Cocaine Highway

Оглавление

Alex Perry. Cocaine Highway

Contents

1. Everything Connects

2. An Isolating Existence

3. Bigger Disasters

4. Everybody Liked Him

5. Cause and Effect

6. Changing Tastes

7. Fuelling Frustration

8. The Sting

9. Nothing has Changed

10. Come the Revolution

1. Further Reading

2. About the Author

3. About Newsweek Insights

Отрывок из книги

“The only reason I can write about any of this – how cocaine smuggling is ruining an area of Africa the size of Western Europe – is because I have agreed to identify almost no one who spoke to me.”

It begins with a boat. Small, white, with two large outboards – a speedboat. The pilot has feathered his throttle and is crawling upriver. The scenery suggests an estuary. The water is a muddy aquamarine. Aside from the grassy bank where the soldiers have parked their pick-ups, the river has no shore, just ankle-deep mud flats shelving up to a curtain of mangrove, behind which lies a seemingly endless, still and inky swamp.

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In 2004 fishing trawlers, go-fast powerboats, small jets and cargo twin props with custom-enlarged fuel tanks began shuttling across the Atlantic. “Highway 10,” so-called because the route roughly followed the 10th parallel, was born. At the beginning of the decade, Europe’s cocaine market was a quarter of its American equivalent. By its end, the two markets matched each other at 350 tons a year. There are now 14-21 million cocaine users in the world, equating to one in 100 Westerners, rising to around three out of 100 in Spain, the US and the UK.[3]

Africans rarely own the drugs they move, something their Latin American, Middle Eastern and European bosses tend to reserve for themselves. But transporting is lucrative work nonetheless, and the syndicates quickly recruited customs officials, baggage handlers, soldiers, rebels, government ministers, diplomats, even a Prime Minister and President or two. The cocaine was flown in by small plane, then taken overland to another African country and flown out in the stomachs of human mules. Or it was shipped in by speedboat and freighted out again in a sea container stacked inside a pile of a thousand others. It was imported in the stomachs of African exchange students returning home from Brazil for the holidays, then re-exported hidden under tons of iced fish or even driven north across the Sahara in convoys of fat-tired super-charged pick-ups.

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