Some 500 kilos of cocaine were seized Nov 25 in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Núñez. Investigators said the drugs belonged to a Serbian criminal organization –the same one that shipped more than two tons of narcotics on a yacht bound from Buenos Aires only to be busted by the Uruguayan navy on October 15 when the boat was at anchor at a fishing pier in Santiago Vasquez, near Montevideo. Arrested on board were Serbs Cetinje Mark and Daniel Tatar Radonjic and Croat Marian Blazevic. The three were carrying Croatian, Bosnian, Canadian, German and U.S. identity documents.
On Nov 19 Interpol arrested one of the leaders of that ill-starred smuggling endeavor in the Slovenian port city of Koper. According to authorities the individual– identified only as “GD”–was a 34 year old Croatian carrying a Serbian passport.
Sources said detectives in the Nunez operation found the cocaine hidden in the walls of an elevator shaft and a basement constructed by drug traffickers below a parking garage in the same building.
No one was arrested.
Serbia has issued arrest warrants against five Serbians and Montenegrins in connection with the 500 kilo seizure– Nenad Novakovic, Draško Vukovic, Boris Laban, Marko Pandrc and Igor Stijepovic–all believed to have been operating in Latin America over the past several months.
The raids in Buenos Aires and on the coast of Uruguay were part of “Balkan Warrior”, a joint transnational operation by the DEA, Serbian Security and Intelligence, the Argentine Federal Police and the Uruguayan Navy.
The Serbian traffickers use two major routes to import large quantities of cocaine from South America.
The first route runs from Uruguay and Argentina via South Africa to Northern Italy and Montenegro and a second route ships from Colombia via central Africa and Turkey to Montenegro.
Over the past several years the Serb mafia has established vital business relationships with the Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC) in Colombia and in Mexico with Sinaloa/Guzman and Zetas/La Compania, which in turn interfaces with another partner of the Serbs– the Ndrangheta in Calabria, Italy. (See September posting on that here.)
According to Serb police sources jointly organized criminal groups from Montenegro, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina take in 200 million Euros per year off the cocaine trade.
The price per kilogram at port is 36,000 Euros, but rockets to four times that amount when it hits the retail markers, according to police sources in Milan.
European law enforcement experts believe that the Balkan route for smuggling drugs, arms trafficking and migrants connects all transnational organized crime groups in Europe and beyond.
Experts from the Organized Crime and Terrorism in Southeast Europe office warn that the “Balkan mafia with the support of the political centers of power creates a new criminal-terrorist infrastructure with serious armed force.”
Among the leaders of this Balkan mafia are former Serbian military officers and intelligence agents.
According to Aleksandar Fatic, director of the Centre for Security Studies in Belgrade, Serbian organized crime has gained a stronger foothold in the international drug trade by exploiting political corruption in the Balkans and offering heroin and cocaine at record low prices– the lowest street price for cocaine and heroin in its history.
Fatic said heroin was selling for as little as one euro a gram while the street price for cocaine was between 30 and 50 euros per gram.The heroin coming into the Balkan network via Iran and the Middle East originates in the world’s leading producer state–Afghanistan. European counternarcotics agencies have established that the Balkan network has nimbly worked drug deals with both elements of Hizballah and Hamas and Israeli criminal organizations.
Fatic said there were five major mafia clans operating in Serbia with up to 10,000 foot soldiers. The groups are organized as networks, rather than hierarchical structures, so they can expand according to the needs of the market or shrink if there is intense police scrutiny,
“There is no such thing as a constant number of group members, as they drift in and out., said Fatic. “Most maintain independent criminal careers and are involved in large cocaine trafficking ‘projects’, some are legitimate business people.” Adding that there was an enormous amount of cash flowing through the economy due to drug trafficking and money laundering.
He warned that the mafias involved were connected with corrupt local and national authorities and corrupt parts of the state apparatus and were not hesitant in using extreme violence, saying machine gun shootouts were commonplace in Serbia–just as they are in Mexico.
While the narcoguerra extends from Mexico to Montenegro (and all points in between) –the players all speak the “it’s-a-small-world-after-all” language of 5.56 and Euros.
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