Rio de Janeiro/Mexico (Reuters) – Countries around the world have spent billions of dollars bailing out corporations hit by the coronavirus epidemic. Coca du Perú makers, who domesticate the thick plant used to make cocaine, say they also help.
Prices for coca leaves sold to drug gangs have slumped 70% since Peru went on lockdown last month, according to Julián Pérez Mallqui, the head of a local growers’ organization. He said his members cater to Peru’s tightly regulated legal coca market, but acknowledged some growers sell on the black market. Peruvian officials say more than 90% of the country’s coca crop goes to traffickers who are now struggling to move product.
While the sector is in complete turmoil, the Pérez organization develops a plan to ask the company to purchase excess Coca stocks.
Peru “has to design clear intervention strategies for coca,” Pérez said. “We’re screwed, just like everyone else in the world.”
A spokesman for Peru’s anti-drugs agency said it may funnel more development aid to hard-hit areas.
The coronavirus outbreak has altered industries around the world. The foreign pharmaceutical industry has been saved. From poster areas along the border between the United States and Mexico to the green coca fields of the Andes to street traffickers in London and Paris, traffickers deal with many of the same problems as valid businesses, an ed reuters .
On 3 continents, Reuters spoke with more than two dozen officials responsible for enforcing the law, experts in narcotics, diplomats and other people involved in illicit trade. They described a corporate confrontation that faces damaged chains, delays in delivery, unhappy workers and millions of consumers. They have also opened a window to innovation, and opportunism, which characterize the underworld.
Cecil Mangrum, a narcotics detective with the Los Angeles Police Department, said an informant recently got a call from a Mexican connection offering 25 pounds of methamphetamine for $3,200 a pound. That’s more than triple the going rate from just a few weeks ago, and the highest price that he has seen for the powerful stimulant in his decade on the drugs beat.
“I need there to be a (where) you can just report the signs for the costs, because the costs are ridiculous,” Mangrum said.
Latin America is the epicenter of a global drug industry worth up to $650 billion a year, according to Global Financial Integrity, a U. S. -based think tank. Gangs make huge profits by generating and transporting cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin and fentanyl, which is sold around the world.
The disruptions are likely to be short-lived, some anti-narcotics experts said. Cartels have proven adept at surmounting any obstacles. The pandemic will eventually ease, trade routes will open, customers and dealers will come out of their homes.
However, the coronavirus has managed to do what the world’s governments cannot do: stop the narcotics giant almost overnight and cause some pain to everyone involved.
In Mexico, the Sinaloa Cartel has faced many threats over the years, including the jailing of former leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman. But never one like the coronavirus pandemic.
Disruptions to global trade have jacked up prices for imported chemicals such as ephedrine that are needed to manufacture meth, a major piece of the organization’s narcotics empire. Meanwhile, a partial shutdown of the US-Mexico border to slow the spread of the virus has complicated distribution, according to two Sinaloa Cartel members who spoke with Reuters.
“Since the border is closed, we have disorders that cross it,” said one of the other people who is helping to produce fentanyl, an artificial opioid for the union.
Thousands of kilometers to the south in Brazil, drug gangs face similar distribution woes. At the giant seaport of Santos, the launching point for a substantial portion of South American cocaine headed for Europe, seizures last month were down 67% compared to March 2019, according to Brazil’s Federal Revenue Service.
Ciro Moraes, director of the Federal Police of Santos, said it as a sign that traffickers are experiencing their own private “recession, courtesy of COVID-19.
“This cripples their business,” he said, if only temporarily.
The United States is Mexico’s top trade partner and the No. 1 consumer of its illegal drugs. Last year some 950,000 people entered the United States daily on foot or in vehicles through dozens of checkpoints along the 1,954-mile border, according to US Customs and Border Protection.
Most narcotics are smuggled in passenger cars that face far fewer checks than commercial trucks, security analysts said. The March 21 closing of the border to all non-essential travel has thrown a monkey wrench in that well-oiled machine.
“Everything has stopped at the border,” said the Sinaloa Cartel fentanyl “cook” who spoke with Reuters.
Bost’s values have risen about 10% in recent weeks, he added. A kilogram of fentanyl sold in large quantities through his company to a drug user in Sinaloa will cost about 12,000 pesos ($490), he said, but this price would rise to $50,000 per kilo if it were delivered in New York.
Raw materials are also bedeviling the cartel. Fentanyl and meth, which kill tens of thousands of Americans each year, are made with chemicals often manufactured in China, India and Germany, Mexican and US officials said.
They said factories, lack of staff, slowdown in shipments and tightening of borders, the source chain of methamphetamine precursors has created a shortage. A Sinaloa cartel methamphetamine manufacturer told Reuters that the epidemic had led to 3 costs of safe ingredients, putting pressure on beneficiaries’ margins.
Seven US Councils ACTERCIICSArray adding 3 from the US Drug Enforcement Administration, described a US drug market Convert.
Methamphetamine has been the hardest hit, with some DEA internal offices reporting increases in value, said a senior source in the DEA circle of relatives with the agency’s national assessment of coronavirus unrest.
Supplies of fentanyl, the leading cause of US overdose deaths, appear to be holding steady, several authorities said.
John Callery, Special Agent in Charge of the DEA’s San Diego Field Office, said drug prices in his sector were up about 20% across the board, except for methamphetamine, whose price has more than doubled in the last couple of weeks to as much as $2,000 a pound. Price gouging could be to blame, he said.
