Cocaine routes

What it is

Cocaine routes are the supply chains moving cocaine from Andean coca-growing regions to consumer markets worldwide. Production concentrates in three South American countries: Colombia alone accounted for roughly 72% of global output in UNODC's most recent count (2023 data), with Peru and Bolivia producing most of the rest. The supply chain runs through distinct phases: coca cultivation, paste and base production (mostly in-country), hydrochloride refinement on Colombia's Pacific coast and in clandestine labs across Brazil and Mexico, maritime or air export, and street distribution. No single cartel controls the full chain. Different criminal organisations own different legs, and control of specific transit bottlenecks determines revenue and drives territorial violence.

History

In the 1980s, Colombia's Medellin and Cali cartels shipped bulk cocaine directly through the Caribbean to Florida, making that corridor the world's most intensive drug transit zone. US interdiction pressure across the 1990s displaced traffic westward, onto the Pacific and overland through Central America and Mexico, empowering Mexican cartels that now dominate US distribution. A second structural shift began around 2004 when South American traffickers began routing shipments through West Africa, exploiting Guinea-Bissau and Guinea as low-enforcement waypoints to Europe. By the 2010s, container shipping through North Sea ports (Antwerp in Belgium; Rotterdam in the Netherlands) had overtaken Iberian ports as the primary European gateway, with cocaine concealed in banana, pineapple, and coal cargoes. Each of these shifts followed law-enforcement pressure on the previous dominant route, a pattern that has held across four decades.

Current state

Global production reached a record 3,708 tonnes in 2023, up 34% in a single year; global seizures also hit a record 2,275 tonnes across 2019-2023, per UNODC. As of early 2026, Ecuador's Pacific ports, above all Guayaquil, have become the critical export hub: roughly 30% of cocaine found in global shipping containers departed from an Ecuadorian port, and estimates put up to 80% of Europe's supply transiting Ecuador (see 코카인 생산 사상 최대, 에콰도르 항구가 밀수 대동맥으로). Belgium's port of Antwerp seized 92 tonnes in 2021 alone; accounting for shipments destined for Antwerp that were intercepted elsewhere, the effective Antwerp-linked total that year was closer to 194 tonnes. The DEA's cumulative seizures across 2020-2024 exceeded 1,000 tonnes in the Americas. West Africa remains a live transit arc: Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Senegal, and Nigeria serve as waypoints for Europe-bound consignments, and local consumption in West African coastal cities has grown as a byproduct of the trade. Australia, Japan, and South Korea are rising terminal markets, supplied via Pacific routes.

Relationships

Control of specific route segments determines which criminal organisations expand and which states bear the violence. Colombia's fragmented post-2016 armed landscape, including dissident FARC structures and the ELN, competes to export from Pacific coast and Caribbean ports. Mexico's Sinaloa cartel and CJNG dominate the US distribution leg, consistently identified by the DEA as the two primary US market suppliers. In Europe, Albanian and Western Balkans organized crime have established positions in Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Marseille, displacing older Dutch and Italian networks near the ports. Brazil's Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) has extended into the South America-to-West Africa maritime leg. The downstream effect of route geography on European violence is visible in homicide statistics: port cities Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam recorded sharp rises in gang killings tied to cocaine infrastructure from 2019 onward, a pattern that mirrors what Colombian and Mexican cities experienced a generation earlier.

What to watch

• Whether Colombia's early-2026 withdrawal from UNODC crop-monitoring methodology degrades the global dataset enough to obscure true production levels, and whether alternative national figures hold up to scrutiny.
• Ecuador port-security operations and their effect on Guayaquil container departure rates, the most consequential chokepoint on the European supply line.
• Antwerp and Rotterdam seizure volumes as a lagging indicator: they track upstream pressure by months and are the most reliable European barometer of route disruption.
• West African state fragility, particularly Guinea-Bissau's recurrent political instability and Guinea's limited maritime patrol capacity, which leave the African arc open.
• Asian terminal demand: growing seizures in Japan, South Korea, and Australia signal route diversification that could reshape the global price and revenue picture.