France: West Indies, Guyana, cocaine routes intensify

Text by: Arnaud Jouve Follow

To respond to the cocaine market in France, in a context of very high production by producing countries, the Antilles and Guyana have become transit platforms increasingly sought after by traffickers. The 1 for 1 in the Antilles and the multiplication of mules from Cayenne have become priority axes of the fight on the transatlantic drug trafficking by the new anti-narcotics office (Ofast). Interview.

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The Anti-Narcotics Office ( Ofast), which was one of the major measures announced by the Minister of the Interior Christophe Castaner on September 17, 2019 as part of the announcement of the national plan to combat narcotics, is operational since the beginning of the year. It replaces the Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drug Trafficking (Octris) and the Anti-Drug Mission (Milad) and becomes the sole leader in the fight against drugs by coordinating the work of the police , gendarmes, customs officers, magistrates, soldiers of the three armies and diplomats. The Ofast, which has some 150 men and women and 16 branches in mainland France and overseas, is headed by a senior official of the national police, the divisional commissioner Stéphanie Cherbonnier, assisted by a magistrate, the prosecutor Samuel Vuelta Simon and by Jean-Philippe Reiland, colonel of gendarmerie.

The divisional commissioner Christian Nussbaum is the inter-regional director of the Antilles-Guyane judicial police whose headquarters is in Guadeloupe and who is in charge of the Antilles-Guyana Ofast.

RFI : Christian Nussbaum, you who knew the Octris, you are now in charge of Ofast for the Antilles-Guyana today, what has changed with this new superstructure ?

Christian Nussbaum : Today, there is a leader in the fight against drug trafficking who has been designated by the Minister: it is the judicial police through the action of Ofast who is directly attached to the director central of the judicial police. The strong mark of this structure is to make work together all the services which still work on narcotics (stups) in a little bit separate. Today, it is really institutionalized, there must be pooling, meeting around a table and joint investigation. This is something that has been put in place through "crosses" which are operational intelligence centers on drug trafficking, like the Marseille "cross" which brings together all the players in the fight against drug trafficking for quite a while. It is the pooling of intelligence and work on investigations between customs, police, gendarmerie, and all this under the authority of the magistrates who direct the investigations.

The priority axes of this work are the return flow from South America, the return flow from Spain, and inside the country, it is the fight against narco-banditry and trafficking in the cities.

Cannabis Angela Weiss / AFP

For you who are in charge of the fight against narcotics in the Antilles-Guyana, how do you see this problem in the Antilles?

It is mainly a problem of cocaine but also of cannabis herb and, since a more recent date, of cannabis resin. Because there is a strong increase in traffic which is due to the possibilities of exchange of cannabis resin for cocaine in the Antilles. Cocaine from producing countries (Colombia, Peru, Bolivia) is available in the West Indies and can be exchanged for cannabis resin imported by metropolitan traffickers for the same amount, i.e. 1 kg of cocaine for 1 kg of cannabis resin. The traffickers arrive in the West Indies with 1kg, 10kg or 100kg of cannabis resin and they leave with 1kg, 10kg or 100kg of cocaine. In this barter, which is called 1 for 1, the kilo of resin is negotiated between 1,000 and 3,000 euros, this allows traffickers to touch kilos of cocaine at this price and to have a huge room for improvement. Trafficking is therefore increasing due to the availability of cocaine and its low cost in the Antilles.

The traffic in the Antilles is mainly destined for Europe and metropolitan France in particular and therefore there is also in the Antilles the problem of mules (drug smugglers). Because the mules are only the outgoing flow of the Antilles and if there is an outgoing flow, it is that there is an incoming flow of cocaine and it enters by inter-island traffic. So we are trying to better fight this inter-island traffic.

Why send cannabis resin to the West Indies to buy cocaine?

Because there is no such product and there is a high availability of cocaine. In the islands, there is cannabis herb but there is no resin, it is a product which has become available by the metropolis and which comes from Morocco. Since we detected this type of Morocco-metropolis-Antilles traffic to have cocaine, we have had increasing quantities. At the beginning, we found people with one or two kilos who tried to leave with cocaine, but now, we see containers arriving from France with inside, hidden, several tens, even several hundreds of kilos of resin cannabis. It went upmarket.

How long has this phenomenon existed?

When I arrived in the Antilles in 2016, we were already starting to see this phenomenon which has since developed. The main vector is air: it is commercial air transport, to come and go from the Antilles. These are mainly mules and for very large quantities, it is the maritime vector in containers with the "rip off" technique, bags which are thrown out of the container and which are collected on arrival. To fight against this maritime traffic, there is also what is called "the action of the State at sea" which is directed by the prefect of Martinique, which allows us to have the means of the national navy for interceptions at sea, whether in the context of research and initiative, or possibly in the context of investigations which could give targets to the French Navy. It is also an actor that will be part of the global system.

