The surge in Colombian cocaine production, coupled with Venezuela’s prolonged political and economic crisis, has dramatically reinforced the Caribbean as a primary drug route for illicit substances, especially cocaine, destined for the United States and Europe.
In 2024, the French Antilles recorded unprecedented figures, including a massive 10.5-ton cocaine seizure off the coast of Martinique. Among the crew members detained were two Colombians and one Venezuelan. The Dominican Republic also marked a record year, seizing 9.5 tons of cocaine in December 2024, followed by another significant 1.5-ton bust in July 2025. Similarly, major seizures were made in other islands, notably in Barbados, where 3.5 tons were discovered in November 2023 aboard a fishing boat with a Venezuelan crew.
“The Caribbean remains one of the main routes for cocaine exiting Colombia, both directly and via Venezuela,” explains Dutch security analyst Douwe den Held to Diálogo. The expert notes this route has been consolidated by record cocaine production in Colombia, where profits from drug trafficking allow for the rapid purchase of protection and influence within small island economies.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) World Drug Report 2025 revealed that global cocaine production hit a record 3,708 tons in 2023. Colombia alone accounted for more than 67 percent of global coca leaf cultivation, driving a 53 percent increase in production that year.
The role of Venezuela and the ABC Islands
The crisis in Venezuela has simultaneously fueled a parallel human smuggling operation, with criminal groups leveraging the same maritime routes to move migrants — often vulnerable to sexual exploitation and forced labor — to nearby destinations like the ABC Islands (Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao), Trinidad and Tobago, and beyond.
According to an InSight Crime report, the Venezuelan state of Falcón, located near the Netherlands Antilles and the Colombian coca-growing region of Catatumbo, has become a principal departure hub for drug and human smuggling. Here, local criminal groups operate with impunity, allegedly benefiting from the complicity of high-ranking Venezuelan military officials, otherwise known as the Cartel of the Suns.
While groups like the Guajira Cartel dominate the western corridor, the coastal state of Sucre, near Trinidad and Tobago, is targeted by the Venezuelan terrorist group Tren de Aragua (TdA). Though TdA’s primary business is extortion and human trafficking, they are increasingly involved in the cocaine trade, often acting as subcontractors for larger organizations. Additionally, Colombian armed groups, including the National Liberation Army (ELN) and dissidents of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), maintain a physical presence in Venezuelan border states (Zulia and Apure), further stabilizing the supply chain.
“Bringing cocaine into Venezuela is relatively easy: There are large areas of cultivation on the Colombian side of the border and, increasingly, on the Venezuelan side as well,” says den Held. Unlike other countries that transport the drug in containers, this option is often unavailable in Venezuela. As a result, much of the cocaine leaves the country in small boats traveling through the Caribbean.
Cooperation between foreign mafias
The seizure in July 2025 of 4.8 tons of cocaine aboard a cement freighter near Martinique, which led to the arrest of a Serbian citizen linked to the Balkan cartel, confirmed the growing interest of powerful foreign organizations in this route.
“Thanks to high tourism, it is relatively easy to go unnoticed. Many people arrive from abroad and stay for a long time, claiming legitimate reasons such as migration or retirement. This makes it easier for drug traffickers to operate without arousing suspicion,” says den Held.
The presence of the Italian mafias, notably the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta, has been reported mainly in the Dominican Republic and the Netherlands Antilles. The ‘Ndrangheta, in particular, uses its sophisticated global network to ship South American cocaine through major European ports like Rotterdam and Antwerp, creating strong implicit links with local transport facilitators.
The Albanian mafia is also present, including a faction from Montenegro known as the Kotor clan, which forms a core part of the Balkan cartel network. The 2024 arrest in the Dominican Republic of Dennis Goedee, a leader of the so-called Mocro Mafia (of Moroccan origin, operating out of the Netherlands), further revealed that this group is collaborating with local gangs on the island of Curaçao, specifically the No Limit Soldiers (NLS), a major Curaçao-based drug trafficking organization.
There are also indications of Turkish mafia involvement, particularly in the hotel and hospitality sector of the Dutch Caribbean, which provides ideal opportunities for money laundering and establishing logistical bases.
Thanks to the presence of these transnational groups, many islands now function as transit zones, from where cocaine is shipped in small boats to hubs like Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, or Jamaica. From there, the drugs are transported in containers or by plane to their final markets in Europe and the United States.
Money laundering in a digital age
Parallel to drug trafficking, sophisticated money laundering operations are flourishing. These activities are visible because the profits are often wildly disproportionate to the islands’ legal economies.
“The gaming industry is very present, especially in areas with a high concentration of casinos, such as the island of Curaçao, which is an autonomous territory of the Netherlands where many online casinos operate,” says den Held.
Furthermore, several Caribbean nations have pursued state-backed digital currencies. While the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar remains live, the regional currency DCash (used in Grenada, Antigua, St. Kitts, and St. Lucia) was officially shut down in January 2024, though a relaunch is planned. The initial high-profile introduction of these digital currencies, despite their official stability, sparked concerns that the underlying technology could be exploited to facilitate criminal transactions due to the difficulty of tracing their origin in the informal sector.
According to den Held, another major mechanism is a parallel banking system, often managed by Chinese communities known as fei qian or “flying money” networks, which operate outside the formal system and are pivotal for rapid, illicit money transfers between the Americas, Europe, and Asia. This system, which is utilized by Latin American cartels and European mafias alike, allows dirty cash to be cleaned through front businesses. On the island of Bonaire in the Netherlands Antilles, for example, with a population of just 34,000, there are an estimated 40 Chinese-owned supermarkets — often with little sign of internal activity — suspected of being money laundering points.
Global counternarcotics response
The increasing sophistication of organized crime has forced an unprecedented level of international collaboration on interdiction and enforcement.
The U.S.-led Joint Interagency Task Force South (JIATF-South), which includes 22 partner nations, has shattered records in 2025. As of late August 2025, JIATF-South had supported the disruption of 402.7 metric tons of cocaine, surpassing the previous annual record by a wide margin. These maritime interdiction operations frequently involve Caribbean partners and have resulted in massive seizures, including the U.S. Coast Guard’s largest drug offload in history in August 2025 of more than 34.5 metric tons, which was the culmination of 19 interdictions in the Caribbean and Pacific.
In a demonstration of localized cooperation, the United States and the Dominican Republic conducted their first-ever joint anti-narcotics mission in September 2025, the Dominican Republic’s National Directorate for Drug Control (DNCD) indicated. This operation recovered 1,000 kilograms of cocaine from a speedboat that had been detected and destroyed through bilateral intelligence sharing, underscoring the shift toward direct, joint enforcement against transnational targets.
The Caribbean drug route is a severe threat not only to the destination countries but also to the islands it passes through. “Most of these countries do not have the capacity to combat it, and it is accompanied by a great deal of violence,” says den Held.
Recent successes in joint operations, however, provide a clear pathway for effective defense. Coordinated response, anchored by intelligence sharing and operational integration among local forces, the United States, and European partners, has resulted in the disruption of supply chain and seizure of record volumes of narcotics. By strengthening these multinational and interagency cooperative models, regional governments are enhancing their capacity to confront global organized crime and protect their communities.
