Not Exactly a Dutch Treat

     Drug Seizure in Antwerp, Belgium

For all our “tough on crime” rhetoric, the United States has been the Great Enabler of Latin American drug trafficking cartels. First, it was the lingering capabilities of prohibition – created and then ended by constitutional amendment (1920-1933) – where crime “families” and abundant demand fueled violent access to alcohol. We’ve seen the movies and television series based on this lawless era. But prohibition did create both a template and an actual criminal infrastructure that could and would evolve to become the narcotics superhighway to the largest and growing market of addicts in the world. It was not a huge step from “the Mafia” to armed street gangs as local distributors and mega-armed cartels (many born here, like MS 13, that migrated back to home countries in Latin America) to cultivate, manufacture and then smuggle narcotics into the Great Enabler, filled with yearning addicts, in the north.

The over-prescription of prescription pain killers, replete with expensive marketing campaigns, created a whole new cadre of drug addicts… new well-financed markets for substitute drugs. While there is still minor illicig trafficking in marijuana, despite near-universal legalization across the states, that segment of the market is no longer the main focus of those rather large drug cartels. Harder, more concentrated narcotics, became more efficient for smugglers… as smaller amounts generated greater addictive power. Money was flowing to those cartels, even as turf wars brought some players up and destroyed others.

This is where the Great Enabler shone in its criminal excellence. Because of a rising and highly distorted view of our Second Amendment – Heller vs DC (Supreme Court – 2008) was the first case in our nation’s history to create what has become a ubiquitous and unbridled right to bear arms (even military assault weapons like the AR-15) – the ability to buy and sell guns in the United States exploded. State and federal judges continued to strike down common sense state gun laws; the Supreme Court (in the 2021 case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen), severely limited states in dealing with gun permits) and thus opened the already hemorrhaging gun-flood gates even wider.

As former President Trump attempted to build a border wall to stop northward immigration and drug trafficking, I wondered why Mexico and points south didn’t want a more vigorous barrier to the cartel-enabling gun smuggling from “easy to buy any guns” United States to their ostensibly gun-controlled countries south of the US border. But then, it may just be too late as drug cartels in many Latin American nations have bought and sold senior politicians and even major segments of local and federal police and military to the extent where corruption probably trumps any notion of taking back control of the streets from these mega-powerful cartels.

But at least the United States has been dealing with the massive infrastructure that has enabled Latin American drug traffickers for decades. The advent of fentanyl (a super-powerful opioid vastly more potent than heroin with killing power at tiny doses) created a narcotic that could wreak havoc in small, easy to smuggle quantities. And as much as the United States was “used to” this violent drug trade, had a barely effective police infrastructure do deal with well-armed drug dealers, many other developed countries did not. The new mega-target of cartel billionaires was Europe, where even police did not carry the kinds of guns that cartels routinely deployed, especially the Netherlands (Holland) and Belgium.

“Each tiny plastic package was barely the size of a fingernail and weighed all of 0.2 of a gram. Still, the bags of white powder police seized in a Brussels cellar were yet another indication that a surge in cocaine and crack supply is hitting Europe hard… And with it comes unprecedented drug violence in Belgium and the Netherlands, whose ports of Antwerp and Rotterdam, respectively, have become the main gateways for Latin American cocaine cartels into the continent.

“In Belgium, the justice minister is forced to live in a safehouse, out of reach of drug gangs. In the Netherlands, killings hit ever more prominent people, and there are suspicions that the reason the heir to the Dutch throne had to quit her student life and return home was also linked to threats from drug lords… ‘We almost have to see it as a war,’ said Aukje de Vries, the Dutch state secretary for customs.

“Officials in Antwerp on Tuesday [1/10] announced yet another annual record in cocaine seizures in Belgium last year: 110 tons, up 23% compared with 2021 and more than twice the amount confiscated five years ago… ‘It astounded us,’ said Belgian Finance Minister Vincent Van Peteghem. ‘It also means the drugs that are entering Europe [undetected] through our ports are also rising. And that, of course, has a huge impact,’ he told the Associated Press… Because with cocaine comes not only addiction, decay and death, but also violence and gang warfare… In the last three years, Antwerp has suffered dozens of grenade attacks, fires and bombings often linked to gangs trying to control the thriving cocaine trade…

“In the Netherlands, murder and intimidation have become increasingly common as drug lords go to extreme lengths to protect their cut of the multibillion-dollar market. And 50 tons of cocaine were seized at Rotterdam last year, which, combined with Antwerp, made for another record year.

“Among high-profile murder victims in the Netherlands in recent years were a lawyer representing a witness in a drug gangsters’ trial and crime reporter Peter R. de Vries, who was a confidant to the same witness… Unspecified threats to the heir to the Dutch throne, Princess Amalia, forced her to abandon student life in Amsterdam and return home last year. Security reportedly also has been beefed up around Prime Minister Mark Rutte. In both cases, it’s suspected that drug-related crime organizations are a factor.

“And in places like Brussels, where the violence might be less spectacular, cocaine and crack are starting to have a chilling effect in areas such as the Marolles, a quaint neighborhood that figured in Tintin’s cartoon adventures… The chief police inspector for the neighborhood, Kris Verborgh, said South American cocaine ‘seems to be — or seems to have become — the new normal.’” Associated Press, January 11th. South American cocaine… rising quickly to embrace the easier-to-smuggle manufactured fentanyl… protected by cartels well-armed with US-made guns. The United States plays the ”victim” card with a straight face… but it is our guns, bought with money from our addicts, that funded and armed these cartels, enabling this soaring worldwide scourge of addiction protected by ultra-violence.

I’m Peter Dekom, and our “law and order” crowd seems to have a particularly strong aversion to looking into the mirror of truth.