Organized crime is increasingly using commercial cargo flights to transport drugs, weapons and gold

Brazil’s Federal Police (PF) arrested a Chinese citizen at Guarulhos International Airport in São Paulo on July 4, as he attempted to board a flight to Hong Kong with 17 gold bars in coffee bags. After his arrest, the PF discovered that the man had been involved in a similar seizure in Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, on May 8, involving one kilo of gold.

A year earlier, this time in Colombia, anti-narcotics police at Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport on San Andrés Island found 1.5 tons of cocaine in a shipment of 57 boxes of vegetables and apples on a cargo plane bound for the United States.

Transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) are increasingly using commercial and cargo flights in Latin America to transport drugs, weapons and gold, according to a report by risk intelligence firm Osprey Flight Solutions (OFS). To better analyze the situation, OFS has issued post-incident alerts, collected between February 2021 and 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 reports at Latin American airports, warehouses and onboard aircraft increased by 147 percent between 2021 and 2023, with the highest numbers recorded in Brazil, Mexico and Colombia.

Brazil recorded the highest number of seizures: 1,737. The incidents were mainly related to gold and drug trafficking, the OFS said. According to data provided by the PF Dialogue In terms of drug seizures (cocaine, marijuana, skunk, ecstasy, amphetamine and methamphetamine) at Brazilian airports, the quantity increased from 4.4 tons in 2021 to 9.8 tons in 2023, an increase of more than 120 percent.

According to researcher Thiago Moreira de Souza Rodrigues, affiliated with the Graduate Program in Strategic Defense and Security Studies at Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, air transport offers advantages, including for smugglers traveling on commercial aircraft.

“The money made from drug trafficking is so high that many people run the risk of being caught, because the material gains are very fast and immediate,” said Rodrigues. “It works like a casino: the stakes are high, but the profits are also very high, if the move works.” He explained that in the case of synthetic drugs, such as cocaine and heroin, the profitability is enormous when they are mixed with other substances for sale. “Depending on the trip taken, it multiplies (…) to several dozen times the price originally paid for that tablet, that package. So it doesn’t have to be traded in large quantities to be profitable,” said Rodrigues.

While the increase in warnings coincides with the return to normalcy of international flights following the lifting of COVID-19 travel restrictions, for Rodrigues the data show greater international drug flow and demand. “Global air traffic has increased enormously in the last three decades. So surveillance, whether it is radiometric, physical surveillance, dogs, in short specialized personnel, is very complex and is always done through 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 dispersed, shipments are multiplied by the large number of air routes and flows. If you take airports such as the world’s largest hubs, there are thousands of flights per week.”

TCOs use a variety of methods to smuggle 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 hide illicit shipments, bribing airport authorities and using smugglers to transport the goods on their flights, InSight Crime reported.

“Since the golden age when drug trafficking began as a transnational economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, commercial aviation has always been used, and for much the same reason: the connection between airport workers on the ground, the logistics of maintaining the airport itself, the airlines – in short, the returns are so high that many people take the risk,” InSight Crime said in a report.

Mexico ranked 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 ranked third with 488 alerts, has cocaine as the most common substance trafficked via air cargo. The main air routes connect the capital Bogotá with the island of San Andrés, 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 during the same period.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, only two percent of containers traveling around the world by air, sea, road and rail are adequately checked for illegal activities.