{"id":12343,"date":"2026-04-20T23:17:12","date_gmt":"2026-04-20T23:17:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/12343\/"},"modified":"2026-04-20T23:17:12","modified_gmt":"2026-04-20T23:17:12","slug":"is-belgium-a-narco-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/12343\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Belgium a narco-state?"},"content":{"rendered":"

In October 2016, a wedding scandalized Antwerp. A bride and her groom, the scion of a prominent Belgian-Moroccan family, celebrated with a parade through Borgerhout, a shabby neighborhood a few hundred meters from the city\u2019s cathedral-like main station. Nothing strange there \u2014 but this wasn\u2019t any old parade. For this was a gangster wedding, with the husband a member of the infamous \u201cTurtle Clan\u201d of cocaine smugglers, where flaunting wealth and power was far more important than love.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So there the tough guys went, jamming Borgerhout\u2019s narrow lanes in their sports cars, showing off their watches and their jewelry and going viral on social media. Stuffy Flanders was appalled. After all, Belgian authorities had watched the Turtle Clan rise from small-time dealers to apex traffickers practically overnight. \u201cOur little asshole drug dealers had made the big time,\u201d one prosecutor wryly tells UnHerd. Belatedly, politicians demanded investigations into money laundering and cocaine smuggling. Journalists, reveling in the drama, dubbed Borgerhout \u201cBorgerokko\u201d \u2014 the \u201ccapital of cocaine\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A decade on from the Borgerhout wedding and Europe has overtaken the US as the world\u2019s largest cocaine market. An internationally diverse blend of traffickers \u2014 old-school Dutch thugs and the Moroccan clans from Borgerhout rub shoulders with Italian mobsters and well-oiled Balkan gangs \u2014 have been drawn like moths to the bright lights of Antwerp and its port. Belgium and the Netherlands, home to Europe\u2019s other giant harbor at Rotterdam, have faced the brunt of the gangsterism that followed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Last October, after spending four months in a safe house due to a threat to her life, an anonymous federal judge from Antwerp shocked Belgium with an open letter<\/a>. In it she claimed that \u201cextensive mafia structures have taken hold, becoming a parallel force that challenges not only the police, but also the judiciary\u201d, arguing that \u201cbribery is permeating our institutions from the ground up\u201d. She even suggested that Belgium was on the path to becoming a \u201cnarco-state\u201d \u2014 a warning repeated<\/a> by another judge only last month.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These claims are clearly worth exploring, as is the way drug trafficking gangs have been able to burrow so deep into Belgian society. And even if Belgium ultimately isn\u2019t a narco-state, this criminal explosion is now seeping far beyond its borders. In the last decade, after all, countries from Sweden to Britain have been outmaneuvered by the rapid rise of the cocaine mafias, already plump from successes in Albania, Spain and Italy. The real question now is: can they ever be stopped?<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

Borgerhout today doesn\u2019t look like a hotspot for cocaine trafficking. Last year, Time Out dubbed it the coolest neighborhood in Europe, praising its \u201cDIY spirit\u201d, leafy terraces and lively streets, where Moroccan grocery stores squat alongside vegan coffee shops. But before the hipsters started arriving a decade ago, Borgerhout was better known for its Moroccan clans, mostly hailing from the rugged Rif Mountains, first arriving as guest workers in the Sixties. Experts in smuggling Moroccan hashish by boat into Spain, some of their number were well-positioned to enter Europe\u2019s already-vibrant cocaine trade.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The criminal clans could hardly have chosen a better base. Alongside Rotterdam, Antwerp is one of Europe\u2019s undisputed shipping centers, receiving<\/a> over half the continent\u2019s maritime goods. But even figures like that don\u2019t do the port\u2019s scale justice. With containers as far as the eye can see, across 160 kilometers of quays, its size is hard to grasp without a drone. Amid this deluge of cargo, and with port officials in Antwerp only checking around 2% of arrivals, it was easy to smuggle in literally tons of cocaine. For three straight years, Antwerp, confiscating so much blow that police incinerators couldn\u2019t destroy it fast enough, set annual records for drug seizures. Rotterdam, for its part, was close behind.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"The vast port at Antwerp. (Arterra\/Getty)<\/p>\n

The Borgerhout smugglers, alongside Moroccan relatives in the Netherlands, swiftly became among the most prolific coke traffickers in Europe. Within a few generations, these family groups rose from rural hash farming to being among the most powerful players in Europe\u2019s billion-dollar cocaine trade, operating transnational drug-trafficking operations stretching from South America across Europe to Dubai.<\/p>\n

