5 Challenges Stopping Ports from Tackling Crime Crisis
Who is actually in charge of port security? Can ports actually work together against drug trafficking while competing to grow their business as fast as possible?
Over the last month, World of Crime carried out more than twenty interviews with port authorities, private terminal operators, shipping companies, police officers, industry watchers, as well as city and national government officials in Belgium, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, Ecuador, and Nigeria.
These interviews coincided with several important events. In late January, the European Ports Alliance was launched, with ports, customs, police and governments across the continent vowing to fight drug trafficking and criminal infiltration together.
Amid record trans-Atlantic cocaine seizures in 2023, alarm bells are ringing about port security. A delegation of European mayors was concerned at the conditions they found at ports in Costa Rica and Ecuador during a recent trip. In Vancouver, Canada, a dedicated port police force is being discussed. Leading maritime security and port agencies in the UK are teaming up to offer a wider range of services to shipping clients. In Guyana, Tanzania, Mauritius, and more, smaller ports are receiving international advice and training to improve their technology and security protocols to combat drug trafficking, environmental crimes, and corruption.
Across these interviews, World of Crime consistently heard similar concerns about how political gridlock, uneven inter-agency cooperation, and a race to always move more cargo were hindering progress on maritime security at ports.
Based on these findings, we list four of the most pressing challenges:
Runaway commercial pressure
Ports are commercial rivals to each other. That fact is sometimes left aside in the rush of collaborations and alliances to fight against drug trafficking and other criminal economies. In an age of rampant inflation and economic struggles, ports are rapid to tout their record cargo flow numbers or how quickly they can process a container.
In 2023, the port of Santos in Brazil moved a record 173.3 million tons of merchandise. The movement of cocaine through Santos unsurprisingly reached a new high at the same time. The port of Guayaquil in Ecuador similarly hailed record exports to the Americas, Europe, and Asia. Yet the province of Guayas, where the port is, sees the most murders in Ecuador, which is itself now the most violent country in South America.
The quest for licit profits has simply brought untold opportunities for organized crime to exploit. “Security is sacrificed in the name of economic efficiency. In the name of the latter, we demand the greatest possible fluidity in the circulation of goods. The logic of controlling container contents comes up against these economic arguments; it slows down flows and temporarily immobilizes goods,” said Clotilde Champeyrache, a mafia specialist at the CNAM university in Paris.
Political and ideological differences
Port administrations are dependent, to a large extent, on both local city administrations and national governments. But this can turn port security into a political football as elected officials are often willing to turn issues like drug seizures, corruption at ports, or the presence of drug traffickers into campaign talking points.
Mayors of port cities are often far more conservative in their approach to organized crime, likely because they suffer from high levels of gang violence linked to the drug trade. The mayors of Antwerp, Rotterdam, and Hamburg, the main gateways for cocaine into Europe and hotspots for gang violence are united in a tough stance on gangs and a strong opposition to any decriminalization of cocaine. The mayor of Antwerp has even suggested sending Belgian police to Ecuador to help hunt down top kingpins.
This puts them at odds with larger European cities like Amsterdam and Milan. These cities are epicenters for cocaine consumption but whose mayors, without the same legacy of direct cocaine seizures and related violence, openly advocate for a radical change in the way Europe deals with drugs. For the mayor of Amsterdam, “spending 80 percent” of police expenditure on drug-related matters has been a colossal waste of money that hasn’t made a dent in the success of the drug trade.
There have been similar spats elsewhere. In late 2023, Aquiles Alvarez, the mayor of Guayaquil in Ecuador, criticized President Daniel Noboa for being slow to respond to organized crime threats.
These political disputes can seem removed from the day-to-day operations of running a port.
Uncertain responsibility
Who is in charge of monitoring and improving port security? It’s not always clear.
Responsibility for different aspects of port security is highly segmented, our interviews found. Port authorities on both sides of the Atlantic that their responsibility was limited to ensuring terminal operators and shipping companies obeyed protocols such as screening staff. There has even seemed to be a tendency among certain ports to shrug off responsibility. In its 2021 activity report, the port of Rotterdam wrote that “tackling subversive crime is a challenge facing society as a whole that, strictly speaking, is not the responsibility of the Port of Rotterdam Authority.”
Customs officials are in charge of seizures, readily share information with each other and with police colleagues, but are often unsure of how and if this data is being used for investigations and prosecutions. And the ability of police to investigate drug trafficking beyond catching and releasing the youths delivering or fetching drugs from ports can seem limited.
Rotterdam has toughened sentencing for “cocaine extractors” hiding inside empty containers entering the port to retrieve drug shipments, but this still only focuses on the lower rungs of the drug trafficking ladder. In Ecuador, a police commander lamented lacking the budget or staff to truly investigate the origins of drug shipments coming into ports, beyond those caught in the act.
But on this point, there is cause for cautious optimism. In Europe, countries are sharing significant resources, such as Dutch divers being assigned to Belgian ports to inspect the hulls of ships. Customs officers in all European countries polled expressed a high degree of satisfaction with existing information-sharing on drug seizures and financial flows. In Costa Rica, port data from scanned containers in seaports is being shared rapidly with partners in the US and Europe, allowing for rapid action.
And the new European Ports Alliance, announced in January, aims to go further, pulling in resources from port authorities, customs, law enforcement, and pan-European police and judiciary institutions. “By bringing together local, national and European authorities in this public-private partnership, we can pool the expertise and resources needed to tackle this scourge,” said Paolo Gentiloni, the EU Commissioner for Economy.
The drive for 100 percent scanning
The race towards ever more cargo handling has created another logical fallacy. Ports are under increasing pressure to scan ever more containers more rapidly to detect drugs and other illicit cargo. In 2019, the Belgian government vowed to scan 100 percent of “high-risk containers” and purchased five new scanners for the port. In Brazil, the port of Santos has a legal obligation to scan every empty container entering the country.
This easy-to-quantify statistic is problematic. The furious face of port growth has outstripped the ability of fixed container scanners to cope. Over the last two years, ports have increasingly invested in mobile scanners, which are already standard at land borders such as between the US and Mexico.
These technologies are being rolled out at ports across the world, including Brazil and Nigeria, but are still far from enough to make up the technological gap.
The quest for 100 percent scanning may actually be becoming a deterrent. As noted in a recent Europol report, corrupt insiders at ports can help avoid scans for contaminated containers, replacing them with “Trojan horse” containers featuring a cloned registration number matching that of the original container.
Shipping companies feel the blame
Maritime drug trafficking would not function without corrupt ship crew or port staff who help to load or unload illicit cargo and help traffickers and contaminated containers avoid detection. All the same, shipping companies are saying that, despite complying with evolving security protocols, their ships and crews are often detained, for weeks or months on end, with little evidence of collusion.
To be clear, there has been ample evidence and investigations of widespread security breaches by the world’s largest shipping companies. MSC, in particular, has been under investigation for several years for its ships allegedly being used on several occasions by drug traffickers from Montenegro to smuggle drugs. The company has strenuously denied any systematic infiltration.
However, representatives from shipping companies who spoke with World of Crime pointed to systematic problems that they say they cannot control. According to them, while security and monitoring at South American container terminals is improving, there are still plenty of ways for drugs to be placed inside, especially at its point of origin or en route. Additionally, bulk carriers, which do not carry containers, have increasingly been targeted to sidestep conventional security and scanning measures. This makes the task of checking every single method of infiltration virtually impossible.