The Journal. - How Cocaine Is Flooding Into Europe

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Come see The Journal Live! Tickets for our show in Dallas are on sale now. High-powered speedboats fitted with radar systems are sneaking tons of cocaine past authorities in Spain, flooding Europe with the illicit drug. WSJ’s Sune Rasmussen traveled to Spain’s southern coast to learn more about the boats and why authorities are unable to stop them. Ryan Knutson hosts. Further Listening: - Inside Mexico's Decision to Take Down a Drug Lord - Drug Cartels' New Weapon: Chinese Money Launderers Sign up for WSJ’s free What’s News newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we get to today's episode, a quick reminder, the journal is coming to Dallas on Monday, November 9th. I'll be on stage for a live show. We'll dig into a big story, bring in a special guest, and I promise it's going to be the journal like you've never experienced it before. There's a link to where you can buy tickets in our show notes. I'd love to see you there. All right, here we go. The world is being flooded with cocaine right now. More land is being cultivated for coca in South America. Gangs have taken control. of ports in Ecuador and Brazil. And a well-oiled global supply chain

has allowed for the illicit drug to travel around the world. Cocaine production has increased so much that cartels are looking for new markets. That's our colleague Suna Rasmussen. He says that a lot of that cocaine is headed to Europe. The cocaine market in Europe has exploded. Cocaine here is now cheaper, better, and there's more of it.

more of it than ever before. Europe is now the second largest market for cocaine in the world after North America. Europe is being hit by a wave of cocaine, according to Europol. The law enforcement agency admits the problem is worse than it first realized, with organized crime networks better connected and increasingly violent. A lot of cocaine enters Europe through the southern coast of Spain, including the beautiful Costa del Sol, home to white sand beaches, in Mediterranean cities like Malaga.

In 2023, Spain seized around 117 tons of cocaine, double from the previous year. So to better understand how the drug traffickers are able to get so much in, Sunnah went there. He patrolled with the local authorities on a nighttime boat patrol. He spoke to prosecutors and drug traffickers, and he met with the families of victims of drug violence. And what he learned,

was that the local authorities are outmatched, outresourced, and outgunned. I think ultimately this story, you know, for all of the sort of violence and crime involved, this is a business story. And the people involved just happen to trade and illicit goods. Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Ryan Canucksen. It's Friday, October 2nd. Coming up on the show, how cocaine. is pouring into Europe and why authorities are struggling to stop it.

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about your wealth and your future. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. On his privatewealth.com to find an advisor near you. On his reporting trip to southern Spain, Suna met with a person very familiar with how cocaine gets into Europe. I met with a drug trafficker at a hotel in Mabaya on the southern coast of Spain. And this guy has for nearly 15 years since he was a teenager, basically, been part of a gang trafficking drugs into Spain.

What do you, what you want to do, what you want to know? Soona's reporting shows that the trafficker is pretty senior in his gang. His job is to handle the logistics of moving cocaine from South America into Spain. And this means that he ensures that the people sending the drugs can be trusted. And then he also receives messages along the way to ensure that the cargo, the cocaine, is safe until it arrives in Spain. And... And we chatted for, yeah, close to two hours. And he kind of laid out the inner workings of the international drug market and drug trafficking industry.

For a long time, the tried and true method for getting cocaine into Europe was to hide shipments in large shipping containers and sneak them through major seaports. And this is still a common method, but traditionally cartels, when they exported cocaine into Europe, I put them on containers. So hitting them in containers on ships where the crew often don't know that the cocaine is present. And then once it arrives, for example, in a port in the Netherlands or in Belgium, then gangs on the other end know where the cocaine is and then they extract it.

But these days, the ports are crawling with security, partly due to the increased cocaine traffic. So increasingly, traffickers are avoiding ports altogether by relying on a network of small but powerful boats to avoid detection. They're using these super-fast, powerful speed boats that they call narco-lanches.

