Vlissingen port cocaine smuggling soars, surpassing official figures by 6.3 tonnes
Cocaine smuggling through the port of Vlissingen appears to be much more rampant than previously thought. A staggering 6,300 kilograms of the drug, beyond what was already a record haul, were discovered to have passed through the port last year, according to new data from the Zeeland-West Brabant police, RTL Nieuws reported.
That total adds 54 percent to the amount of cocaine known to have passed through the facility in 2023. The additional volume of cocaine, which has a street value of about 500 million euros, was found by authorities in other European countries, police said. Investigators in those countries and the Netherlands worked backwards to determine that the drugs arrived in Europe as part of various cargo shipments which first entered via the Vlissingen port.
The new data supports an earlier assertion that the Vlissingen port has quietly become a major transit hub for cocaine as smugglers begin to spread out away from the Rotterdam port. Official figures showed that authorities caught 11,566 kilograms of the drug at the Vlissingen port last year, nearly three times the total captured in 2022.
The new figures would suggest that a total of nearly 17.9 tonnes of cocaine was trafficked via the port in Vlissingen, Zeeland. It was not known if cocaine trafficking via the facility increased, or if investigators have uncovered more of it. Authorities have increased their presence there, and at other seaports in the Netherlands.
Nearly 60 tonnes of cocaine were found across the Netherlands last year and over 75 percent of that, 45.5 tonnes, was found in Rotterdam. A year earlier, 46,789 kilograms were found in Rotterdam, almost 92 percent of the 51 tonnes found in the Netherlands in 2022.
As more cocaine continues to flow through Zeeland, local authorities will begin to take a closer look at how the port is staffed. "The fact that more than 6,000 kilograms are still being found in other places and also pass through the port here, means that we have to further expand that capacity," Vlissingen Mayor Bas van den Tillaar told RTL Nieuws. "Then I am thinking of at least doubling the port police capacity."
However, in order to do that, the Zeeland-West-Brabant police district would need to scale up. A spokesperson for the Ministry of Justice and Security said that the only way more police officers could be allocated to the Vlissingen port under the current budget is to relocate officers from other areas within the district.
The trafficking of cocaine into the European Union happens largely via the ports in Belgium, the Netherlands and Spain. Europol said both cocaine use and trafficking is on the rise in Europe, with Latin American crime syndicates tied up with European criminal organizations.
Earlier this year, Europol estimated the European Union cocaine trade at 11.6 billion euros in revenue. Cocaine ranked second behind cannabis, where the illegal trade in the drug is valued at about 12.1 billion euros. All illegal drugs account for a market size of roughly 31 billion euros, Europol said.