In cities with more flexible blocking nuclei, the illegal activity is more resistant, police said.
In Houston, the drug market is holding up well because dealers still have gigantic supplies, said Lt. Stephen Casko of the Houston Police Department. “As the reserves run out, that’s when you start to feel stress,” he said.
Jerome Washington, a sergeant with the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office in Texas, said the drop in car traffic had prompted traffickers to increase the amount of drug smuggling they did across the border.
“They are just being more selective,” Washington said. “It’s like a numbers game: The more cars on roads, the more cars you can send across that will blend in.”
The signs appear to be for transportation of the air deliveries, he added.
“The smuggling tactic has changed,” the official said. Traffickers “either go over or under.”
Repatriating drugs to Mexico also proved to be a headache, according to Antarctica officials.
In Los Angeles, according to a senior researcher at the DEA in California, Mexican posters wash the corporations of illicit products with presence in the city’s attire district. For money, said the company. But the closure of non -essential companies in California has hindered that project, said the DEA researcher.
South America was flooded with cocaine long before anyone knew about COVID-19. Record production in recent years has weighed on prices. Drug gangs have stepped up their exports, officials said, sending unprecedented amounts to historic markets in the United States and Europe, while cultivating new consumers in the Middle East and Asia.
In the United Kingdom, cocaine seizures in the 2018/19 financial year reached 9.65 tonnes, the highest total since records began in 1973, and up nearly 200% compared with the 2017/18 total, the Home Office said.
In Peru, the world’s No. 2 manufacturer Colombia, a national lockdown to curb the virus worked as a prevention button on the country’s cocaine treadmill, according to Miguel Ángel Ramírez Vásquez, a senior member of Peru’s anti-narcotics effort. border closures, reduced flights and roads have been more rigorously patrolled, he said gangs are struggling to move drugs.
“Everything is paralyzed. No one buys, and nobody sells,” Ramírez said.
Among the most affected spaces is the Green Valley of the Apurimac, Jan and Mantaro rivers. Known as real, it produces about 43% of the 50,000 hectares that Peru reaps, according to the United Nations Office against Drugs and Crime. Pérez, representative of Coca producers, said that almost all of the 500,000 inhabitants of the region are dedicated to this crop.
The National Coca-Coca (ENACO) company administered by the State Buy Component of the country’s production for medications and drinks prescribed to the costs that decrease to what drug traffickers pay. But about 93% of Peru’s harvest is illegally changed to cocaine, said Enaco.
Pérez said his group, known as Fepavrae, discussed tactics for EnaCo to buy its surplus Coca. He declined to give percentage details.
“It’s an internal discussion within the organization,” he said. “We’re working on it.”
Cristian Galarza, a leading executive at Enaco, said he had not heard of the internal Fepavrae plan, but it was not surprising.
“Because of the coronavirus situation, everyone has to get creative and find alternatives,” he said. Still, he said it’s unlikely that ENACO, which has annual sales of about 35 million soles ($10.34 million), could help many of those affected.
“If there is a coca grower … who has been selling illegally, we won’t work with them,” Galarza said. “If they go to the other side, it’s difficult. They’ve crossed a line.”
Rubén Vargas, director of Peru’s anti-drug agency, Devida, is unaware of the coca growers’ plan. He said Devida has already budgeted 70 million soles ($20. 68 million) this year for rural progression projects in the VRAEM, and can provide more to assistance areas most affected by the outbreak.
“We will work with all social organizations and companies that have more proposals within the framework of this emergency that we are experiencing,” he said.
Ramírez, the anti-drugs cop, was apoplectic about the growers’ plan.
“When they do well, they sell to drug traffickers; and when they do badly, they get the support of the government,” he said. “What do you think of growing?” Pineapple?
Across the border in Brazil, traffickers face the opposite problem: Cocaine is skyrocketing due to supply shortages, according to a federal police official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
He said the wholesale value of a kilo of cocaine has more than 40 percent at 20,000 reais ($3,735) in recent weeks in the northern Amazon city of Manaus, a transit hub for Andean cocaine in Brazil and Europe.
While the drug is accumulating in Colombia and Peru, “here (in Brazil) the value is high, because there is no product,” said the federal policeman.
In the southeast of the Brazilian port of Santos, Latin America’s biggest European-linked cocaine crises have subsided, according to Moraes, the federal police chief. Customs officials cleared just over a ton of cocaine in March 2020, up from 3 tons in the same month. last year.
Moraes believes that less cocaine enters Brazil. He also suspects that European demand is declining, in part because shipping companies are suffering from shipping in a context of containment.
In France, the shutdown of bars and party venues has led to a decrease in the use of recreational drugs like cocaine, MDMA, ketamine and LSD, the French Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (OFDT) said in an April report examining the impact of the pandemic on the nation’s illicit drugs trade.
Retailers responded quickly to the new reality, the report said, with some staying away from consumers and “even promoting hand sanitizer, gloves and masks. ”
(Reporting through Gabriel Stargardter in Rio de Janeiro and Drazen Jorgic in Mexico City; additional reporting through Mark Hosenball in Washington; Andrew Hay in Taos, New Mexico; Jesús Bustamete in Culiacan, Mexico; Lizbeth Díaz in the City from Mexico; Michael Holden in London; Francesco Guarascio in Brussels, David Lewis in Nairobi;
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