Narco-launches, aka narco-boats. They're sort of super-fast, powerful, brute force, but they are equipped with radars and cameras, so to the people who manned the boats can kind of detect law enforcement and evade detection and arrest. So they come with some sophisticated equipment, but the boats themselves are pretty simple. I should mention that these boats are illegal in Spain, so they're typically built in workshops in Portugal, and then they're smuggled into Spain either via river or via truck. Typically, one of these boats will come with four engines in the back, each of 400 horsepower.

So that's a hugely powerful boat. Yeah, you've got 1,600 horses right there. Yeah, exactly. The boats can go hundreds of miles out to sea, where traffickers wait for cocaine shipments from South America to be dropped off in the water. They can wait for weeks at a time, sheltering under umbrellas and eating the fish they catch in the ocean.

And unlike the bustling ports, these smaller boats can duck into the quieter coastlines along southern Spain. A lot of this coastline, some of it is developed, but a lot of it is not. You've got long stretches of sandy beaches, which is ideal territory for traffickers to drop a couple tons of cocaine

because it's super difficult to detect. So they just drive these narco boats right up onto the sand. And sometimes they do it in broad daylight on a beach where there are families swimming. Wow. According to Sunas reporting, transporting cocaine this way is cheaper than sneaking it in through ports on containers.

The ports cost the drug smugglers about 21% of the shipments value. They often have to pay off port workers, police officers, and ship captains. But the narco boats only charge a 12% fee. The fee is lower because for one thing,

it takes just a few people to operate a narco boat. So usually it takes four people to man one of these boats. You'll have a pilot, you'll have one person that mans the radar, and then you have two people that take care of the cargo.

But they get paid very well for it. A pilot of one of these boats get paid up to 300,000 euros, so that's $350,000, more or less. So that's a very good salary for it. For one job. The fee also goes towards other costs. The boat itself costs around 500,000 euros. Then you have to pay for fuel.

He said fuel costs are up because of the war in Iran. Of course. Straight up a moose. It also affects it. Inflation hits everybody. It hits the drug dealers as well, you know. But a single boat can carry as much as four metric tons of cocaine. which is worth roughly 250 million euros.

And that's per boat. That is an insane profit. What does this mean for the gangs and the cartels? It means that Europe has opened up, like the fact that Europe has opened up as such a hungry market, to put it bluntly, insatiable market, it seems, means that cartels in South America

and cartels operating in Central America and the U.S. have found a way to strengthen the revenue independent of the U.S. So while authorities in the U.S. are trying to squeeze the amount of cocaine going in there and trying to squeeze the cartels, they found a market that seems insatiable where they can continue to earn probably greater profits than ever before. Soon as says those profits flow into the local economy in southern Spain, especially the coastal city of Marbella. Marbea is not only a tourist hotspot,

but it's also a place that for decades has attracted a lot of flashy consumption, a lot of dirty money to be frank. And that means if you're a drug dealer that makes a lot of money and you need to launder your money or spend your cash, you can do that relatively undetected, you can do that in a way

that doesn't draw too much attention to yourself in Marbea. As the gangs and traffickers prosper, Spanish authorities have struggled to fight back. That's next. The agency responsible for patrolling Spain's coastline is the Guardia Seville, or Civil Guard. Two years ago, the Civil Guard had a violent and deadly interaction with the drugboats,

and it was caught on video and shared on social media. This was one winter evening a couple of years ago where this small inflatable police boat was doing a patrol of a port in southern sea, Spain, in a place called Barbate. And this area is a place that's known as gangland. In the video, numerous drugboats are speeding around the port. They're imposing, 60 feet long and powered by four engines.

And a small police boat approaches. But instead of fleeing, this larger speedboat, then started circling around the smaller police boat. And onlookers on shore began. chanting, they chanted, OLE, OLE! As if cheering for a bullfighter almost. And they said, Matalo, matalo. Basically killed him. The drug smugglers toy with the police boat,

approaching its speed and narrowly missing them several times. And then the drug boat smashed into the police boat and crushed the officers. on board? In the end, two officers were killed. While he was in Spain, Suna met with the mother of one of the officers who died, Miguel Angel Gonzalez.

