‘It’s like a cat and mouse game’: on the frontline of Belgium’s fight against drug smugglers | Belgium

S.break Van Cotthem takes a safety knife and delicately cuts the side of the cardboard box, an aluminum ladder made in China, to open its contents. Working under harsh fluorescent lights at the border checkpoint in the port of Antwerp, Van Cotthem checks paperwork and taps the ladder with a magnet to see if the ladder is aluminum and not another metal.

It’s a daily operation for customs officials in Antwerp, one of Europe’s main commercial transit points, which last year handled the equivalent of 13.6 m of 20-ft-long (6 metres) containers. All is well and the truck, crammed with the same boxed ladders, can set off for Germany.

But it’s not always that simple. Customs officials are grappling with routine attempts to evade customs duties or import counterfeit goods, as well as relentless efforts by violent criminals to smuggle drugs, especially cocaine, into Europe.

Antwerp is one of Europe’s main entry points for cocaine: Authorities seized 483 tonnes of the drug between January 2019 and June 2024; This is the largest amount among the 17 ports reporting to the European Union Drugs Agency. Europe’s second largest port fell victim to a number of factors. As cocaine production in South America (especially Colombia) has increased rapidly over the last decade, Dutch drug gangs have shifted their attention to Belgium, prioritizing the even larger port of Rotterdam.

It is thought that most of the cocaine coming to Belgium will be taken to the Netherlands for later distribution. But too many remain in Belgium to cause serious harm, while local criminals are gaining a foothold in the lucrative trade. The power of drug gangs has led judges to warn that Belgium risks becoming a narco-state and that international drug crimes threaten social stability.

While cocaine seizures in Antwerp have fallen from a record-breaking 121 tonnes in 2023 to 55 tonnes in 2025, the problem remains challenging. “It’s like a cat-and-mouse game,” says Van Cotthem, Belgian customs and tax communications officer. “Smugglers find new ways to smuggle drugs in every time.”

A few meters away from where he is speaking, six brand new mobile scanners are parked, ready to check the suspicious container at any time of the day or night. Customs officials have purchased nine scanners (the other three are deployed elsewhere) to enable quicker checks of suspicious containers and minimize the risk of drug gangs seizing any drugs before a checkpoint. In 2025, 65,000 risky containers were scanned in Antwerp compared to the previous year, and ultimately the target is to scan 350,000 to 400,000 containers along fixed conveyor belt machines.

Screening is becoming increasingly sophisticated in response to the fiendishly creative ways criminal gangs find to conceal drugs. Cocaine was traditionally packaged around fruit. In recent years, port officials have discovered it mixed with orange juice or coal, hidden inside fake pineapples, buried in cardboard boxes and fabric, or concealed in wooden beams and paving stones.

Antwerp customs officers train for at least a year to detect tell-tale signs on a scanned container (for example, a break in the pattern or “something wrong” in the gaps between official goods).

Kristian Vanderwaeren, head of Belgium’s customs and tax office, says drug traffickers’ modus operandi has changed in other ways. Smugglers change route; For example, they send South American cocaine to Europe via West Africa. The circuitous route is an attempt to bypass authorities’ risk protocols, which depend in part on the country of origin for determining whether a container should be inspected. In 2025, Ghana became the third most important country of origin for drug seizures in Belgium, after Ecuador and Costa Rica, while Colombia, the traditional source, fell to fifth place.

Smugglers also try to avoid major ports altogether by dumping illegal cargo at sea. “Mother ships” from South America transfer the cocaine to smaller boats or toss waterproof bundles with buoys and GPS trackers overboard for later recovery. Police have detected these practices as far south as the Canary Islands and as far as the Kattegat, the strait separating Denmark and Sweden.

It may only be a matter of time before the drugs can be shipped across the Atlantic without a crew. europol reported this year It states that semi-submersible ships equipped with antennas and modems are “probably already capable of crossing the Atlantic without a crew.” Drug traffickers are also known to take to the skies: Vanderwaeren recalled that Brazilian authorities stopped a private jet loaded with cocaine heading to Belgium a few years ago. He said his agency is studying how to intercept planes, drones and submarines. “But this is not an easy task. Most of the time you need the military to support or help us with this.”

Authorities have deployed more police at the port, including a special unit to combat smuggling. “We are very resilient, we have brought in a lot more capabilities of the state to tackle the problem,” Vanderwaeren says. He notes that as controls are tightened in Antwerp and nearby Rotterdam, smuggling has shifted to France and Spain, a “waterbed effect”. Spain reported a record seizure of 123 tonnes in 2024, while France reported a doubling of cocaine seized from 2023 to 2024. “You’re seeing more seizures in Spain, you’re seeing more seizures in France, because it’s getting harder and harder for the Antwerp gang to get their stuff into the port,” says Vanderwaeren.

Letizia Paoli, head of KU Leuven’s criminal law and criminology department, says no one knows for sure how much cocaine is entering Antwerp. He believes smugglers are now trying less protected ports and changing tactics when targeting Antwerp. “It is less common for smugglers to send more than one ton in one shipment, instead they send more shipments in smaller quantities to spread the risk,” he says. This hypothesis is supported by data showing an increase in seizures of cocaine under 100 grams and a decrease in seizures of large quantities of cocaine in Antwerp between 2023 and 2025.

Paoli thinks claims that Belgium has become a “narco-state” are unfounded because drug-related corruption remains “pretty rare” and “low level”, especially compared to countries such as Mexico and Honduras, where very high-level figures have been convicted of accepting bribes from cartels. Moreover, while he found that drug-related violence was at a low level in Belgium, he emphasized that he greatly empathized with the warnings. However, cocaine use is quite common.

“Cocaine is widely available at a very high level of purity,” says Paoli. “Drug traffickers here don’t even bother to cut the cocaine with other substances, they sell it almost pure at 80 percent, 90 percent purity, which has not happened in the past. This shows that there is actually more cocaine they can get rid of.”

He and his academic colleagues estimated that EU consumers used 160 tonnes of the drug in 2021, and said police thought this was an underestimation. But even if it were much higher (e.g. 250 tonnes), he argues, this could easily be incorporated into legal trade: 2.1 billion tonnes of goods from the rest of the world enter EU ports every year. With that in mind, he says: “You have to conclude that traders will find a way one way or another.”