The 52-metre vessel was sailing under the flag of Palau and approaching the northwestern Spanish coast after a voyage to bring a large cocaine shipment from South America to Europe.

Spanish authorities had been investigating a Galician trafficking organisation based in the northwestern county of O Salnés in Pontevedra. The plan was for smaller vessels to meet the ship off Galicia, transfer the cocaine at sea and carry it ashore.

But bad weather prevented the traffickers from making the rendezvous with the Nehir, so a Navy patrol vessel went to intercept it instead.

As officers from the Policía Nacional’s GEO tactical unit boarded, someone aboard opened several water inlets. Police removed the nine crew members and recovered more than 1.8 tonnes of cocaine before the Nehir capsized. It did not immediately sink. Instead, the vessel remained afloat upside down and was towed to Gijón, where it eventually sank in the port.

Investigators now say they later discovered why the crew had tried to lose the ship.

Another 1,650 kilograms of cocaine had allegedly remained hidden aboard. According to Spain’s Interior Ministry, members of the trafficking network subsequently returned to the Nehir in Gijón and entered the vessel to recover it.

The authorities did not finally refloat the Nehir until February 2023.

But by then, the investigation had moved well beyond the ship.

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When police officers arrived, they came under fire. Two were wounded, one critically, and a 51-year-old security guard at the property was killed. Police subsequently carried out a swathe of arrests in an operation across nearby maize fields, motorways around the country and Nijmegen train station. 34 people were detained, including suspects from the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Algeria.

“What took place in Overasselt last night is indescribable. For colleagues, this is truly a very intense incident. Colleagues were injured and were brought to safety by others at risk of their own lives. It was truly an act of heroism,” said deputy police chief, Joland Aalbers.

A raid on this scale is almost unheard of in the Netherlands, despite the country becoming a far more prominent pivot in the European drug trade.

So why send such a hit squad to a remote Dutch farm? Prosecutors are investigating whether the group was preparing a kidnapping. Reporting by newspaper Het Parool suggested a dispute over cocaine allegedly belonging to the organisation of the Netherlands’ foremost drug trafficker, Jos Leijdekkers, better known as Bolle Jos.

The newspaper, citing unnamed sources, linked the dispute to a shipment intercepted in France. Some drugs may nevertheless have reached the Netherlands, and the attackers allegedly believed a man living at the Overasselt property could account for them, or that the cocaine itself was being stored there.

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Five people were arrested including two Mexicans, while police seized drugs and equipment worth approximately 600 million rand ($37 million). The operation involved South African authorities working alongside the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).

The presence of Mexican nationals in a meth laboratory near South Africa’s northern border might once have appeared unusual.

It isn’t anymore.

Why not?

South African authorities have uncovered at least five major methamphetamine operations and arrested at least 16 Mexican suspects across four provinces in two years.

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On June 10, four alleged CJNG members travelled to Czechia. They had quite the shopping list.

Among them was José Miguel Alvarado Morales, the godson of Audias Flores Silva, alias “El Jardinero”, one of the CJNG’s most senior figures. El Jardinero was arrested in Mexico in April.

According to US federal prosecutors, the men were looking to buy machine guns, RPG-7 launchers, 61-millimetre mortars, ammunition and other military equipment for shipment to Mexico.

The proposed payment was unusual. Prosecutors say the defendants agreed to pay for the weapons with fentanyl and methamphetamine that would be distributed in the United States. The indictment does not say who was supposed to receive or sell those drugs, or exactly how the proceeds would reach the weapons supplier.

But the Czech adventure rolled two business ventures into one. The men allegedly also planned to meet a possible new supplier of precursor chemicals used to manufacture synthetic drugs.

This was only one of several recent cases placing alleged CJNG operators or business partners in Europe.

In March, Bulgarian arms dealer Peter Dimitrov Mirchev was extradited from Spain to the United States over a separate alleged attempt to supply military weapons to the cartel.

That investigation stretches back to at least 2022. US prosecutors say Mirchev and several associates held meetings with people claiming to represent the CJNG and eventually arranged a test shipment of 50 AK-47s from Bulgaria. A Tanzanian end-user certificate was allegedly obtained to disguise the intended recipient.

The ambitions then became much larger. Prosecutors say Mirchev prepared a €53.7 million weapons package that potentially included rocket launchers, anti-personnel mines, anti-aircraft weapons and other military equipment.

Then, on August 5, Spanish police announced a different CJNG case about liquid methamphetamine.

The investigation began after French authorities discovered a container travelling from Mexico to Spain. On board were 12 tonnes of liquid vanilla extract with 2.5 tonnes of methamphetamine dissolved into it.

Spanish and French investigators followed the shipment into Spain and uncovered a network of processing and storage sites in Catalonia. Thirteen people were arrested.

More unusually, Spanish authorities explicitly described the organisation behind the operation as a branch of the CJNG. The methamphetamine had been shipped across the Atlantic in liquid form and then had to be extracted and processed after reaching Europe.

Weapons negotiations in Czechia, another alleged arms pipeline running through Bulgaria and Spain, and tonnes of methamphetamine hidden in vanilla extract therefore provide three very different recent European connections to the same Mexican cartel.

What are CJNG networks actually doing in Europe?

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Abelardo de la Espriella made that precise promise on Caracol Radio’s 6AM W programme on 9 June. He was still a presidential candidate and was denying a broader claim attributed to him: that he could restore security across Colombia in three months. What he meant, he said, was ten high-profile criminals captured or killed, followed by the recovery of lost territory.

On 7 August, now Colombia’s new president, De la Espriella stood before troops at the Pichincha military canton in Cali and ordered the security forces to fight every criminal structure. He also promised an official list of groups that his government would classify as narco-terrorists.

