BARCELONA, Spain — Three weeks ago, in the farmlands of central Spain, police spotted something peculiar: a surveillance drone hovering over a forest. Pushing in, they discovered something never before seen in Spain: an outdoor drug laboratory set up under a tarp where Colombian chemists were extracting cocaine that had been infused into concrete powder, a process police estimate was funneling 264 pounds of cocaine into the country each week.
With increasingly clever ways of smuggling the drug and its coca base — including infusing cocaine into plastic chips, charcoal or clothes — authorities and analysts believe they may be finding only 10%-15%, or as little asof what’s coming into Europe, a booming market for cocaine that now rivals the one in the United States.
Seized packages of cocaine at a police base in Cartagena, Colombia, previously bound for the port of Rotterdam. “The Netherlands has always been a country that’s connected with some drug trafficking, but that’s because it’s a country that’s a transportation hub,” criminologist Lieselot Bisschop, a professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, told Yahoo News. “There's a lot of infrastructure that facilitates trade overall. Illegal trade can piggyback off of the legal trade,” she added.
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