All this has turned Belgium into a magnet for violence and corruption. An hour south of Antwerp in Brussels, the infamously boring capital of the European Union, there have been several murders linked to the cocaine trade. Since the 2012 shooting of Dutch trafficker Najib Bouhbouh in Antwerp, meanwhile, killings related to the port\u2019s drug trade have rocketed across the country, as well as in Netherlands and Spain. Last September, Brussels residents woke up to find an alleged Albanian drug trafficker hanging from a street sign.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Civilians have sometimes been dragged into the mayhem too, including a port worker shot and wounded after speaking about cocaine smuggling in a TV report. In 2022, a botched hit on Othman el-Ballouti, a member of the Turtle Clan, led to the death of his 11-year-old cousin. A wave of bombings followed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

And on the cocaine comes. From the port, some cocaine-laden containers are waved through by corrupt port staff, while others are sent in the hope they\u2019re not subject to random searches. Then the drugs, sometimes sent in batches of multiple tons, are surreptitiously removed from containers by specialized \u201cextractor crews\u201d: often teenagers who\u2019ll only face juvenile charges if caught. They then either load up a legitimate vehicle or jump a fence to get the drugs past the physical border of the Schengen Zone a few hundred meters away.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Once the cocaine does cross the Schengen line, the possibilities are basically endless \u2014 and almost entirely risk-free. Broken down into smaller packages and distributed to wholesalers, a metric ton of cocaine can end up supplying nightlife in 10 cities across five countries, from Berlin and Milan to Manchester and Athens. These drugs are sometimes shipped directly to the UK or other European ports, though foreign distributors also come to Belgium to buy cocaine from local high-level traffickers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce the cocaine crosses the line into Schengen, the possibilities are basically endless.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for the smugglers themselves, that complex journey from Antwerp to nightclub bathroom offers plenty of scope for promotion. One excellent example is al-Ballouti, who alongside his fellow Turtle Clan associate Nordin \u201cDikke\u201d (\u201cFat\u201d) al-Hajjoui got into the game after earning money as lookouts for extractor gangs. Within a decade, they were moving cocaine by the ton, and ended up commanding their operations from the safety of Dubai \u2014 until a new treaty<\/a> between Belgium and the UAE allowed their extradition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Though both men now face decades in prison, leaders are quickly replaced, something equally true further down the command chain. Typical here is Dani. Speaking to UnHerd using a pseudonym, he\u2019s one of many young Albanians who treat working in the Northern European coke trade like a gap year. We meet in Tirana, where he now bartends and waits at a caf\u00e9. Before that, though, he spent some of his twenties in a Belgian prison: after being caught \u201ctrying to work\u201d at a port near Antwerp.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Albanians have long migrated to the EU and Britain for legal work, but like Dani some instead head to the Low Countries and its coke trade. \u201cThe big players live in Dubai and need people to work the ports for them,\u201d Dani says, \u201cso lots of boys take that chance, instead of going to Germany to work in a warehouse or drive a truck.\u201d In the end, Dani came unstuck. But the point, again, is that with so much money to be made \u2014 every tonne of cocaine arriving in Europe has a potential street value of \u20ac100 million \u2014 there\u2019ll always be young men willing to try their luck.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

In 2016, the same year as the Borgerout wedding, Colombia\u2019s peace deal with the FARC transformed the global cocaine trade. The far-Left paramilitaries, alongside other armed groups in Colombia, relinquished their control over the world\u2019s biggest coca crop, and a new generation of traffickers decided to open the floodgates to Europe. European gangs started sourcing and shipping their own coke direct from South and Central America \u2014 and profits duly skyrocketed.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s been shadowed by other changes. Traditionally, gangs from different countries played different roles: the Moroccans specialized in getting drugs out of the port; the Albanians in transport and logistics inside the EU; the \u2018Ndrangheta from Calabria in brokering and insuring shipments, and providing the connections to growers in South America. Soon enough, though, gangs began working together, sharing routes and huge multi-ton shipments. This is why you frequently see stamps on kilos of cocaine: it\u2019s not marketing, but rather signals which cartel gets what.<\/p>\n

The authorities, for their part, are struggling to contain the chaos. \u201cAntwerp is the epicenter of a cocaine flood,\u201d says one former police detective in Antwerp, \u201cand it\u2019s up to what\u2019s basically the size of a local police force to manage it. The cartels feeding cocaine to the EU that are backed by billions of euros in revenue aren\u2019t facing the coordinated police resources of all the nations of the European Union: they\u2019re facing the customs and police of a single city.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"Police seize a cocaine shipment in Antwerp. (Francois Walschaerts\/Getty)<\/p>\n

