Seizures of cocaine “very sharply increasing” in 2022 in New Aquitaine, underlines the interregional director of customs, Serge Puccetti. Last year, some 709 kg of white powder were indeed intercepted in the region, regional customs announced on Monday morning.
“It’s double the best previous year, continues Serge Puccetti, with in particular a case of 578 kg seized by the Arcachon brigade in December on the motorway from Spain, in a tile truck. We have been on an upward trend for several years, because demand is more and more important, and production is increasing. »
“Up to 1.5 kg ingested in the body”
And all the means are good to make pass the drug. “We intercepted 22 mules [personnes transportant dans leur corps de la cocaïne] in 2022, it is much more than in previous years, and they sometimes had significant quantities, up to 1.5 kg of cocaine ingested in the body, continues the interregional director. These mules arrive from Guyana, go down to Paris airports, and are then dispatched throughout the territory to unload their goods. »
The “saturation” strategy is increasingly used. “The traffickers place lots of mules on the planes, up to 30 people loaded, knowing that if we catch three or four, all our units are occupied, and the others can fall through the cracks. These are people who sometimes travel a lot, we apprehended some who had already made six or seven trips. We do not necessarily challenge them at Bordeaux airport, we also had them at Saint-Jean station, and in smaller stations like Poitiers and Niort. »
Soon scanners to equip postal sorting platforms
Cocaine is also increasingly transiting by freight. “With the development of e-commerce, our express and postal freight business has exploded,” confirms Pascal Deladrière, regional director for Bordeaux. These millions of packages that pass through airports every year are almost our new frontier. Between 2021 and 2022, the share of narcotics seized in express and postal freight increased from 20 to 25%, under the responsibility of the management of Bordeaux. This forces us to set up new systems, and to industrialize ourselves, since we are in the process of buying scanners, which we are going to install on the major express and postal freight platforms, to assist us and help us to decision. The goal is to find more fraud products. »
For travellers, the sniffer dog, X-ray analysis and behavioral study remain the most effective means of spotting traffic. “The X-ray analyzes the difference in composition of the materials (organic, inorganic, etc.), and detects densities which may represent suspicious elements, explains Michaël Faucher, divisional head of Mérignac. This allows a first in-depth check, without opening the suitcase, but it does not give us the detailed composition of a product, so it is the agent who decides if it is suspicious, in relation to knowledge of the flow, the behavior of the person…”
“There is no standard recipe, continues the divisional head: we look at people, where they come from, we try to see if there is a specific behavior. And we ask. If the answers are risky, we set up a control. It’s random, because we see all types of profiles. Then, if we find unidentified goods, we can use a spectrometer which allows us to chemically identify a product contained in a bottle, for example, knowing that we can hide cocaine in many things, or transform it into many things, in paste, in rigid material…”
Besides cocaine, cannabis seizures remained at a very high level in 2022, with 11.3 tonnes seized. “With four million euros apprehended, we have also doubled the amount of illicit financial flows seized,” adds the interregional director.
“We also protect biodiversity, and we fight, for example, against the trafficking of glass eels, which is very present in the region, but also against products protected by the Washington Convention, insists Serge Puccetti. In 2022 we made seizures of turtles, dolphin skulls, corals… And we also see goods such as bushmeat, these are health offenses against protected species. »