By 11 August, the first scalp had been collected, De la Espriella was presenting his first results. “During military operations in Meta, alias ‘El Ruso’ or ‘El Alemán’ was killed,” he told Colombians. Three other alleged members of the same structure died in the operation. The president called Hernando Forero Mosquera, alias “El Ruso",” the principal leader of Structure 28, part of the FARC dissident coalition led by Iván Mordisco, Colombia’s most-wanted man.

El Ruso had reportedly spent more than 21 years in the insurgency, but had taken command of Structure 28 only about a month earlier. According to Cambio’s reconstruction, his established job was to maintain a logistics corridor connecting Arauca, Casanare, Guaviare and Meta. He was accused of coordinating attacks using explosives and armed drones and was being prepared to take over Structure 39 in Meta and Guaviare.

Was El Ruso the first of De la Espriella’s ten? The government has not said so.

The operation may have been planned before the inauguration, and El Ruso was absent from the most obvious speculative lists. Yet he may actually be a more valuable high-value target than several famous commanders. His value lay in logistics, technical knowledge and links between criminal structures.

But will de la Espriella make good on his promise of ten captures or killings?

After a flurry of military operations against organized crime in his first days in office, de la Espriella must now deal with the catastrophe of the earthquake which struck on August 11.

But after that, who will he target?

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“That gun is still out there,” Elle’s father, Tim Edwards, wrote to Britain’s new prime minister, Andy Burnham, this week. Burnham’s reply: “I don’t want to release any of these people. But we have been forced to do so.”

Here are the details:

• Under the Sentencing Act 2026, which received royal assent in January, prisoners serving standard fixed-term sentences — the burglars, drug dealers and fraudsters who make up the bulk of the prison population — will be released after one-third of their sentence, down from the 40 to 50 percent required today.

• The also includes violent offenders sentenced to under four years, and those who committed actual bodily harm or unintentional wounding at any sentence length, because they don’t carry a maximum of life. A three-and-a-half-year sentence for assault now means about 14 months inside.

• The most serious offenders on fixed sentences — four years or more for crimes carrying a life maximum, such as manslaughter and wounding with intent — currently serve two-thirds of their sentence before automatic release. The Act cuts that to half: a 13-year manslaughter sentence now means six and a half years inside.

• Rape and serious child sex offences were due to make the same two-thirds-to-half jump, until Burnham barred them on August 4.

• Selection is automatic, by sentence type. There is no case-by-case risk review. Release is delayed only if a prisoner is formally disciplined inside.

• The first 700 or so walk on October 7, an estimate made before the new exclusions, with around 5,000 expected in tranches ordered by sentence length, ending in June 2027.

• The reason is mathematical. The adult male prison estate has run at 98 to 99.7 percent occupancy since October 2022, with nearly a quarter of prisoners doubled up in cells built for one.

• A Conservative building program promised 20,000 new places but delivered 6,518 by late 2024, five years late and £4.2 billion over budget. In December 2024, the Ministry of Justice calculated it would run out of cells by early 2026.

• This is the third release scheme in three years. The Conservatives freed 13,325 prisoners early in 2023–24, initially up to 18 days before their release date, rising to 70 days by May 2024.

• Labour’s SDS40 scheme cut release to 40 percent of sentence from September 2024 and freed 38,042 prisoners in its first ten months — roughly triple the Conservative pace — and releases have continued since. The Sentencing Act makes the emergency permanent.

Burnham rightly explains he has little choice. Two previous release schemes saw the Conservatives release 13,325 prisoners up to 70 days early in 2023–24, and Labour’s SDS40 scheme, which cut releases to 40 percent of sentence from September 2024, accounts for most of the 70,000-plus early releases since. The Sentencing Act makes the emergency permanent.

Burnham, prime minister since July 20 without a general election, paused the scheme within days of taking office as anger built over the eligibility of two of the men convicted over the killing of police constable Andrew Harper. The August 4 relaunch excluded sex offenders but not manslaughter — so the Harper killers stayed eligible. And reporters soon found that grooming-gang members convicted prior to a 2003 law change outside the new exclusions too, because their crimes were prosecuted as indecent assault under the old statute.

Why the fury, if the Conservatives did it first?

Every government since 2023 has released prisoners early. The difference now is scale, permanence and visibility.

The Conservative scheme shaved up to 70 days off sentences and was run quietly enough that Labour, then in opposition, accused ministers of a “cover-up” over unassessed risk. The Sentencing Act instead rewrites the release point itself, permanently, and cuts far deeper, slashing sentences to eligible prisoners to a third, while extending for the first time to serious violent offenders on long determinate sentences.

It is also the first scheme the public could see coming. More than 7,000 victims received letters telling them their attacker was eligible. Many learned of it that way for the first time.

Rotherham grooming survivor Sammy Woodhouse discovered her rapist was being considered for early release. Fellow survivor Sarah Wilson told the press that, “If this new law goes through, I’ll have fought longer for justice than they’ll have served in prison.” Bradford survivor Fiona Goddard told the Yorkshire Post the letters had left her unable to sleep or leave the house.

And the politics have changed. Burnham is the seventh prime minister in ten years, installed unopposed after Labour’s local-election collapse, facing a Reform party whose “lawless Britain” platform promises to end early release altogether.

Nigel Farage’s attack must have been easy to write: “Andy Burnham said it would be awful if PC Harper’s killers were released early. But he’s now letting it happen.”

What the backlash gets right

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They were hardly alone. Instagram showed successful swimmers reaching Spanish territory. TikTok users published maps of possible routes. Facebook posts offered supposed patrol information and discussed wetsuits, fins and inflatable tubes. Buses, trains and taxis filled with people travelling north, while thousands more walked or hitchhiked towards the coast. The movement was coordinated, in the broadest sense, through online information.

