US drug-boat strikes reshape cocaine trade as global supply keeps rising

Cocaine prices fall to historic lows across US and Europe

President Trump has celebrated the airstrikes, saying his administration has “made tremendous strides in stopping the flow of illegal drugs into our country.” In June, Trump said “the drugs coming in by sea are down by 97%,” adding, “We’re trying to figure out who the 3% are, because they are the bravest people on earth.” U.S. officials said the operation has deprived criminal groups of $1.5 billion in cocaine. Scholars of the cocaine trade and U.S. officials familiar with the program told the Journal that drug boats in large numbers still leave Colombia, which produces 70% of the world’s cocaine.

Thirteen months into the initiative, Colombian navy divers are detecting greater use of “parasites” — metal modules packed with cocaine that traffickers bolt onto the hulls of freighters preparing to steam out of Buenaventura, Colombia’s largest Pacific port. Deep in the Amazon, smugglers have shifted shipments east, hiding drugs on boats moving through the rain forest’s vast river network. Along Colombia’s long Pacific coast, crews evade U.S. military airstrikes by hugging the shoreline in the same speedboats the Americans are targeting, the Journal reported.

“The boats keep going. The Pacific is vast,” said Ervyn Norza, a former police investigator who researches the drug trade for Rosario University in Bogotá. Felipe Botero, a researcher for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a Geneva-based nonprofit, told the Journal the U.S. military campaign gives priority to flash-bang visibility over disruption of organized crime. “This is a policy that’s more about visibility and narrative — showing decisive action — than one that genuinely disrupts organized crime,” Botero said.

U.S. and European officials said Guyana and Suriname have emerged as new platforms for cocaine-laden boats, while Venezuela remains a critical launchpad. Traffickers have responded by spreading shipments across cargo containers, freighters, fishing boats and submarine-like vessels. United Nations researchers told the Journal that Colombia is growing more coca leaf and producing more finished cocaine than at any point in its history, and that the resulting trafficking network is more diffuse and expansive than before the strikes began.

Clandestine labs produce more than 3,300 tons of cocaine annually, and armed groups have nearly doubled their ranks to 28,000 members during the past four years, the Ideas for Peace Foundation told the Journal. Colombia’s new president has vowed to work with U.S. intelligence to neutralize the commanders of drug-trafficking groups and to restart fumigation of drug crops, which ended in 2015.

The scale of the trade is evident on the streets of consuming countries, where supply is outstripping demand to the point that prices are plunging, the Journal reported. In Miami, wholesale cocaine sold for about $16,500 a kilogram this summer, well below the historical $22,000 to $25,000 range. European prices have plummeted from $45,000 to as low as $16,000 a kilogram in some cities. Purity remains remarkably high, sometimes hitting 98% in Europe, because dealers no longer need to stretch supplies with adulterants.

U.S. officials with deep experience fighting the drug trade told the Journal the airstrikes cost traffickers money, strike fear into the smuggling supply chain and prevent some shipments from reaching American cities, while acknowledging that massive quantities of cocaine continue to flow. Ric Curtis, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who tests drug toxicity at a South Bronx harm-reduction nonprofit, said New York City users have a steady supply of high-quality cocaine. “It’s real coke — I’m surprised,” he said. “The price is right. It’s cheap and it’s widely available, I mean, widely.”

In Europe, the influx is overwhelming authorities, the Journal reported. The drugs arrive on container vessels, smaller boats from way stations in Africa, and semi-submersible vessels that cross the Atlantic to rendezvous with ships near Portugal or Spain. Laurent Lanier, senior analyst for the European Union Drugs Agency, said the volume is so high that bargain-basement prices are attracting new customers who in the past could not afford cocaine. “It’s just crazy the amount of cocaine we get in Europe,” Lanier said.

France illustrates the difficulty of containing the supply, the Journal reported. In 2025, the country seized a record 92 tons of cocaine, a 204% increase from 2022, according to the French Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. Yasmine Salhi, an economist at the center, said traffickers have shifted from major gateways like Le Havre in Normandy to smaller ports to evade controls, while airliners bring additional supplies smuggled from French Guiana and French islands in the Caribbean. French dealers now sell small bags for about $11, a previously unheard-of price, while the per-gram cost on the street has dropped 37% over the past decade, Salhi said. Much of the cocaine reaching France then crosses borders into other consuming countries, the Journal reported.

The resilience of the trade is visible in Buenaventura, Colombia’s primary Pacific gateway, where police team with analysts in Bogotá to profile suspicious vessels heading to transit countries like Ecuador or Mexico. They deploy X-ray machines, drug-sniffing dogs and chemical-trace kits to check cargo, police officer Alejandro Gutierrez told the Journal. “The analysts give us all of the information, where it’s going, what it is, why they profiled it,” Gutierrez said. “We open the containers, verify and see what merchandise has been switched out.” Smugglers have learned to embed the drug in charcoal, leather hides, cement and fruit pulp, then extract it after pickup at a destination port, the Journal reported.

Liborio Cuéllar, who manages one of three vast ports in the city, told the Journal, “We’re pretty confident that we stop a lot of it.” But the system has limits: police inspect only 10% of containers, and Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Rojas, who oversees antinarcotics operations at the port, said a single container holds thousands of sacks of agricultural products, making universal testing impossible. “We’re not infallible,” he said.

Along Colombia’s 800-mile Pacific coastline, traffickers have a maze of swamps and inlets from which to launch cocaine-laden vessels, among them the speedboats the U.S. targets. Edilberto Cortés of Colombia’s army said another route that has gained prominence as a direct response to the U.S. targeting of speedboats is the Amazon, whose sprawling river network offers traffickers numerous paths east to the Atlantic and onward to Europe. While security forces are confiscating more cocaine in the rainforest, the sheer scale of the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers, which run for hundreds of miles into Peru and Brazil, makes thorough interdiction nearly impossible, Cortés told the Journal. Driving along the banks of the Orteguaza River in southern Colombia, he pointed to long boats churning past, piled high with food, fuel and other supplies bound for jungle communities. “Look at that — they load up tons of provisions,” Cortés said. “Sometimes they carry cocaine, too. How are we supposed to find it among all that tonnage? It’s impossible.”

Juan Cordoba, who told the Journal he comes from a coastal village and has smuggled drugs, said the networks remain vast and flexible. “Routes are everywhere, on the water, in the mountains, carried on airplanes, in boats of all kinds,” Cordoba said. He described one common route: a fishing boat heads north close to the Colombian coast and crosses into Panama, where it transfers the cocaine to a speedboat that moves it to ports in Central America or Mexico, and then overland to the United States. Traffickers aggressively recruit crews, he said, and the financial incentives are often too powerful for residents of impoverished villages to ignore. “You can get a call and they’ll say, ‘You’ll get 180 stacks,’” Cordoba said, referring to 180 million pesos, or about $54,000. “You say, ‘It’s risky, yes, but it is 180 stacks.’”

Traffickers are also increasingly moving shipments south to Ecuador and deep into Paraguay and Bolivia, where containers flow down the Paraná River to the Atlantic, the Journal reported. Smugglers exploit regional transit treaties that allow containers to cross into Argentina without customs inspection, and cities like Montevideo, Uruguay, serve as jumping-off points for Europe.