Spain seizes record 13 tonnes of cocaine in Ecuadorean banana shipment

Spanish authorities have made a record cocaine seizure after intercepting 13 tonnes of the drug hidden in a cargo container of bananas shipped from Ecuador to southern Spain.

The bust was the second largest recorded in Europe and one of the biggest worldwide, according to a statement by Spain’s national police force.

“It is obvious that these 13 tonnes of cocaine were not only bound for the Spanish market,” António Jesús Martínez, head of the central narcotics brigade of the National Police, said on Wednesday. “The Spanish market cannot handle so many drugs all at once. These drugs were intended to be distributed throughout Europe.”

Spanish officials found bricks of drugs hidden behind the bananas on a ship at the southern port of Algeciras last month. Police said the container — which had arrived from Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city — was inspected because the Ecuadorian exporter had been flagged as having a “history of illicit trafficking”.

The drug bust last month, in collaboration with the Ecuadorian police, resulted in five raids and one arrest. The person arrested was a partner in the company that was receiving the shipment, while two managers of the firm remain at large, Martínez said.

Previously, the biggest seizure of cocaine by Spanish authorities was 9.4 tonnes in 2023, also in Algeciras. Police sources told local media that in total, 100 tonnes of the drug were intercepted in Spain last year, more than double the amount seized in 2022.

European nations have been grappling with a soaring influx of hard drugs, including cocaine, that are mainly smuggled into EU container ports from Latin America.

In June this year, German officials confiscated 35.5 tonnes of cocaine hidden in a shipment of fruit and vegetables, a seizure that authorities called the biggest such drug bust in Europe’s history. They intercepted the shipment after a tip from Colombian officials.

The EU set up a new drug agency (EUDA) this summer to tackle organised drug gangs.

European home affairs commissioner Ylva Johansson said in July that the threat of drug trafficking was “as big as the terrorism threat”, and that the agency would work with Latin American countries such as Ecuador to crack down on criminal networks.

Traditionally, drug traffickers processed cocaine in Latin America before exporting it to Europe. However, drug experts warn that more of the production process has been moved to sites across the Atlantic.

About 39 cocaine laboratories were dismantled in 2022 across several EU countries, according to the latest available statistics from EUDA.