Global Cocaine Networks and Trump

Increased cocaine production delivered an extra $25 billion in earnings to transnational organized crime in 2024, ensuring greater criminal sophistication and state penetration which, combined with a new Trump administration, will have profound effects on criminal dynamics in Latin America and the Caribbean in 2025.

To give an idea of the scale of the increase in cocaine production, just the 2023 increase of 1,000 tons is double what Colombia produced in all of 2015. Add to that smaller increases in the other two major cocaine producers, Bolivia and Peru, and the appearance of industrial-scale coca plantations in Ecuador, Honduras, Guatemala, and Venezuela, and we find ourselves in the greatest cocaine bonanza in history. Record seizures have been registered across the world, including in Colombia, but they are not keeping up with production. 

Yet, it is relationships between the Latin Drug Trafficking Organisations and European mafias that have really transformed the cocaine business, heralding the evolution of a new generation of global criminal networks. The Italian, Dutch, and Balkan mafias are the most prolific players and are now operating upstream in Latin America, negotiating cocaine shipments at source and securing a greater share of the profits for themselves. Europe, meanwhile, has overtaken the United States as the world’s biggest cocaine market. As the European Union and South America’s Mercosur move forward on a free trade agreement, expect yet more drugs to find their way across the Atlantic.

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