Paraná-Paraguay waterway a focal point for global security policy

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This river of commerce has become dangerous. Over time the drug-traffickers have taken control, using it as a key route for the contraband of cocaine to Europe.

Even if they are no novelty, there have been reports since the beginning of this decade about the illicit activities of transnational criminal organisations who use the Hidrovía Paraná-Paraguay waterway to transport cocaine and other drugs to the European, Asian and even Oceanian markets.

The current context places the waterway at the forefront of a security crisis implied by the lack of controls preventing illicit products, including narcotics, reaching the Atlantic Ocean.

Incoming United States president-elect Donald Trump has recently announced that he will declare war on drug cartels, putting them on the same terms as on terrorism and fighting them with all the firepower and intelligence the North American superpower can muster.

As public security expert Jorge Luis Vidal puts it, “Donald Trump is doing this to pressure Mexico because according to US law, when a criminal group committing violent actions causing the deaths of citizens within the United States is declared terrorist, he can go after them.”

Vidal continues: “That is why [former Mexican president] Andrés Manuel López Obrador told Trump on the campaign trail that the thought should not even occur to him because it would be violating Mexican sovereignty – i.e. sending commando groups into Mexican territory to take apart those gangs and cartels considered terrorist by the United States (according to Trump) in Mexican territory. But in principle, it is a way of pressuring the Mexican state.”

Argentina, under President Javier Milei, is now Trump’s most important ally in the South American region. The La Libertad Avanza leader’s administration has put out an international tender for dredging and buoy-marking the Hidrovía Paraná-Paraguay waterway, which constitutes a river highway vital for the economy of Mercosur countries and providing an exit for the products which the region offers the world.

But it’s not just about the best offer for logistical services – it’s also a question of global security.

Limits

The empathy with the Republican administration which will be taking control of the White House imminently even reaches the limit of permitting US military servicemen to be installed along the 3,400-kilometre Hidrovía Paraná-Paraguay.

Argentina’s Autoridad General de Puertos (AGP) port authority, in one of its last actions before its upcoming elimination by the cost-cutting Milei administration, signed a Memorandum of Understanding authorising the arrival of the Engineering Corps of the US Army to one of the biggest fresh-water basins in the world.

Reports of its problems are circulating. A recent and detailed journalistic acccount in The Washington Post newspaper has described the various security breaches along the Hidrovía, which media outlets like the Noticias Argentinas news agency have been pointing out for some time.

The Hidrovía Paraguay-Paraná flows through five South American countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Paraguay, Argentina and Uruguay. Designed to be a key axle of economic activity, it connects 150 ports and moves millions of tons of freight annually, feeding hopes of economic growth.

Nevertheless, as The Post has pointed out, this river of commerce has become dangerous. Over time the drug-traffickers have taken control, using it as a key route for the contraband of cocaine to Europe.

The river highway was inaugurated in 1992 to compete with the major global trade routes, linking up the continent’s agricultural wealth with world markets.

The logistical importance for legitimate trade is beyond any doubt but the United Nations Office against Drugs and Crime (UNODC) has revealed a fivefold increase in cocaine seizures between 2010 and 2021, highlighting its growing role in world drug-trafficking.

Denunciations from embassies and government offices activated more controls but they were insufficient against the imagination and power of organised crime and its ability to corrupt.

In June 2022, Argentina’s Customs Office took the decision to begin scanning all the containers being transhipped in the ports of Rosario, Buenos Aires or San Nicolás, especially those coming from Paraguay with European or African destinations. The cocaine being illegally trafficked often comes from Bolivia and Peru.

These controls were state policy. They were implemented under ex-Customs chief Guillermo Michel during former president Alberto Fernández’s 2019-2023 government, when Sergio Massa was economy minister, and continued during the brief stint in which Rosana Lodovico led the agency under the current Milei government. (Since then, Eduardo Mallea and now José Andrés Velis have led the agency.)

Illegal trafficking

The circuit of illegal trafficking mainly originates at Paraguayan ports. Contraband is then shipped along the Hidrovía and passed to larger ships in Argentina before sailing out into the Atlantic and onto Europe.

The European Union has recorded a high number of drug seizures in its member countries, spelling out in black and white an original modus operandi repeated over time.

In February 2021, authorities at the German port of Hamburg confiscated 16 tons of cocaine which had been hidden in tins of acrylic paint in containers coming from Paraguay – the largest quantity of cocaine confiscated in Europe up until then. Transhipment in the port of Buenos Aires had been the key to that operation, which was the presumed cargo of Brazil’s Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC).

According to the specialised site InsightCrime.org, “the PCC is the biggest organised crime network of Brazil. It originated in São Paulo in the 1990s, tracing a bloody path towards criminal power nationwide. The group is presumed to have members in every Brazilian state, expanding its operations to other Latin American countries, as well as Europe and Asia.”

In 2022, four tons of pure cocaine were discovered and seized at the Dutch port of Rotterdam, hidden in bags of soy. A few months later, in May 2022, at the Australian port of Newcastle, 50 kilos of cocaine transported in a grain bulk carrier which had sailed out of the Santa Fe port of Timbúes were discovered.

Flooding the demanding European and Asian markets with cocaine and other products, these are just some of the various examples of cases of illicit drug-trafficking which have been discovered, leaving the true number of cases which were never revealed up to the reader’s imagination.

In any case the efficacy of the stricter controls in Argentine ports has made the illegal operations more difficult, obliging drug-traffickers to adapt in order to continue their activities, a familiar issue for them since they began – they must be one of the most dynamic economic sectors in that sense.

In this context, the port of Montevideo has now become the main exit point, chiefly because of the lack of scanners and radar across much of the country.

New circuits

There are several examples of the new export circuits. In June 2022 five tons of cocaine hidden in containers of rice onboard a ship coming out of Montevideo were confiscated in Belgium, followed by a further 1,822 kilos in a container of sugar in September and 653 kilos stashed inside a container of beef.

Montevideo, situated at the end of the Hidrovía Paraná-Paraguay, has now become a key transit point for cocaine. Criminal groups are not only sending narcotics via containers but also storing drugs across Uruguayan territory, thus increasing concerns.

The United Nations warned in 2021 about the global security crisis implied by illicit drug-trafficking, with UN officials writing several dossiers to explain that Bolivian drug-gangs were creating various corridors along rivers and canals, complicating the country’s efforts to stem the flow of cocaine to international markets.

The UN affirmed that same year that the drug-traffickers were beginning to use the Hidrovía Paraguay-Paraná on the eastern frontier of Bolivia, which connects up with the river systems of the entire region, facilitating access to African and European purchasers.

Nobody can say that they had no idea, no warning. Today the Hidrovía is not only a synonym for a multi-million tender for dredging, it is also the focus of a question of national and global security.

by Antonio D'Eramo, Noticias Argentinas

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