Drug trafficking in Antwerp: fear of Dutch conditions

In the Belgian port city of Antwerp, drug trafficking and criminal gangs dominate entire streets. Even the mayor is pessimistic. He demands a plan from the government.

A bearded man dressed in black with a baseball cap fires several pistol shots, another with a hooded sweatshirt films him with his cell phone, both are recorded by a surveillance camera. Pictures from the north of Antwerp from last week show how carefree members of drug gangs are now behaving in the Belgian port city.

90 tons of cocaine in 2021

Bomb attacks, shootings – since June, the police have identified a good 30 acts of violence in the drug milieu, more than in the whole of last year. Criminal police director Yve Driesen speaks on the vrt station of a spiral of violence, driven by a lot of money. The police seized 90 tons of cocaine in the port in 2021. The market value was 4.5 billion euros.

“If you calculate that we confiscate around 10 to 20 percent of the cocaine, then 80 to 90 percent come through – so we’re talking about gigantic sums here,” says Driesen. “Estimated at over 40 billion euros in one year.”

In the first half of 2022, Belgian customs seized around 36 tons of cocaine.

Drug gangs with a lot of money

The police reported spectacular manhunt successes because they were able to crack the encryption software Sky ECC, which criminal gangs used. But Customs Director Kristian Vanderwaeren emphasizes: “Even if you factor out these particular results, you can see an annual increase in cocaine. Operation Sky ECC had a huge effect because a lot of cocaine was stopped, a lot of people were arrested. But the conclusion is: the trade illegal drugs is going on, so we need to invest more and make that a priority.”

“The drug gangs are sitting on a mountain of money,” says Antwerp’s police director Driesen. “They can afford the best lawyers and tax experts and have the potential to infiltrate society as a whole. We see that corruption permeates all areas: police, judiciary , private companies, customs – it doesn’t matter. Everywhere there are people who are seduced by money.”

“Financiers and decision makers of criminal organizations”

Mayor Bart De Wever of the right-wing nationalist party N-VA is sounding the alarm. He is calling on the Belgian government to come up with a plan to fight the drug mafia – similar to what happened after the 2016 terrorist attacks.

Police director Driesen says: “I don’t see any awareness of the problem, and that frustrates me incredibly. The country stands still when it comes to Islamist terror, but if there’s shooting in Antwerp, then the mayor has a problem.”

According to von Driesen, the gang bosses are no longer just based in the Netherlands. Antwerp’s drug mafia is catching up. “Guys who grew up in this area have become financiers and decision-makers in the criminal organizations. They call the shots. We even know of leaders who are so high up that they are also starting to run the Dutch bosses.”

“A lot worse to experience”

Fear is growing in affected neighborhoods. Antwerp looks with concern to the north, where Dutch gangs consider themselves so unassailable that they took their feuds to the public and allegedly had the journalist Peter de Vries murdered a year ago.

Mayor de Wever is pessimistic: “Most likely we will experience much worse things like in the Netherlands. Accidental murders, murders of relatives and in the upper class. Even if a slimmed-down plan comes up tomorrow, it will take years for the monster to be tamed like this that you really notice it on the streets.”

All the more surprising de Wever’s balance sheet despite the summer’s series of violence: Antwerp, says the mayor, is the safest metropolis in Belgium.