Unloading at Fort de France of a seizure of 3 tonnes of cocaine taken at sea in 2011. PATRICE COPPEE / AFP

Who are the main operators of this traffic? Are these, for example, Latin American cartels?

I think that when cocaine is in the West Indies, the cartels are far away. They are no longer the ones who have control over the goods and they no longer belong to them. We are dealing, in the context of this traffic, with large local traffickers, West Indies, Saint Lucia or Dominica, who are in business with large traffickers who are in metropolitan France. They are local operators, it is very rare that people from producing countries are involved in the networks that are being dismantled in the Antilles. It happens but it is very rare, and when it does happen, it is small hands. Those who are at the head of traffic in the Antilles are notorious criminals who are already large. They oversee the incoming flow and they delegate the outgoing flow.

How often do you make foreclosures in the West Indies?

We can make seizures every day, it depends on the quantities. There is an inter-island traffic which is very intense for the incoming flow on Martinique and Guadeloupe. We can do four, five, six interception operations in the year, plus interception operations in the context of files, plus operations that are suddenly triggered by the Navy or by Customs as part of their patrols. Over the past year, all services combined, we have seized approximately three tonnes of cocaine in all three territories (see table). There can be very good years and bad years, it all depends on the surveys and the course of the surveys. We do not capture everything, that's for sure, there is still a large part that is available, we see it in business. It is perhaps for us, with the creation of Ofast, the opportunity to look at what we do, what we manage to touch, what we manage to dismantle, to possibly question ourselves. and approach the subject differently. In addition, the increase in customs seizures, very time-consuming in their judicial processing, strongly paralyzes the operational activity of our investigation groups.

OFAST table © OFAST

What is the situation in Guyana?

This is completely different traffic than what is happening in the Antilles. Traffic in Guyana is an incoming flow from Suriname and an outgoing flow to the metropolis by the commercial air carrier. It is an outgoing flow mainly through what is called "mules", which is a very common phenomenon in Guyana at Cayenne airport. Customs who are increasingly intercepting say that there are between ten and twenty mules per flight between Cayenne and Paris.

Image of the abdomen of a man loaded with many cocaine capsules. Christophe ARCHAMBAULT / AFP

Do you work with Brazil and Suriname?

The flow entering Guyana is not so much from Brazil, it is from Suriname. Cocaine arrives from producing countries in Suriname and passes through French Guiana through the town of Saint-Laurent du Maroni and a little further down the border river from Maroni.

Working with Suriname is one of the objectives of Ofast. Arriving to develop police cooperation at first, and even judicial cooperation afterwards, that is the objective, but it is a country where we start from afar, because it is not the nature of Surinamese to cooperate with us. There are many difficulties on this side that we will try to overcome.

Regarding Brazil, in another area, what is currently developing in Guyana is violent delinquency of Brazilian origin and in particular of Brazilian gangs who come to Guyana to raid with robberies, breakages and who leave immediately.

Who are the actors of drug trafficking in Guyana?

In Guyana, we are now on intermediate traffic. Behind this mule traffic, it is generally small family businesses which often have a part of the family in metropolitan France and another in French Guiana. To get the mules out of Guyana, they take care of everything: they recruit them and bring them to the airport. We stay on intermediate traffic, we are not on big traffickers. But at Cayenne airport, just on the mules, we are at 1 ton of seizure per year by customs. The ex-Octris and new Ofast detachment in Cayenne processes between 300 and 400 mules per year. This is a huge and very time-consuming figure, consuming a lot "in official hours", as they say, and that diminishes our investigative capacities on the traffickers' networks. This is a real problem that Ofast will perhaps try to change to arrest as many large traffickers as possible.

The development of this traffic in Guyana is all the more dramatic since we are dealing with smugglers who are doubly victims: it is a kind of double punishment for these mules. These are people who come from disadvantaged backgrounds, who are exploited, and often forced to do what they do. So, they are already punished from this point of view there, and when they are intercepted by customs, inevitably there is a judicial sanction, and even if there is a tendency to give a weaker sanction, it is dramatic .

Again, as part of the creation of Ofast we will analyze what is happening and try to work differently to manage to curb this phenomenon with all the actors. But it will be done with the same means, because we must not dream, we will not have 200 to 300 civil servants who will arrive more tomorrow morning, so the challenge is: how, with the same means, we can work better.

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