I always wondered how all that cocaine got to Europe.
Turns out it was youths.
Hundreds of unaccompanied child migrants across Europe are being forced to work as soldiers for increasingly powerful drug cartels to meet the continent’s soaring appetite for cocaine, a Guardian investigation has found.
EU police forces have warned of industrial-scale exploitation of African children by cocaine networks operating in western Europe in cities including Paris and Brussels as they seek to expand Europe’s £10bn cocaine market.
Child protection agencies warned that cocaine gangs, which are exploiting the “unlimited” supply of vulnerable African children at their disposal, are using brutal means to control their victims, including torture and rape if they fail to sell enough drugs.
This whole report is a bit racist, no?
I mean, black people torturing and raping little boys? Are we allowed to talk about something like that?
Sources told the Guardian that London may be next after police recently found a number of Moroccan and Algerian children, seemingly victims of torture, who they believe were trafficked into the country by cocaine gangs.
Concern over the level of exploitation was so great that in March, EU police forces – along with UK and UN agencies and Europol – met to discuss how to tackle the exploitation and trafficking of African children by drugs networks based in western Europe.
A separate recent assessment by EU police forces investigating serious organised crime and human trafficking concluded: “Sweden, Belgium, the Netherlands, Spain and France presented several concrete cases of the exploitation of hundreds of north African minors, recruited by drug trafficking networks to sell narcotics.”
Eric Garbar, head of human trafficking and smuggling at the Belgian federal judicial police, is one of the officers leading attempts to tackle the exploitation of unaccompanied children by criminal networks. He said: “With African minors, essentially Moroccan and Algerian, the most important area is the exploitation by OCGs [organised crime groups] involved in criminal activities such as drug trafficking.
“What we have in the EU is an unstoppable low-cost human resource from Africa.”
You could outlaw illegal immigration. Or legalize cocaine.
Or both.
Most problems have simple solutions.
BELGIUM: THE COCAINE CAPITAL OF EUROPE
With Belgian ports witnessing record seizures of cocaine, the nation has emerged as Europe’s cocaine-trafficking capital, reflecting a concerning trend in the region’s drug trade. The influx of narcotics into Belgian ports underscores the… pic.twitter.com/im2ajefQpn
— Bangladesh News 24 (@bdnews24) May 9, 2024