Within two days, tens of thousands had entered Ceuta by land and sea. Spain now estimates that about 72,000 people crossed and roughly 70,000 returned. The exact numbers are difficult to pin down. By 3 August, authorities reported 72 deaths on the Spanish side and 11 in Morocco, most from drowning.

Several thousand remained in Ceuta, where reception centres were overwhelmed and officials were processing 862 unaccompanied minors, according to Spanish official figures.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez quickly identified a culprit. He said an “interested reading” of a Supreme Court judgment had spread “like wildfire” through mafias trafficking in human beings, producing the avalanche. Morocco also blamed digital manipulation, false information, erroneous legal interpretations and human-trafficking networks in its official public account.

What did Spain’s Supreme Court actually decide?

On 8 July, Spain’s Supreme Court upheld a ruling concerning the special procedure used for immediate rejections at the borders of Ceuta and Melilla. The court found that the procedure did not automatically cover migrants intercepted while swimming at sea because they had not crossed the physical containment structures specified by Spanish law, according to the court’s own summary.

The judgment did not open the border and did not give swimmers the right to remain. Yet online, the legal distinction became a much simpler proposition: enter Ceuta by sea and Spain cannot send you back. Migrants interviewed during the crisis described seeing videos of successful crossings and interpreting them as proof that an opportunity existed.

A separate Spanish policy only fuelled the fire. In April, the government opened an extraordinary regularisation process, allowing undocumented migrants already in Spain to apply for residence and work permits. Its terms were strict: applicants had to prove they had arrived before 1 January 2026 and lived in the country for at least five continuous months.

For someone watching fragments of Spanish news from Morocco, the court ruling and regularisation scheme could easily collapse into a single promise: arrive by swimming, avoid immediate removal, obtain papers and work. That promise was false. It was also credible enough to act upon in a country where unemployment among 15 to 24-year-olds reached 37.2 percent in 2025, according to Morocco’s statistics agency.

But from Morocco, watching fragments of Spanish news, the two measures collapsed into one promise: swim to Ceuta, avoid removal, get papers and a job. Every part of that chain was false.

So how are human smugglers involved?

First off, let me clarify a pet peeve of mine. Human smuggling and human trafficking often get used interchangeably. They are not the same.

Human smuggling is a transaction: a migrant pays someone to get them across a border illegally, and the relationship ends once they arrive. Human trafficking is exploitation: a person is moved or held through coercion, deception or debt in order to be used, for labour, sex or other profit, whether or not any border is crossed.

A network dismantled by Spanish police in June 2025 showed how human smugglers operate to Ceuta. Prosecutors alleged the group housed migrants in the Moroccan town of Fnideq, moved them to Ceuta by boat or with swimming guides and underwater scooters, then held them in safe houses inside the enclave until their families completed payment. They charged up to €14,600 person for the full journey, allegedly moved at least 200 people and earned more than €2.5 million, according to the police case summary.

The methods vary with the budget. At the cheap end, migrants are sold a place in an inflatable boat. At the expensive end, powerful jet skis run the ten miles across the Strait of Gibraltar in half an hour, one to three passengers and a pilot at a time.

And Europol has documented how established smuggling groups advertise routes on social media platforms, recruit migrants and facilitators online, then move operational conversations into private messaging services.

Then why weren’t human smugglers to blame this time?

Because almost nothing about the July rush matches how the trade actually works. Human smugglers sell convenience to people who cannot make the crossing alone. But if a rumour has convinced thousands that the border is open and Morocco is letting them reach the water, that convenience disappears. There is little reason to pay thousands of euros for a swim that now looks free.

The documented participants bore this out: they travelled on ordinary trains and taxis, bought or borrowed their own gear, and followed instructions visible to anyone with a phone.

That does not mean smugglers were absent. The more clearly criminal business emerged after the migrnats arrived in Ceuta. Between 1 and 3 August, local reporting documented approximately 50 people reaching Algeciras and La Línea by speedboat and jet ski, mostly from Ceuta. One boat alone carried between 15 and 20 people, while the fast crossings were said to cost between €4,000 and €6,000 per passenger. A 2025 Spanish investigation had already demonstrated the value of this second leg: police alleged that a network held migrants in Ceuta safe houses until their families completed payment, then ferried them to Algeciras.

Smugglers may also have amplified the original rumour. Europol has documented established networks using mainstream social platforms to advertise routes and recruit clients before moving conversations elsewhere. But a familiar method is not proof of responsibility.

The operators of the Haraga Ceuta social media page and the other principal accounts remain unidentified, while both governments offered no supporting evidence when making their allegations.

The people holding them had each paid a premium for a very particular kind of phone, sold on the promise that no one outside the conversation would ever read a word.

These phones had been heavily modified. The front camera was removed, so the device could never photograph its owner. The SIM card was foreign, making the user harder to trace. And the whole thing was rigged to erase itself the instant a wrong password was typed.

On top of all that, the phones ran encrypted messaging apps like Signal and Threema.

But when all three thousand of them lit up with the same message that July afternoon, it was not from some overarching criminal mastermind.

It was from the New South Wales Police.

Detectives told the users that their accounts had been linked to VIP Phones, an alleged underground supplier of modified handsets, and warned that everyone associated with the service could now be identified, investigated and prosecuted.

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The weapon was one of the parting gifts presented by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan after the alliance met in Ankara on 7 and 8 July. Each red box, lined in black, held a revolver engraved with the recipient’s name, six cartridges and a note waiving Turkish export controls.

