🇳🇱🇸🇱 He was one of the world’s most wanted men. So he bought a west African country

Jos Leijdekkers is one of Europe’s most wanted criminals. His greatest caper yet looks to be the takeover of a country. In half a decade Leijdekkers has turned Sierra Leone, a place previously best known for blood diamonds, into a hub for billions of dollars’ worth of Colombian cocaine, disguised as rice or plantain chips, which pass through each year en route to Europe.

By funnelling a share of the profits to Sierra Leone’s political elite and funding large parts of the state itself, Leijdekkers has amassed perks that would be the envy of a Bond villain. He is believed to have a Sierra Leonean diplomatic passport. The police and military establishment bow to him, squadrons of container ships and submarines ply the shores at his command, and he is escorted in a motorcade by the presidential guard beneath a cloud of drones.

For decades Africa played a minor role in the world of cocaine trafficking. In the 1980s, when the mass export of Latin American cocaine began, the smugglers sent their product straight to Europe aboard cargo ships. By the 1990s Rotterdam, the continent’s biggest container port, had emerged as the preferred destination. In 2000 a quarter of the 200 tonnes of cocaine reaching Europe was believed to enter through its docks. Within two decades nearly 50 tonnes were being seized each year at the port by customs officials, who estimated that they found less than a fifth of the cocaine dispatched to their quays.

Fighting the narco-traffickers was a game of cat and mouse. In the 2000s Dutch officials rolled out new mobile scanning units that could manoeuvre around a port and examine any container with ease. In response, the cartels built their own version in the Colombian Amazon, which they used to determine whether cocaine could go undetected within a consignment of cocoa beans (it could not) or be successfully smuggled inside sections of steel machinery (it could). In the late 2010s, when it had become clear that the criminal organisations also had some Rotterdam customs officials in their pockets, the port authorities took countermeasures: customs-workers were no longer told in advance which containers they would handle on any given day.

The tenfold increase in seizures between 2017 and 2021 seemed to be evidence that the port’s methods were effective. Yet when I arrived in Rotterdam this May, I found that seizures had slumped again, from 70 tonnes in 2021 to 12 in 2025. Plenty of cocaine is still being manufactured: production volumes in Colombia are believed to be at an all-time high. And plenty is reaching Europe: the current street price is €15,000 ($17,400) per kilo, the lowest figure ever recorded. Sewage samples confirm that up to 60,000 lines of cocaine are snorted every day in Rotterdam alone.

So how are drugs reaching Europe? One answer is the African connection, the importance of which has soared in recent years. In the mid-2000s, Latin American gangs looking to diversify their trafficking routes began to send some of their goods by fishing boat across the Atlantic to west Africa. The cargo would be hustled northwards by pickup through the Sahel or by trawler to the Mediterranean. At first the main entry point was the minuscule nation of Guinea-Bissau. By 2006 so much cocaine was passing through that fishermen took to whitewashing their houses with it.

Fast forward two decades and it is estimated that one-third of the cocaine reaching Europe now arrives via west Africa. Guinea-Bissau has been superseded by Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal and Cape Verde, but the logistics remain the same. Cocaine is kept in warehouses, often for months at a time, before being dispatched in small boats to the Mediterranean. Sometimes the destination is a mid-size port like Marseille or Gioia Tauro in Calabria. Other times, it is just a remote beach. “The problem used to be Rotterdam, Antwerp and Hamburg,” a customs analyst in Rotterdam told me. “Now it’s the entire southern coast of Europe!”

🔗 https://unwall.app/www.economist.com/interactive/1843/2026/09/18/cocaine-trafficking-sierra-leone?etear=nl_weekly_1