tagged w/ Castel Volturno
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I grew up hearing about Colombian drug cartels dumping huge amounts of cocaine into the United States to feed America’s insatiable craving for the fine white powder that made entertainers and socialites feel amazingly cool. Our government went to war against drugs with billions of dollars and helicopters, social programs and guns. Eventually, for lots of reasons, cocaine use trailed off in the United States. In recent years the drug lords have seen their trade route through the Caribbean produce fewer mansions, private armies and the lifestyle of kings. But they found a new market.
In recent years, Europe has been consuming more cocaine than anywhere else in the world. So I headed there to find out how all that coke was getting into Europe.
Unlike the US, where coke was associated with high rollers and the rich and famous, cocaine today is the European everyman’s drug. We found it in pubs in England, public bathrooms in Italy and wherever young people gather to have a good time. The UK, Italy, and Spain have become the largest consumers of cocaine in the world. The bulk of it still comes from South America, but the trade route has changed. In order to meet their growing demand, South American drug lords use West Africa as their crucial transit point to get the drug into the European Union. With chronic poverty, rampant corruption and loose borders, parts of West Africa have proved to be willing partners in flooding Europe with drugs.
I tracked the drug at one point to a South American drug trafficker who’d settled in Guinea Bissau, but I had to find out where it was going from there. My producer, Joanne, and I traveled to southern Italy, where we heard smugglers gained easy access to the European continent. When we reached the tiny town of Castel Volturno, one of the largest cocaine trafficking hubs in Europe, we felt as if we had stumbled into an African slum.
Castel Volturno is a notoriously lawless town, overwhelmed with poor immigrants and controlled by the local mafia. I’ve reported from a lot of hot spots in the world, but Castel Volturno oozes with a special eeriness. We were searching for a drug trade that was practically invisible, but all the time we could feel the watchful eye of the Camorra, the local mafia, whenever we moved. People were often afraid to talk to us about cocaine or who was running the place, but we pursued every angle we could while our unseen targets watched us.
Cocaine Mafia (Video)
You can watch "Cocaine Mafia" or any of the previous episodes of Vanguard online.
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