MANTRAYA ANALYSIS# 85: 04 MARCH 2025
BIBHU PRASAD ROUTRAY & SHANTHIE MARIET D’SOUZA
Abstract
In recent years, India has experienced a significant increase in the smuggling of cocaine from South America. The demand for this expensive drug has surged, mostly for the creamy layer among substance abusers. To address the supply side of the equation, transnational networks have become more sophisticated and amorphous. In addition to small quantities of cocaine being smuggled into India via air routes, larger shipments have been transported concealed in cargo ships. In response to this growing challenge, India’s counternarcotic policy needs to enhance its interception capability, improve inter-agency coordination, and foster cooperation with other countries.
The Interception
There has been a surge in the frequency and quantity of cocaine smuggled from South America into India. In February 2025, at the Indira Gandhi International airport (IGI), there were five instances of arriving passengers arrested for concealing cocaine upon their bodies. Ingested capsules were extracted from their stomachs or rectums after medical procedures. The net recovery was 5198.5 grams worth ₹68 crores. In the previous month, January 2015, seven other passengers were intercepted at Delhi and Mumbai airports, carrying capsules containing cocaine weighing 5.164 kilograms with a street price of ₹ 66.58 crores. The February arrests included two Brazilian nationals and three unidentified foreign nationals. In January, among the seven arrested were two Brazilians from Sao Paulo and five Africans from Uganda, Kenya, and Senegal. They had arrived from Sao Paulo, Brazil via Paris, Addis Ababa, and Nairobi.[1]
Arrests and recoveries made in these two months are continuation of a trend of the past few years. The Directorate of Revenue Intelligence (DRI) recovered over 72 kilograms of cocaine from passengers arriving at various airports in the country in 2024.[2] Given the high-purity cocaine and the sheer quantity of drugs being recovered from these mules, authorities suspect India’s profile is changing from being a transit country to being a destination and consumer of cocaine.
Modus Operandi
While investigations of these arrests may in the coming months throw light on the international smuggling network from South America and Africa, the arrest of the Senegalese man, Thoma Mendy, has already revealed some of the complex networking at play.
Mendy had a history of carrying cocaine from Africa to India using fake passports. Being a professional mule until his luck ran out, he had been in touch with drug syndicate members in Sierra Leone.[3] On this occasion, he was carrying the cocaine in a carton, which had been handed over to him by a person of African ethnicity at a hotel in Sierra Leone. The Syndicate had promised him US$ 3,000 on successful delivery of the consignment in Mumbai.
In addition to air routes, the agency also noted a significant rise in drug trafficking via couriers and parcels. Air routes have gained popularity owing to the speed and volume of international air traffic, which facilitates the rapid movement of illicit substances. The chances of an unsuspected passenger – a middle-aged woman or a man with light luggage passing undetected through the Customs Green Channel – is much higher. Mendy’s case is a pointer.
His story is in full conformity with the findings in the DRI’s 2023-24 Smuggling in India Annual Report. A hundred percent increase in seizures in the past year has highlighted that cocaine smuggling via air routes has become a dominant method of trafficking the expensive drug into India. The number of cocaine-related cases rose from 21 in 2022-23 to 47 in 2023-24, with most of these seizures occurring at airports. Of the 8,224 kilograms of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances seized in 2023-24, 107 kilograms were cocaine with a market worth of ₹975 crore.[4] Cocaine is the only drug to witness such an upward trajectory.
Increasingly sophisticated smuggling methods, shifting global trade patterns, and the emerging technologies that facilitate such trade are stretching the capacities of law enforcement.[5] For instance, the job of detecting cocaine smuggling through the established procedures has become even more difficult with the emergence of “black cocaine.” Mixing cocaine with other substances, such as charcoal or iron oxide, serves to throw off detection, even standard detection methods such as sniffing. Complex extraction processes are required to revert it to pure cocaine, but costs are more than covered by the profit margin.
Beyond the Airports
While seizures at the airports gain media attention due to their innovative modus operandi, much bigger seizures have occurred outside the premises, serving notice that a large volume of cocaine is managing to enter the country without being detected at entry points. According to standard estimates, only a tenth of the drugs entering the country are seized.[6]
In October 2024, in the biggest-ever drug bust in New Delhi, officials confiscated over 560 kilograms of cocaine sourced from Colombia that had reached Gujarat through cargo ships via Dubai. The seizure led to multiple arrests of smugglers and dealers linked to an international drug syndicate that operated in India and Dubai. As investigations continued, more skeletons tumbled out of the closet. Within days, police seized another 208 kilograms of cocaine hidden in packs of chips and other food items in a rented shop. In the same month, a joint operation between Delhi and Gujarat state police departments resulted in the confiscation of 518 kilograms of cocaine from a pharmaceutical company in Gujarat.
The main distributor, Tushar Goyal, had a family-run publishing and real estate business. He, through a Dubai-based drug cartel which is headed by an Indian national, imported cocaine from countries such as Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, and Mexico. All monetary transactions for the drug deals were conducted using the Tether cryptocurrency, making tracing the transactions a challenge. From a central warehousing facility, cocaine was being distributed to handlers based in major Indian cities, often during the onset of festive seasons, when the local demands were high.
The Source and the Route
South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Nearly each of the region’s mainland nations has become a major producer or mover of the drug. From there, multiple routes pass through Oceania, Africa, and the Middle East, depending upon the destination.
