A coordinated maritime operation led by Spain’s Guardia Civil seized 11 tonnes of cocaine and 8.5 tonnes of hashish in the Atlantic Ocean and led to 54 arrests.
The two-week operation ran from 13 to 26 April and targeted criminal networks moving cocaine from Latin America to Europe using at-sea transfers intended to avoid major ports, Europol announced in a release on Friday.
Police and maritime units tracked and intercepted suspected vessels along the eastern Atlantic corridor between the Spanish Canary Islands and the Portuguese Azores.
Eight vessels were intercepted during the operation.
Jean-Philippe Lecouffe, Europol’s Deputy Executive Director Operations, said the agency would now use intelligence gathered during the action to help identify and dismantle the criminal networks behind the trans-Atlantic smuggling operations.
Smugglers shifting away from ports
Criminal networks have increasingly shifted cocaine trafficking away from major European ports towards more fragmented maritime routes across the Atlantic, Europol said, referring to a warning it issued earlier this year.
It stressed that traffickers have been using a multi-stage system in which larger “mother vessels” transport drugs into international waters before transferring loads to faster craft, with final deliveries made to smaller boats for landings in remote coastal areas in Portugal and Spain.
The operation involved law enforcement authorities from Italy, Portugal, the UK and the United States, alongside Spain, with Europol providing coordination and analytical support.
International waters between the Canary Islands and the Azores are increasingly being used for large-scale cocaine transfers, an area known among law enforcement as the “Cocaine Highway.”