British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was the first to mention the gift, telling journalists on his flight home. Officials from several delegations described the scenes among their security teams, suddenly responsible for functioning firearms and boxes of ammunition, as “insane”.

What followed was a continent-wide exercise in firearms law.

The waivers allowed the guns to leave Turkey. They did nothing to satisfy the import, possession and registration rules waiting at the other end. Under the EU firearms directive, the ammunition is subject to the same acquisition and possession arrangements as the gun it fits. No recipient is reported to be under criminal investigation; every reported response involved transfer to an embassy, a police service or another authorised custodian.

The choice of gift drew criticism beyond the logistics. British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore called engraved guns “totems of macho Mafia autocratic Caesarism”. Selim Kuneralp, a retired Turkish ambassador, wrote that he wished his country had chosen a gift representing its culture rather than firearms that recalled the habits of Gulf monarchies.

Why did Erdoğan choose revolvers?

Images released by the Lithuanian presidency show a Gümüşay .357 Magnum, a rare six-shooter produced by Turkish state arms maker MKE in the 1990s. The presentation box identified it as “the first revolver-type handgun produced in our country”, and the recipient’s name was engraved on the barrel. The Lithuanian images show six cartridges; Reuters reported that Starmer’s delegation received 500 rounds and a cleaning kit.

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The governor climbed aboard. The Netherlands was set to play Morocco in Monterrey, the capital of Nuevo León.

“Muy contento,” he posted on social media, “se me cumplió el sueño de subirme al Orange Bus.” (Very happy, I fulfilled my dream of climbing onboard the Orange Bus.”

The stunt on the Oranjebus was framed as a politician doing a PR coup by welcoming foreign supporters to his country and state.

But García, a Mexican presidential hopeful, is now in a spot of bother.

Why is he in trouble?

García had wanted this fixture for months. Back in January, he bet the equivalent of his monthly salary that the Netherlands would play in Monterrey.

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Both were reported to be eighteen. They had been wound to the pole from the ankles up in brown packing tape, their mouths sealed, mouse whiskers drawn on their cheeks and the word RATA written across each forehead in marker. A red and black Italika motorcycle stood beside them. A placard accused them of stealing it.

They were not the only ones to be found this way. Between 13 and 19 June, five men appeared at dawn across the town in the same condition, bound to poles, several of them beaten, each named on a sheet of cardboard as a motorcycle thief.

Four bikes reported as stolen were recovered and handed to authorities. No one filmed any of the captures or the men being tied up. But on social media, the supposed vigilante got a name: the Batman de Lagos de Moreno.

What do we know about Batman de Lagos de Moreno?

The men pulled from the poles had all been beaten. Municipal officers found them beaten and bound and handed each to the Ministerio Público and investigative police, who moved them to hospital for treatment.

While their names and any gang or cartel affiliations have not been revealed, they were all between 18 and 23 and only alleged to have committed street-level motorcycle theft.

No crime has even been confirmed. The accusation was made entirely by the staging. Each scene was a statement: the word ratero or RATA inked on a forehead, cartoon whiskers drawn on the face, a placard spelling out the charge and, in three cases, the supposedly stolen bike propped alongside as exhibit. The placards were more of a warning to others. "Esto les va a pasar a todos los rateros," (This will happen to all thieves), read one.

There has also been no claim about who committed this. Often, cartels leaving threatening banners, known as narcomantas, will sign their names and identify those they are targeting.

The Batman de Lagos de Moreno is a viral trend, but it’s only based on social media furore, not on any statement by the alleged vigilante.

What does the Mexican public think?

This happened in Jalisco, the home of the Jalisco Cartel New Generation (CJNG), Mexico’s deadliest cartel.

The story wrote itself. To some, he was a citizen tired by useless authorities who had gone hunting thieves on his own. To others, he was a silent guardian. To many just enjoying the meme, he was best represented by a costume Adam West might have been shamed by.

Within a week, he even had that ultimate proof of modern success: Batman de Lagos de Moreno had his own memecoin.

What do the authorities think?

Investigators do not see a hero. Prosecutors have opened separate investigations into each of the five cases. Whether the men were thieves does not change the fact they are being treated as victims of kidnapping and bodily harm.

For Jalisco’s chief prosecutor, Salvador González de los Santos, “at this moment, they are the victims.” Mexico frowns, if ineffectually, at anyone taking justice into their own hands.

The single most concrete line of inquiry points away from a lone figure in a cape. Local sources told Milenio that investigators were examining a group of men who arrive in pickup trucks to seize their targets, and the state had identified two vehicles tied to the incidents.

Patrols were being stepped up across Lagos de Moreno to head off further cases, and residents were urged to report crime through legal channels rather than the nearest lamppost.

Is motorcycle theft really that much of a problem in Mexico?

Motorcycle theft is now the single largest category of vehicle theft in Mexico. Of the 105,435 vehicles reported stolen in 2025, more than 40,000 were motorcycles, around 38 per cent of the total. This has tripled in the last decade.

There are close to 9 million motorcycles on Mexican roads, a number swollen by the delivery economy of Uber, Rappi and DiDi, and they are the easiest large purchase in the country to steal and the fastest to liquidate. About three quarters of thefts happen while the bike is parked and unattended, after which the machine is either resold whole on false papers or stripped for parts. The most-stolen marque, by some distance, is Italika, the same budget brand left propped next to the two victims in Lagos de Moreno.

Jalisco sits near the top of the table. In the first two months of 2026 it recorded the third-highest state total in the country, behind the State of Mexico and Guanajuato. Lagos de Moreno reported at least 54 thefts between January and May 2026, up from 34 in the same period in 2025, and police dismantled a motorcycle chop-shop in the municipality in February.

Who is behind it?

