Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) arrested a Chinese citizen at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo on July 4, attempting to board a flight bound for Hong Kong with 17 gold bars in coffee bags. Following his arrest, the PF found that the man was involved in another similar seizure, in Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, on May 8, with a kilogram of gold.
A year prior, this time in Colombia, antinarcotics police at Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport in San Andrés Island, found 1.5 tons of cocaine inside a shipment of 57 boxes containing vegetables and apples in a cargo aircraft bound for the United States.
According to a report by risk intelligence company Osprey Flight Solutions (OFS), transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) have been increasingly using commercial and cargo flights in Latin America to move drugs, arms, and gold. To better analyze the situation, OFS issued post-incident alerts, collected between February 2021 to February 2024, on the seizure of illicit goods, generated at the main airports with connections to the United States, Europe, and Africa.
Data shows that alerts generated at Latin American airports, in warehouses, and aboard aircraft, increased by 147 percent between 2021 and 2023, with the highest numbers in Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia.
Brazil recorded the highest number of seizures: 1,737. The incidents mainly had to do with gold and drug trafficking, the OFS said. According to data the PF provided to Diálogo regarding drug seizures (cocaine, marijuana, skunk, ecstasy, amphetamine, and methamphetamine) at Brazilian airports, the amount jumped from 4.4 tons in 2021 to 9.8 tons in 2023, an increase of more than 120 percent.
For researcher Thiago Moreira de Souza Rodrigues, from the Graduate Program in Strategic Defense and Security Studies at the Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, air transport has advantages, including smugglers traveling on a commercial aircraft.
“The money made in drug trafficking is so high that many people run the risk of being caught, because the material gains are very quick and immediate,” says Rodrigues. “It works like a casino: The stakes are high, but the winnings are very high too, if the move works out.” He explained that in the case, for example, of synthetic drugs, cocaine and heroin, the profitability is enormous when they are mixed with other substances for sale. “Depending on the trip made, it multiplies […] up to a few dozen times the price originally paid for that tablet, that package. So, it doesn’t have to be trafficked in large quantities to be profitable,” Rodrigues said.
Although the increase in alerts coincides with the return to normality of international flights, following the removal of COVID-19 travel restrictions, for Rodrigues the data shows greater international drug flow and demand. “Global air traffic has grown a lot in the last three decades. So, surveillance, whether by radiometry, physical surveillance, dogs, in short, specialized personnel, is very complicated, always done by samples,” Rodrigues said. “Even if some drug shipments are seized, the volume that passes through is much greater than what is seized in the surveillance networks. In air traffic, although it is smaller and more spread out, shipments are multiplied by the large number of air routes and flows. If you take airports like the world’s major hubs, there are thousands of flights a week.”
TCOs use many methods to traffic drugs and other illicit goods via air routes. Common tactics include placing goods in hidden compartments built into legal shipments, setting up export companies to conceal illegal shipments, corrupting airport authorities, and using smugglers who transport the goods on their flights, InSight Crime indicated.
“Since the golden age when drug trafficking began as a transnational economy, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, commercial air travel has always been used, and basically for the same reason, the link between airport employees on the ground, the logistical maintenance of the airport itself, the airlines, in short, the yield is so high that many people take the risk,” InSight Crime said in a report.
Mexico came second on the OFS list, registering 700 alerts during the period studied. The results highlight the flow of synthetic drugs via domestic flights from Culicán and Querétaro to cities on the U.S.-Mexico border, such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. Colombia, which came in third place with 488 alerts, has cocaine as the most common substance trafficked via air cargo. The main flight routes connect the capital Bogotá to San Andrés Island, but there were also drug alerts linked to flights to Belgium, France, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Alerts at Colombian airports increased by 275 percent in that same period.
According to the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime, only two percent of containers that travel around the world by air, sea, roads, and railways are adequately inspected to detect illegal acts.