While Colombia has long been the leading source of cocaine worldwide – a situation exacerbated by the misguided policies of the country’s current left-wing president, in recent years, organized criminals in Brazil have evolved into a powerful narco insurgency with transnational reach. Brazil today is the second-largest player in the cocaine trade, with two major drug syndicates, the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) and the Comando Vermelho. Both source their cocaine from Bolivia and Peru, which enters Brazil through Parana, a state bordering Paraguay. Both PCC and Comando Vermelho have connections in Oceania, using routes along the Pacific coast of South America. Large consignments of cocaine have entered Australia through this route. The low-scale transshipment of cocaine using individual air travelers to India indicates that these cartels have yet to establish a dedicated supply route into South Asia.
In Colombia, the cultivation of Coca crops tripled in 2024. The amount of land used to grow the drug’s base ingredient is more than five times what it was when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993 (with attendant security implications). For decades, cocaine consumers were primarily Americans. The industry has since grown and globalized, with new routes, new markets, and new criminal enterprises. The booming trade has attracted Russian, Turkish, Balkan, and Italian criminal groups to South America to have a piece of the pie. As a result, the Colombian syndicates, now have well-established supply routes to Africa and the Middle East. In December 2024, a drug trafficker, wanted in connection with an international drug smuggling operation through the Belgian port of Antwerp, was arrested in Dubai. Year by year, increase in the volume of sea cargo means that the traffickers have more opportunity to hide their contraband alongside legal trade.
Lessons Learnt and Future Pathways
After the Delhi drug bust, the police sounded optimistic about disrupting the network in a major way. However, this would seem, at best, tactical rather than strategic thinking. Attacking the margins of supply does nothing to staunch demand. Drugs, including cocaine, typically flow to demand. Lifestyle changes among affluent youths in India are creating a sufficient market for cocaine, which in the country is the most expensive drug at a price tag of more than ₹12 crore per kilogram. The fact that cocaine is only for the higher levels of society’s drug users at the moment and not for the average ones may promote a complacent attitude. However, that would be perilous, given the capacity of the undetected smuggling networks to swiftly expand into smuggling all sorts of contraband using the same route and mode, thereby endangering national security. Witness the Trump administration designation of a half dozen narco-cartels as terrorist organizations on a par with the likes of al-Qaeda and Islamic State.[7]
Lessons learnt of counter-narcotics operations worldwide point to a vexing, ongoing endeavor that has an increased chance of tactical success with constant capacity enhancement among the law enforcers, inter-agency cooperation, and coordination among affected nations, yet strategically can make progress only by addressing demand and the contextual factors which lead to both drug use and participation in the drug trade. The official policy to contain the current wave of cocaine smuggling in India needs to factor in these realities and design policies to address these gaps. An incremental bottom-up counter-narcotics policy with greater cooperation with countries in South America can be a pathway to disrupt and curb the narco trade and the illicit networks.
END NOTES
[1] On 24 January 2025, Indian Customs officials stopped a female passenger at IGI in New Delhi after she arrived from Sao Paulo, Brazil via Paris. After interrogation, she was taken to the hospital, where she eased out 100 oval-shaped capsules over the next few hours. They contained 802 grams of cocaine with an estimated street value of ₹12.03 crore. On the same day, a Kenyan man arriving from Addis Ababa eased out 67 capsules filled with 996 grams of cocaine, valued at ₹14.94 crore. Four days later, on 28 January, a 26-year-old Brazilian female passenger eased out 98 capsules containing 866 grams of cocaine, estimated to be valued at ₹12.99 crore. On 14 January, cocaine weighing 2.5 kilograms worth ₹26.62 crore was recovered from a 40-year-old Senegal citizen, who had arrived from Nairobi, in Mumbai airport.
[2] The exact weight of cocaine seized was 72,303.86 grams (calculated by the author from data on the DRI website. https://dri.nic.in/).
[3] Background to development of the West African connection, to include emergence of Africa’s only true narco-state, is Patrick Chabal and Toby Green, eds., Guinea-Bissau: Micro-State to “Narco-State” (London: Hurst, 2016).
[4] In addition, 49 kilograms of heroin, 236 kilograms of mephedrone, and 136 kilograms of methamphetamine were also seized.
[5] Well regarded analysis has noted that drug movement is concentrated along specific routes, with corruption among the key factors facilitating the trade. See Luca Giommoni, Alberto Aziani, and Giulia Berlusconi, “How do Illicit Drugs Move Across Countries? A Network Analysis of the Heroin Supply to Europe,” Journal of Drug Issues 47, no. 2 (2017), 217-240, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022042616682426.
[6] Though involving gold rather than cocaine, a recent treatment of smuggling in Nepal illuminates standard methodologies; see Rajaram Gautam, “Illicit Gain: Gold Smuggling Political-Criminal Nexus in Nepal,” Journal of Counterterrorism & Homeland Security International 29, no.3 (February 2025), 31-35, https://iacspjournal.com/.
[7] See https://www.state.gov/terrorist-designations-of-international-cartels/.
(Dr. Bibhu Prasad Routray is the Director of MISS. Dr. Shanthie Mariet D’Soza is the Founder & Executive Director of MISS. This analysis has been published as part of Mantraya’s ongoing “Organised Crime and Illicit Trafficking” project. All Mantraya publications are peer-reviewed.)