At the bottom of the chain are the street thieves, the motoratones, working the parked bikes that make up around three quarters of all thefts.

A popular, cheap machine can be sold whole within hours on falsified papers, or broken down for parts in one of the chop-shops the police keep stumbling on, including the one dismantled in Lagos de Moreno in February.

The five men taped to the poles, if they stole anything at all, likely belonged to this tier.

But a stolen motorcycle can be used in many ways. For a hitman, a stolen motorcycle is cheap and hard to trace, can be abandoned or stripped once the job is done, threads through traffic, and vanishes into the swarm of delivery riders that fills every Mexican city.

In May, in Zapopan, Jalisco, a gunman walked up to a man sitting in his car, fired repeatedly and fled on a motorcycle. When federal forces killed CJNG founder, El Mencho, February, men on motorcycles hurled petrol bombs at Oxxo stores and torched branches of the Banco del Bienestar across half a dozen towns.

Has Mexico had vigilantes like this before?

Mexico has never lacked people willing to take justice into their own hands.

Lynchings rose sharply through the last decade, but they never fit the pattern of the costumed crusader who works the same beat night after night.

That belongs to the likes of Seattle's Phoenix Jones, who patrolled in body armour for a couple of years before a pepper-spray arrest and, later, a drug charge ended the act. Mexico's own masked civic figures, like Superbarrio Gómez in the 1980s, sought to fight corruption through labor rallies and press conferences.

But there have been incidents like Lagos de Moreno before.

In May 2022, bodies began appearing in the boots of cars across Morelos, each left with a handwritten note signed by a self-named avenger who called himself el Limpiador de Morelos, the Cleaner. A man and a woman were found dead in a car boot in Cuautla on 5 May, another man in a vehicle on the La Pera highway on 10 May, and more in the days that followed.

The notes claimed the dead were child sex offenders. Social media anointed him a hero doing the work the police would not. And then the authorities said the quiet part. The Morelos state prosecutor, Uriel Carmona, announced that the Cleaner was probably not a lone justiciero at all, but an organised-crime operation wearing the avenger's mask.

Just like Lagos de Moreno.

And tying alleged thieves to poles and exhibiting them is not a citizen's improvisation. It is a recognised tactic of Mexican criminal governance.
In 2020 the Sinaloa Cartel strung alleged robbers from a communications antenna on top of a building, beating one of them with a board. There too, the word rata was written on their bodies.

Batman de Lagos de Moreno is sadly not some would-be Bruce Wayne returning Italika motorbikes to their owners. It’s most likely a local group pissed off that someone was stealing in their territory.

The warrants were the ninth phase of an investigation into the collapsed bank, Banco Master. But while allegations of corruption have surrounded numerous politicians connected to Banco Master’s founder, Daniel Vorcaro, they are now reaching deep into Lula’s government.

Wagner denies wrongdoing and told the press that Lula had telephoned to express confidence in him.

However, this has hit Lula’s Workers’ Party at the worst possible time. The country is bracing for a bitterly contested general election in October, in which Lula, now 80, is facing a close challenge from far-right firebrand, Flavio Bolsonaro, son of the former president, Jair Bolsonaro.

What was Banco Master?

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Within a week the count climbed to six, spread across Zavala, La Salle and Gillespie counties and across the state line into Lea County, New Mexico. The confirmed hosts were calves, a goat and a dog. Texas Governor Greg Abbott issued a disaster proclamation covering all 254 Texas counties and stood up a state response team.

The eradication of this parasite was one of the genuine triumphs of twentieth-century agriculture. The female screwworm mates once in her short life, so American entomologists bred and irradiated males by the million, released them by aircraft, and watched wild populations collapse as the matings produced no offspring. The United States was declared free of the fly in 1966.

The technique then pushed the parasite south through Mexico and Central America until a biological barrier closed it off at the Darién Gap, the roadless jungle dividing Panama from Colombia.

For sixty years that barrier held. No longer.

The pest did not drift north on its own wings. It was carried, mile by mile, by an industrial-strength contraband livestock trade run by criminal groups in Central America and Mexico. And yet, the political fight over who is to blame is preventing a coordinated response.

The fly does not fly far

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Guerrero, better known as Niño Guerrero, founded Tren de Aragua and became the gang’s most important leader from inside Tocorón prison in Aragua state. He appears to have died in the jungle of Bolívar state, possibly around the gold-mining enclave of Las Claritas, where I and other researchers had long believed he may have been hiding.

He had been wanted by the United States for years. His death came as Venezuela’s illegal gold economy, particularly in Bolívar, was being reopened through military operations, political negotiation and the prospect of foreign investment.

Much of the immediate coverage has focused on Guerrero’s biography, his former kingdom inside Tocorón, and the more sensational mythology around Tren de Aragua.

I spent years investigating Guerrero for my 2025 book, Tren de Aragua: The Guide to America’s Growing Criminal Threat.

Here are my initial takeaways on what his death means for Tren de Aragua, organized crime in Venezuela and Latin America, and the US’ campaign against the gang.

1. Was Niño Guerrero a cartel boss?

Niño Guerrero was not a cartel boss. Tren de Aragua was not a cartel in the Mexican sense of the term.

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Hours earlier, gunmen murdered 29-year-old Jamal Samuels in what police described as a retaliatory hit. Two days before that, a car carrying Hubert Baptist and Eric Frazer had been raked with rifle fire on the same highway near Haulover Bridge.

Governor-General Dame Froyla Tzalam responded by placing Belize City and a string of surrounding villages under a state of public emergency. Soldiers and police gained the power to search anyone without a warrant, detain suspects for 30 days without charge, impose a night curfew on minors and shut down businesses. Thirty days later, the emergency expired on schedule, the roughly 30 men detained under it walked out of the Kolbe Foundation prison, and the country moved on.

