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Local gangs are increasingly joining forces with Balkan organized crime in the trafficking and trade of cocaine, taking advantage of greater access to the highly lucrative European market. Soon we will see new alliances or new settlement of accounts.
In Ecuador, murders increased eightfold between 2018 and 2023. The perpetrators are almost never arrested. Much of the violence is related to dominance among local groups fighting over who will supply drugs to foreign criminal groups.
The Albanian and Serbo-Croatian mafias are playing a dominant role in this sector. Through violence and alliances with locals, these criminal groups have taken deep roots in Ecuador. Local Ecuadorian gangs are increasingly cooperating with Albanians and Serbo-Croats in their activities related to the trafficking and trade of cocaine. This cooperation allows Ecuadorian gangs greater access to the very lucrative European market.
As proof of what we say, on February 16, 2024, an operation coordinated by Europol led to the indictment of an Albanian businessman, who uses Ecuadorian fruit and vegetable companies as a cover to import significant quantities of cocaine into Europe.
As a result, the company's assets worth 48 million euros were frozen. Naturally, this attempt to achieve dominant positions by Albanians and Serbo-Croats creates conflicts with other mafias present in the country, including the Italian Ndrangheta.
It is no coincidence that many Albanian and Serbo-Croatian citizens have been killed in recent years. (Ilir Hidri, Albanian; Fadil Kaçaniku, Montenegrin, Milan Milovaç, Croatian; Adriatik Tresa, Albanian; Remzi Azemi, Kosovar; July Spasic, Serbian).
After these fights, in order to grab market shares, Albanians operating in Ecuador temporarily move to other South American countries, such as Peru, Colombia, Bolivia and Brazil, from where they can manage the situation from a safe distance and in at the same time take advantage of the opportunity to expand their networks in these countries.
It is believed that given the large sums of money that determine such traffic, the mobsters operating there will always find deals and create their own alliances. The demand for cocaine from Europe is constantly increasing, so deliveries will continue until the necessary agreements are reached to rebalance the balance of power and economic power between the various criminal organizations.
It is not believed that in the end the Balkan mafia groups will abandon Ecuador. They've spent more than a decade making contacts in the local underworld, and with the cocaine economy booming, their role won't end easily.
We must also take into account that the Albanian and Serbian mafia have many strategic and logistical networks in the Netherlands for the distribution of cocaine from Latin America to most of Europe.
Edin Gaçanin, one of the main drug traffickers in Europe, used and still uses the port of Rotterdam as a hub for drug trafficking to neighboring countries. Drugs are often hidden in fruit shipments. In 2023, for example, Dutch customs seized a cocaine shipment of 90 million euros hidden in a container of bananas from Ecuador.
The financial system of the Netherlands is crucial to the illegal economy, as it allows criminals the easy flow of money. Amsterdam, for example, is the center of the European "haëala" system, an informal money transfer apparatus that requires no record keeping and therefore leaves no trace. It is well understood that these prerogatives of the Albanian and Serbo-Croatian mafia over time will inevitably have to define new structures in the geopolitics of drug trafficking and new alliances between mafias operating in the drug sector.
Cocaine trafficking between the Netherlands and the Western Balkans is dominated by Albanian-speaking, Serbo-Croatian and Bosnian-Montenegrin criminal groups who control the trade, middle-level distribution and, together with Dutch criminals, large-scale trafficking, often in cooperation with each other. the other.
However, in the Netherlands, the macromafia and our Ndrangheta also operate and are certainly not second-rate criminal organizations. Soon, we will see either new developments in the area of mafia alliances or new clean-ups. / Huffington Post
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