Belgium\u2019s dysfunctional politics hardly helps. The country\u2019s French and Flemish halves are often reluctant to cooperate. Each has a powerful regional government, as does Brussels itself, overlapping with a federal bureaucracy often paralyzed by political and economic rivalries. Ironically, this fecklessness is reflected in the fact that the cocaine mafia has rarely been caught corrupting senior Belgian officials: they\u2019re too incompetent to be useful. Rather, explains the detective, the cartels focus on lower-level workers, the dockers, clerks and police officers they need to smooth the coke\u2019s passage. This conveyor belt of graft is quickly killing trust in society, especially when the trade\u2019s epic profits are sometimes so visible on the streets of Borgerhout, and by gangs flaunting their wealth on social media.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That leads to another question: whatever the judges might claim, is Belgium really a narco-state? Anna Sergi, an expert in organized crime, isn\u2019t convinced. Yes, there are genuine and rising fears. But actual narco-states \u2014 Guinea Bissau and Belize, or parts of Mexico and Bolivia \u2014 are places where the government has lost its monopoly on violence to the drug gangs. And as Sergi stresses: \u201cWe don\u2019t have that in Belgium.\u201d<\/p>\n

Joris van der Aa, who has covered the crime beat in Antwerp for a decade, makes a similar point. Clearly, threats against judges and politicians must be taken seriously. Yet as the journalist continues, many such plots are little more than bravado. \u201cIn Belgium,\u201d he says, \u201cwe see much less violence, threats and brutality compared to South America or even other parts of Europe.\u201d\u00a0For their part, Belgian clans are reluctant to kill each other, let alone top officials or cops, because \u201cnobody is trying to physically control territory \u2014 they just want to make lots of money\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a stark contrast to Europe\u2019s premier drug supermarket: Amsterdam. A short train ride from Antwerp, the city faces a far more powerful and entrenched version of organized thuggery. It may not yet be a narco-state in the Mexican style, yet the city\u2019s streets and canals have witnessed the murder of journalists, lawyers and witnesses. In 2021, to give one example, a high-profile reporter was shot and killed after leaving an Amsterdam TV studio. His killers? Associates of Ridouan Taghi, a Dutch-Moroccan kingpin.\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

The authorities aren\u2019t blind to these challenges. Since 2022, the Dutch have devoted \u20ac524 million to anti-smuggling security at their ports. There have been other clampdowns, too, notably when European police forces gained access to the encrypted phone networks used by criminals. Yet the drugs keep coming \u2014 with European coke reaching record purity levels even as prices stay low.\u00a0<\/p>\n

That\u2019s unsurprising. As soon as police clamp down, drug gangs simply tweak their tactics. One example is dissolving drugs in plastic, making them harder to spot. All the while, traffickers are on the lookout for new ports to conquer. Norway and Greece are two popular options, with police in Thessaloniki seizing<\/a> 270 kilograms of cocaine in a major bust last summer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Whether you use the term \u201cnarco-state\u201d or not, then, Europe\u2019s drug problem isn\u2019t going away \u2014 even as more countries are being infected by cocaine gangsterism. So it\u2019s a pity that a genuinely pan-European response remains absent. That\u2019s arguably by design. Yes, the EU has a single market and free travel. Yet it also has 27 different police forces reporting to 27 different governments, all with their own distinct politics. As for the traffickers, all they have to do is get their coke beyond a port\u2019s boundary fence. From there, 450 million consumers await.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For Sergi, the solution is for European nations to band together, and focus more on the gangs than the drugs they\u2019re pushing. \u201cWe need to have a coordinated effort and make a choice,\u201d she says. \u201cEither we interdict drugs wherever they arrive \u2014 which is a waste of time and resources, and you can never win \u2014 or you create a task force and you follow the criminal groups.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

For the moment, though, the expansion of the global cocaine trade will continue. And how could it be otherwise when it\u2019s so wrapped up, literally, in globalization? Hidden amid a tsunami of commerce, the magnified profits of prohibition have made cocaine too lucrative for the gangs to ignore. As they continue to gnaw away at democracy, both in Belgium and across Europe, the rise of cocaine gangsterism has created yet another existential threat for the continent \u2014 one it can no longer afford to ignore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In October 2016, a wedding scandalized Antwerp. A bride and her groom, the scion of a prominent Belgian-Moroccan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12344,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[19,7,8307,146,8308],"class_list":{"0":"post-12343","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-belgium","8":"tag-antwerp","9":"tag-belgium","10":"tag-cocaine","11":"tag-crime","12":"tag-drug-smuggling"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@be\/116439590232391061","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12343"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12343\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/be\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}