It was the seventh state of emergency Belize has declared against its own gangs in eight years. They have barely made a dent.

The Belize Bloods and Crips

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The vessel had left Freetown in Sierra Leone nine days earlier, official destination Benghazi in Libya. It was the largest single maritime cocaine seizure in history.

Wwith the Arconian still tied up in the Canary Islands, the revelations about this cargo proves how the trans-Atlantic cocaine pipeline has shifted.

This morning, I read one of the finest pieces of investigative crime work I have read in a long time. This was the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)’s report on the Arconian here. Please share and support their work widely.

What follows is my takeaways from their conclusions, it is not meant to replace their astounding forensic efforts.

Sierra Leone has stopped concealing its role in the cocaine trade and is now its most reliable Atlantic node, with the president's own family entwined in the network. Cocaine has become abundant enough that traffickers can buy entire cargo ships for a single voyage and treat them as expendable. And European trafficking organisations are evolving at industrial speed, outpacing every framework built to contain them.

1. The size of West African seizures is climbing because trafficker confidence is climbing

In 2025, the average size of a cocaine seizure in West Africa was 5.6 tons. That was more than double the 2.4 ton average seen in 2024, according to the Maritime Analysis and Operations Centre – Narcotics (MAOC-N) in Lisbon. The total tonnage Total seized on the route rose seven-fold between 2022 and 2024, reaching 352 tonnes in 2024 alone.

Individual seizures have grown.A record was set in September 2025 when the French Navy seized 9.6 tons off West Africa, this was broken by 10-ton seizure off El Hierro in the Canaries in January 2026. That record lasted four months when the Arconian was found with three times that number on board.

This is not an exact science by seizures can be used to estimate how much law enforcement caught while it was moving. With each new record, this looks like proportionally less.

However, this trajectory also measures something traffickers understand well: the cost of being intercepted, relative to the value of getting through. When that ratio falls, consignment sizes rise, because the marginal cocaine added to a single hull is essentially free once the network has paid for the vessel, the crew, the protection, and the route.

The Arconian carried no cover cargo. Its thirty tonnes of cocaine were stacked behind a hidden metal door in a long gallery, with no rice or cacao or soybean flour to disguise them. Concealment was not deemed necessary.

A network willing to load thirty tons onto one ship in plain view is a network that has, over years of successful runs, priced interception as an acceptable cost.

2. Sierra Leone has been taken over by a Dutch-led drug network

Specific institutions inside Sierra Leone have been individually purchased, one office at a time, by a Dutch-led drug trafficking network.

The network’s anchor is Jos Leijdekkers, a 34-year-old Dutch fugitive from Breda known as Bolle Jos, who arrived in Sierra Leone in 2022 under the alias Omar Sheriff and set up at the Two Seasons resort on the coast south of Freetown. By mid-2024 he had entered the ruling family, in a relationship with Agnes Bio, the daughter of President Julius Maada Bio, with whom he has since fathered a child. Agnes Bio held a diplomatic posting at Sierra Leone’s UN mission in New York during the same period. On 1 January 2025, footage filmed by First Lady Fatima Maada Bio and circulated on social media showed Leijdekkers seated two rows behind the president at a New Year church service in Tihun, the president’s home village.

Leijdekkers is close to many in power. In a reshuffle in August 2023, Alusine Kanneh was appointed Chief Immigration Officer; Andrew Jaiah Kaikai was appointed Executive Director of the National Drug Law Enforcement Agency; and Yankuba Bio, a close relative of the president, was made Director of the Ports and Harbours Authority, running Queen Elizabeth II Quay, the very port from which the Arconian sailed. Each of those three men has since been photographed in proximity to Leijdekkers or to vehicles associated with him. Kanneh was filmed receiving a gift at Leijdekkers’s birthday party and dismissed the day the footage went public.

The protective infrastructure is visible too. A private jet with a fake registration and disabled radar landed at Freetown International Airport in September 2024; its Mexican and Dutch crew were released after paying a $100,000 fine. Belgian customs identified Sierra Leone as the second most prominent point of origin for cocaine seizures in Belgium in 2024, according to a GI-TOC report published this month. Sierra Leone retails cocaine at €17.90 per gram, the lowest figure in West Africa, the predictable overspill from stockpiles that are too large to move discreetly. A Dutch journalist was detained outside Leijdekkers's Two Seasons resort in 2025 on suspicion of espionage. Press freedom organisations have reported bribes of up to €5,000 offered to local journalists to stop covering him.

3. Jos Leijdekkers is the prototype for a new generation of traffickers.

The simplified version of the Leijdekkers story is that a violent Dutch kid from Breda got too big for the Netherlands, fled to Sierra Leone, and got even bigger. The accurate version is that almost every cocaine trafficker of his generation took some version of that route, and only Leijdekkers came out the other end controlling a transcontinental logistics operation that the Spanish Civil Guard now estimates is moving cocaine on a scale European law enforcement had never previously documented.

His starting point was ordinary. In 2011, Leijdekkers shot two brothers in a Breda bar fight and was sentenced to six years. He met the Dutch trafficker Piet Wortel inside, and on release entered Wortel’s network, organising multi-tonne cocaine shipments through Antwerp and Rotterdam. By 2019 he was ordering kills, the disappearance of his associate Naima Jillal, photographed under torture and never found, was traced back to him. By 2020, he was instructing his enforcers to shoot an Antwerp port guard in the kneecaps for spotting one of his containers. He fled to Istanbul, then to Sierra Leone, in 2022.

