With up to β¬60 billion of drugs a year passing through the port city of Antwerp, the epicentre of Europe’s cocaine trade, the country is facing escalating gang attacks.
On September 15, in Brussels, the Belgian prime minister, three federal ministers (of the interior, justice and health), the federal prosecutor and 14 mayors met to discuss a long-neglected issue: drug trafficking, which has led to an unprecedented flare-up of violence in the country this summer. “At last,” said one magistrate, who has been decrying the authorities’ slow response for years. He says the situation has reached the point at which it is now a matter of stopping the country becoming a “narco-state.”
It all started in 2012, when Dutch traffickers kidnapped one of the members of a family who had tried to steal a batch of cocaine offloaded from a container at the port of Antwerp. The family relented when they received a photo of the meat grinder the kidnappers were threatening to feed the young man into.
Since then, the violence has not stopped β and this summer there have been shootings, attempted arson, stabbings (leaving one person dead) and grenade attacks on homes and businesses. These have been primarily in the Belgian capital, where a turf war is taking place, but have also occurred in Antwerp, where the port has been the epicenter of cocaine trafficking in Europe for years. Nearly 90 tons were seized there in 2021, while another 28 tons were confiscated in South America on their way to Belgium.