BARCELONA, Spain — Three weeks ago, in the farmlands of central Spain, police spotted something peculiar: a surveillance drone hovering over a forest. Pushing in, they discovered something never before seen in Spain: an outdoor drug laboratory set up under a tarp where Colombian chemists were extracting cocaine that had been infused into concrete powder, a process police estimate was funneling 264 pounds of cocaine into the country each week.
Last month, Spanish police also seized 1,843 pounds of cocaine and shut down several laboratories and processing centers just outside of Barcelona, and in July seized six remote-controlled, unmanned submarines fitted with hidden compartments built to transport cocaine to Spain from Africa. On Wednesday, Spain’s national police announced that they’d seized another 145 pounds of pure cocaine hidden in industrial rolling machines shipped from Peru.
With increasingly clever ways of smuggling the drug and its coca base — including infusing cocaine into plastic chips, charcoal or clothes — authorities and analysts believe they may be finding only 10%-15%, or as little asof what's coming into Europe, a booming market for cocaine that now rivals the one in the United States.
Authorities say there is now a surplus of the drug, with some varieties like highly addictive crack cocaine being cut with deadly fentanyl. Worldwide cocaine production is breaking all records —In recent years, traffickers have increasingly looked to expand their customer base in Europe,the wholesale price from that in the U.S.
Over the past 15 years, Albanian crime groups have muscled into the scene and Colombian and Dominican traffickers have moved to Europe to oversee operations from Spain, long a major hub for cocaine entry. Now, however, most smuggled cocaine is believed to be coming in via maritime containers into the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands — Europe’s biggest — and the nearby port of Antwerp, Belgium.
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