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

The Brazilian Federal Police (PF) arrested a Chinese national 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 determined that the man was involved in a similar seizure that took place on May 8 in Foz do Iguaçu, Paraná, in which he had looted one kilogram of gold.

A year earlier, drug enforcement agencies in Colombia had found 1.5 tons of cocaine in a shipment of 57 boxes of vegetables and apples on a cargo plane bound for the USA at Gustavo Rojas Pinilla International Airport on the island of San Andrés.

According to a report by risk intelligence firm Osprey Flight Solutions (OFS), transnational criminal organizations (TCOs) in Latin America are increasingly using commercial and cargo flights to transport drugs, weapons and gold. To better analyze the situation, OFS published post-incident alerts collected between February 2021 and February 2024, indicating seizures of illicit goods at major airports connecting to the United States, Europe and Africa.

Data shows that the number of alerts generated at Latin American airports, warehouses and on board 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 were mainly related to gold and drug trafficking, the OFS said. According to data provided by the PF to dialog The amount of drugs seized at Brazilian airports (cocaine, marijuana, skunk, ecstasy, amphetamine and methamphetamine) increased from 4.4 tons in 2021 to 9.8 tons in 2023 – an increase of over 120 percent.

For researcher Thiago Moreira de Souza Rodrigues of the Graduate Program in Strategic Defense and Security Studies at the Fluminense Federal University in Rio de Janeiro, air transport offers advantages, including for smugglers who travel on commercial aircraft.

“The money made from drug trafficking is so high that many people are at risk of getting caught because the material gains are very quick and immediate,” says Rodrigues. “It works like a casino: the stakes are high, but the gains are also very high if the trick works.” He explained that with synthetic drugs, cocaine and heroin, for example, the profitability is enormous when they are mixed with other substances for sale. “Depending on the trip, the gain multiplies […] up to a few dozen times the price originally paid for the tablet or package. So there is no need to trade large volumes to be profitable,” said Rodrigues.

Although the increase in alerts coincides with the return to normality of international air travel following the lifting of COVID-19 travel restrictions, for Rodrigues the data show greater international drug flow and demand. “Global air traffic has increased greatly over the last three decades. Therefore, surveillance, whether by radiometry, physical surveillance, dogs, in short, specialized personnel, is very complicated and is always done through samples,” said Rodrigues. “Even if some drug shipments are seized, the volume that passes through is much larger than what is seized in the surveillance networks. In air traffic, although it is smaller and more distributed, shipments multiply due to the large number of air routes and flows. If you take airports as the major hubs of the world, there are thousands of flights a week.”

TCOs use many methods to smuggle drugs and other illegal goods by air. Common tactics include placing goods in hidden compartments within legitimate shipments, setting up export companies to conceal illegal shipments, bribing airport authorities and using smugglers to transport the goods on their flights, InSight Crime said.

“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 connection between airport staff on the ground, the logistical maintenance of the airport itself, the airlines, in short, the return is so high that many people take the risk,” says a report by InSight Crime.

Mexico ranked second on the OFS list, registering 700 alerts during the period studied. The results show the flow of synthetic drugs via domestic flights from Culicán and Querétaro to cities on the US-Mexico border such as Tijuana and Ciudad Juárez. Colombia, which ranked third with 488 alerts, has cocaine as the substance most commonly smuggled by air. The main flight routes connect the capital Bogotá with the island of San Andrés, but there were also drug alerts related to flights to Belgium, France, the UK 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 transported around the world by air, sea, road and rail are sufficiently inspected to detect illegal activities.