This was Frances Maria Gomez-Pantoja. And she, of course, blames the cartels, but she also blamed Spanish authorities. Because they're doing to pass to the lansha without

nothing. No, no, they prohibit to pass. And she says that the Spanish

government has underinvested in the armed forces, police, the Navy, Guardia Civil.

And so they're now too ill-equipped to really take up the fight and that makes them

vulnerable to attacks. And even though the people who are involved in her son's death

were arrested, she feels like justice wasn't done because all her son's colleagues are still out there fighting this fight and risking their life for it. What does that story illustrate?

I think it tells us something about how violent the drug trade in southern Europe has become and the level of impunity that some of these drug traffickers operate with. and also the lengths they're willing to go to to protect their trade, and they clearly feel like they can attack law enforcement with impunity. Sooner looked into how authorities are handling the influx of cocaine, and what he found was that Spanish authorities are severely outnumbered. According to the Spanish government,

there are hundreds of drug boats operating around the Strait of Gibraltar alone. Fewer than ten of the Civil Guard's boats are fast enough to catch them. Spanish authorities operate a little bit with their hands tied behind their backs. I mean, they are doing what they can, but they have limited resources, just to go back to the back of the napkin, the drug math we did before. One drug boat can carry $250 million worth of cocaine and street value. Over the past decade, that's more or less what the Spanish government has allocated to fight drug trafficking in the southern part of Spain. Wow, so one boat is... One decades worth of funding.

The entire defense budget. Yeah. Spanish authorities acknowledge they're under-equipped to intercept the narco boats, but they say they're making progress in fighting cocaine smugglers. In May, the Civil Guard confiscated more than 30 tons of cocaine off the Canary Islands, the largest seizure ever made anywhere in the world. I think Spanish authorities feel confident that they're catching more of these boats now, than they used to. They've gotten better at detecting them and monitoring them and following them

to shore and finding them on wherever beach they end up. But that just doesn't change the fact that there are maybe 10, 15 times as many drug boats as there are, police boats. The cartels are basically flooding the zone in the Strait of Gibraltar. And then, of course, you can pick off some of them. But as long as it's still so profitable for drug traffickers to keep doing this, they'll keep coming. And soon it says the global cocaine trade, now equipped with drones, radar, thermal imaging, and powerful boats, will find a way to get drugs into the hands of customers, no matter what. In the industry, drug experts and law enforcement officials, they use this term called a waterbed effect,

which is basically what it sounds like. If you try to suppress the drug supply in one area, then it just bulges up in another. I think if we look at the international drug trade as just any other global trade, then we start to understand why the cartels act in the way they do. And it all comes down to profit. It all comes down to a cost-benefit analysis of whether these methods work or not. And as long as it's profitable for them to do it this way, they'll continue to do it, right? That's all for today. Friday, October 2nd.

The journal is a co-production of Spotify in the Wall Street. Street Journal. The show is made by Catherine Brewer, Evelyn Farrado Alvarez, Pia Gadkari, Max Green, Sophie Codner, Matt Kwong, Colin McNulty, Jessica Mendoza, and Mani Moise, Laura Morris, Enrique Perez de la Rosa, Sarah Platt, Alan Rodriguez-Espinoza, Heather Rogers, Katie Shepard, Keevigna, Givica Verma, Catherine Whalen, Tatiana Zamiz, and me, Ryan Knudson. Also, this is Catherine Whelan's last week with us. Catherine, we will miss you so much. Good luck on your next adventure. Our engineers are Griffin Tanner, Nathan Singapore, and Peter Leonard. Our theme music is by So Wiley. Additional music this week from

Catherine Anderson, Peter Leonard, Bobby Lord, Nathan Singapok, Griffin Tanner, and Blue Dot Sessions. Fact-checking this week by Nicole Pesolka. Thanks for listening. We'll see you on Sunday for another episode of My Monday Morning.