Jonquilyn Hill

We are talking about a proliferation of smaller, much more nimble, very strategic drug trafficking organizations across South America.

Many people say Ecuador is now the world's cocaine superhighway.

the pacific coast of peru just above the capital lima sits el callao the country's main shipping port it's also one of the world's primary distribution points for cocaine even within colombia of proliferation of these smaller armed groups that have mastered the cultivation process and the production process to more quickly easily move it out of the country and we see

all these new different transit points and routes that are capable of moving the drugs in much larger quantities around the world to destinations that previously were pretty irrelevant in terms of the cocaine trade.

So it is a much more globalized business than before, and it works in an entirely new way that makes it much more difficult to combat.

Yeah, what's behind that globalization?

Why?

What's driving that growth?

Some of it is the demand side.

We are seeing demand soaring in countries that previously were not considered main markets.

Europe now is a top destination alongside the United States.

So some of it is demand side, but some of it is also supply side.

I mean, we are seeing within Colombia just the amount of land with cocaine and the productivity of that land is so much higher than before.

And each year it grows and grows.

And when you talk to experts, some of that is explained by the way that they've

created these cocaine enclaves where they not only have much more productive land and they grow a lot more of the crop, the base plant is called coca, it's way more productive and they've managed to concentrate these enclaves near the borders and near the coasts so they can more quickly move it out.

And before we had this sort of like one or two main armed groups that controlled the trade in Colombia.

Now because of the peace negotiations in 2016 and sort of the collapse of those peace negotiations and the aftermath of that.

And it's also sort of opened up the country to

Criminal networks from around the world, from Europe, you know, the Mexican cartels, groups like these Albanian mafias that have been able to take advantage of this and move the drug through different transit countries as well.