Turkey in recent years has witnessed a record-breaking number and magnitude of cocaine busts, prompting questions about whether the country is joining Syria and Lebanon as the third narco-state in the Eastern Mediterranean, analysts Aykan Erdemir and Kürşat Gök wrote in National Interest on Saturday.
The pair highlighted a bust last June by Turkish police of 1.3 tons of cocaine hidden in a banana shipment from Ecuador to Turkey’s southern Mersin port, followed by the discovery of another half-ton of cocaine concealed in another shipment to the port from the South American country. The two incidents alone exceed Turkey’s annual totals from only a few years ago
If Turkey does indeed become a narco-state, the pair wrote, it would only serve to compound the region’s trafficking and money laundering problems while simultaneously presenting illicit non-state actors “greater opportunities to exploit’’ the nation.
Turkish mob boss Sedat Peker made international headlines last year, over his claims on government-mafia relations, as well as Ankara’s links to a drug trafficking network extending to South America. According to the 49-year-old organised crime leader, Turkey – a long-time major route for the heroin trade – has become a key hub for cocaine under the rule of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).
Reports and data over the last few years appear to confirm Peker, according to Erdemir and Gök, who pointed out that the country’s police confiscated some 2.8 tons of cocaine in 2021, up from 1.5 tons in 2018.
“These figures are simply the tip of the iceberg and do not include cocaine shipments headed for Turkey but captured in Latin American ports of exit,’’ the pair wrote, highlighting that Colombian police last June seized 4.9 tons of cocaine in the country’s southwestern port of Buenaventura en route to an Istanbul port Ambarli port.
Just one month prior, Turkish media reported that authorities in Panama captured 1.3 tons of cocaine en route from Ecuador’s largest port, Puerto Bolivar, to southern Mersin province.
The fact that cocaine shipped to Turkey comes disproportionately from Ecuador’s Puerto Bolivar port, which a Turkish company backed by Erdoğan won a 50-year tender to operate in 2016 sparks further ‘’suspicions about the complicity of Turkish officials,’’ according to the analysts.
Turkey’s ailing economy and its growing need for foreign currency amidst a depletion of its central bank’s net international reserves will only serve to make “the country’s political elite and struggling citizens more susceptible to the appeal of narco-dollars,’’ Erdemir and Gök wrote.