The financial scale matches the operational one. A Rotterdam court ordered him in July 2025 to pay €96 million in confiscated criminal earnings, calculated from 14 cocaine shipments over less than a year. The Dutch Justice Minister told Buitenhof on 1 June 2026 that Leijdekkers earns “hundreds of millions of euros a month”. Dutch police estimate his network turns over up to €2 billion a year. He has been convicted in absentia in the Netherlands, in Antwerp, and at Dendermonde in May 2026 for a separate 11-tonne shipment.

The result is a single individual who has done what no almost no European trafficker before him managed to do: move the centre of his operation out of Europe entirely, embed it inside an African state, and run cocaine logistics at industrial scale from that base.

4. The Leijdekkers network runs across four jurisdictions a

Almost everything publicly known about how the Arconian was assembled, nd how at least two other vessels were assembled before it, comes from a single source: the report by GI-TOC, The Arconian operation. Anatomy of a record Atlantic cocaine shipment - trafficking on cargo vessels from West Africa to Europe, published a few days ago. , authored by Josef Skrdlik, Sarah Fares, and Lucia Bird. The work draws on AIS vessel tracking, ship registry analysis through Equasis, corporate mapping via Sayari and OpenCorporates, witness photographs from inside the network, and more than 190 stakeholder interviews carried out across West Africa in 2025.

The structure runs across Sierra Leone, Germany, Turkey, and the Philippines, with each jurisdiction performing a specific function.

In Sierra Leone, Leijdekkers’s network sets up single-purpose shell companies to acquire the vessels in country. The Arconian was bought in February 2026 by Serenity Shipping SL Ltd, a Freetown-registered firm with no prior shipping history and no other vessels. The ship White Eagle was bought in December 2023 by Imperial Shipping Agency SL, a similar shell. The White Labeille was bought in October 2024 by Diamond Line Shipping Ltd, for a reported US$2 million paid in advance of the ship’s arrival in Freetown.

None of the three companies had ever owned a vessel before. None has owned one since. Each was created to hold one ship for one voyage, and discarded.

In Germany, the pre-Sierra-Leonean paper trail sits at the same Flensburg address: Eckernförder Landstraße 65. The three vessels were sold to the Sierra Leonean shells by three German-registered owners, Firat Shipping Co. Ltd (the Arconian), Toprak Shipping Inc. (the White Eagle), and Zeynep Shipping Co. Ltd (the White Labeille), all sharing that address. All three vessels were managed pre-sale by a fourth company at the same address: Tunaryan Schifffahrts GmbH. GI-TOC’s mapping of Tunaryan and its associated entities found no other significant commercial presence; the cluster manages only a handful of ships in total. The Flensburg layer is what made the vessels available to be bought.

In Turkey, a single firm in Gaziantep, Nisa Uluslararası Deniz, was registered as International Safety Management (ISM) manager on all three vessels within a three-week window in August and September 2022. ISM management is a legally required role under International Maritime Organization rules.

Concentrating it in one small Turkish company across three otherwise unconnected vessels is what allowed those three vessels to be operated as a unit. Leijdekkers’s own ties to Türkiye, including a Turkish brother-in-law and his brother Harry repeatedly being arrested, sit behind that layer.

In the Philippines, a Manila-based recruitment agency, coordinated through a Filipino woman based in Freetown who regularly visited Leijdekkers’s residences, supplied the crews. Filipino sailors crewed the Arconian (17 of them, alongside six armed Dutch and Surinamese guards), the White Eagle (15, abandoned in Nador, Morocco on 1 January 2025), and the White Arrow (16, abandoned in Benghazi the same day, recorded in the ILO/IMO database of abandoned seafarers). One Filipino operations manager, with a prior career at a ship-management company, wired tens of thousands of dollars a month back to his family through Western Union.

The network that loaded the Arconian with cocaine was a deliberately distributed business, with each jurisdiction selected for what it could best provide.

5. Why was the Arconian headed to Libya?

The Arconian‘s declared destination was Benghazi, on the eastern Libyan coast, which sits inside one of the two halves of a divided Libyan state, and which half a cocaine shipment is heading toward tells you something about who was expected to receive it on arrival.

Libya has been governed by two competing administrations since 2014: the internationally recognised Government of National Unity (GNU) in Tripoli, headed by Abdelhamid Dabaiba, and a rival authority in the east based in Benghazi, dominated by the Libyan Arab Armed Forces (LAAF) under the Haftar family.

The two sides control separate territories, separate coastlines, separate port authorities, and separate illicit economies. Benghazi falls under the LAAF.

The political response to the Arconian seizure tracked that divide. Within a week, Prime Minister Dabaiba ordered an investigation into the shipment, framing it as an eastern problem. The eastern authorities responded by denying any link to the shipment threatening to suspend diplomatic relations with Spain.

The Arconian became a domestic Libyan political weapon.

GI-TOC’s vessel tracking found four other ships in the broader dossier, vessels with the same ownership patterns, the same reflagging cadence, and the same Freetown departures, that docked in Libyan ports between 2024 and 2026: Benghazi, Sirte, Misrata, and al-Khoms.

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime, in its first dedicated report on Libyan drug trafficking dynamics published in January 2026, documented Libya’s expanding role as a trans-shipment hub for cocaine moving toward Europe, the Middle East and North Africa. Research for the European Union Drugs Agency had already identified Tobruk and Benghazi as known cocaine landing sites, with onward movement by sea toward southern Italy and the Balkans.

6. Disposable vessels may be the new normal

The Arconian was 41 years old. It had spent most of its working life shuttling cement, rice, and bagged cargo between West African ports under a succession of unremarkable owners. In early February 2026, weeks before its final voyage, it was acquired by Serenity Shipping SL Ltd, a Sierra Leonean company that had never owned a vessel before and has not owned one since. The ship was bought to make one trip.

