“Months of surveillance paid off in October 2011, when 50 Cape Verdean paramilitary police, in cooperation with Dutch forensics experts, raided a garage in a densely populated neighborhood of the West African island nation’s capital. The drugs they found represented the biggest stash discovered in all of West Africa that year: 1,360 kilograms of Colombian cocaine.

Thousands of kilometers away in the village of Zerasari near the Afghan-Pakistani border, anti-narcotics agents from the United States, Afghanistan and Russia had already made a major discovery of their own. The multinational operation captured several drug laboratories that had been hoarding about a ton of high quality heroin.

What united these two operations, which occurred more than 9,000 kilometers apart, was the ultimate destination of many of these confiscated hard drugs: Europe...”

Excerpt from per Concordiam Staff, “Combating Narcotics,” per Concordiam: Journal of European Security Defense Issues 4, No. 1, 2013: 50-53.

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