The economics are straightforward. A 30-tonne cocaine shipment intercepted by the Spanish authorities was valued by the Audiencia Nacional at €812 million. A 40-year-old general cargo vessel in West African coastal trade sells for between US$1-3 million. The ratio between cargo and ship has become absurd. They can buy the ship outright, accept that interception means losing the hull, and still come out ahead by orders of magnitude on a single successful voyage. The Leijdekkers network’s reported turnover of up to €2 billion a year makes a $2 million ship an obvious purchase.

This breaks the maritime interdiction model in two ways.

The first is operational. European law enforcement is structured around tracking known traffickers, known cargo vessels, and known shipping companies over time, the assumption being that vessels and corporate structures are persistent assets whose patterns can be mapped.

The Leijdekkers model dissolves that assumption. Each Sierra Leonean shell is created for one ship. Each ship is sailed once. Each ship’s history under previous owners is irrelevant to its final voyage. By the time a vessel’s behaviour becomes interesting enough to warrant attention, it is already mid-Atlantic with its cargo aboard.

GI-TOC was able to map the Arconian, the White Eagle, and the White Labeille together only retrospectively, once the Arconian had been seized and the wider ownership patterns became visible.

The second is structural. The age and condition of the vessels involved sit outside most modern maritime regulatory frameworks. The Arconian, the White Eagle, and the White Labeille were all built between 1985 and 1989. Each had a documented history of regulatory infractions before being acquired by the Sierra Leonean shells. The White Eagle, under its former name Breadbox Falcon, was on the Black Sea ship watch list in 2020 for repeated detentions. The White Labeille had been detained in Praia, Cape Verde in 2019 carrying 9.5 tonnes of cocaine, then sold by public tender after the investigation concluded. These are vessels the legitimate shipping economy has already discarded — and that is precisely why traffickers can acquire them cheaply enough to throw away.

The maritime interdiction system was designed for a world in which moving 30 tonnes of cocaine required logistical commitments — chartered vessels, persistent shipping companies, repeated voyages — that gave investigators something to follow. That world is gone. The new model assumes the ship will be lost, treats the hull as a one-time logistics token, and absorbs the cost in the price of the cargo. Interdiction can still catch individual vessels. What it cannot yet do is catch the network behind them faster than the network can spin up the next one.

Isaí was under an active US extradition order and described him as a logistical coordinator for Los Chapitos, accused of running synthetic-drug production lines into the United States and Costa Rica. Investigators said that he had brokered the sale of 10,000 fentanyl pills to the US in 2025.

Isaí is not central to the Chapitos, the faction of the Sinaloa Cartel run by El Chapo’s sons. At most, he is mid-tier. But his arrest is a useful occasion to take stock of the Guzmán family more broadly as the dragnet reaches its lower rungs.

El Chapo’s family is not done. The Chapitos remain one of the dominant forces in the Mexican criminal landscape and in the cross-border fentanyl trade. Iván Archivaldo and Jesús Alfredo Guzmán Salazar still run the faction from the Sierra Madre. But there’s only two of them left. Ovidio and Joaquín are in present.

El Chapo’s family is not done, but it is dwindling.

Here’s how it happened.

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Dijkman is a household name in Maastricht. He spent the better part of forty years as the city’s archaeologist and conservator, was knighted for his work earlier this year, and had curated past exhibitions on d’Artagnan at the Centre Céramique in the city.

When the floor of the Sint-Petrus-en-Pauluskerk church gave way in February and a skeleton appeared beneath the altar, Dijkman was called in and first claimed it might be d’Artagnan.

So what was the crime?

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He is the most senior Cuban regime figure ever criminally charged by the United States, at a time when the island is in freefall. Cuba is currently enduring rolling blackouts of up to 22 hours, its subsidised oil lifeline severed by the US capture of Venezuela’s Nicolás Maduro in January, and a US president who has repeatedly said he may invade the country.

Castro’s indictment is just another turn of the screw. Below are nine takeaways on what this indictment means and what happens next.

Is this actually a murder case?

It’s more than murder.

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Magyar inherited, in the language of Hungary’s own investigative press, a captured state. Under Orbán’s Fidesz party, institutions had been systematically redirected to enrich a narrow circle of loyalists. Intelligence services had been turned against journalists and EU fraud investigators. The machinery of justice had been quietly disabled.

Magyar’s first speech as prime minister showed the scale of the task. One of his first pieces of legislation will be the creation of a National Asset Recovery and Protection Office to uncover and retrieve stolen or embezzled funds. He gave a 31 May 31 deadline to the chief prosecutor, the presidents of the Supreme Court and Constitutional Court, and the heads of the Media Authority and other bodies filled by Fidesz to resign. He committed Hungary to joining the European Public Prosecutor’s Office (EPPO), the body with the power to investigate fraud against EU funds directly in member states, which Orbán had spent years keeping Hungary out of.

The ten cases below are the largest that must now be investigated from the Orbán years. Some are systemic, such as a decades-long EU funds fraud operation involving billions of euros and dozens of connected firms. Others are specific, such as a street lighting company owned by the prime minister’s son-in-law or a foreign minister who appears to have been briefing the Kremlin during breaks in EU Council meetings.

As of 13 May, none of the principals have been charged. The only active investigation was opened on 28 April “against unknown perpetrators,” after reports that Orbán-era oligarchs had begun moving assets to the Gulf in the weeks following the election.

But an architecture of accountability is being built.

1. Systematic EU funds fraud and the capture of public procurement

This is the case that contains all others. Everything else flows from the same central mechanism: the state as a distribution vehicle for a private oligarchy.

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