The search of the freight container at Ringaskiddy Port in Cork began like any other routine inspection conducted by customs officers and gardai.
Their objective was clear: to intercept a large quantity of drugs that might be smuggled through the port. What they stumbled upon was beyond their expectations.
As the container was opened, it revealed a cargo of crystal meth weighing nearly 546kg, more than half a tonne, with a street value of €32.8 million.
This search on February 16 was not a standalone operation but rather a strategic move in a broader investigation into the illegal drug trade flourishing in the southwest of Ireland.
Many in the upper echelons of both Ireland and Europe’s criminal intelligence services had long suspected that Ireland was serving as a logistics base for South American cartels, who are expanding their reach across Europe, Asia and countries in the southern hemisphere.
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The Sinaloa cartel, a powerful Mexican organised crime group which operates in more than 40 countries, is one of the key players in the illicit trade.
“The purpose is simple,” said Séamus Boland, the detective chief superintendent who leads the Garda National Drugs and Organised Crime Bureau.
“Law enforcement agencies do not pay much attention to container traffic coming from Ireland as we are not a drug-producing country,” he added.
“The US market is saturated so the cartels are concentrating on shipping cocaine and other drugs to Europe and the southern hemisphere. But we predicted this might happen.”
To advance their interests, cartels such as the Sinaloa and the Clan del Golfo from Colombia, the most powerful of all the cartels, have begun liaising with Irish criminals, who act as their agents.
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Among them is Morris O’Shea Salazar, a 33-year-old man of Irish-Mexican heritage who spent some of his teenage years living in Killorglin after the death of his Kerry-born father in a car accident in Mexico almost two decades ago.
He attended a local secondary school before moving to Spain.
According to court documents, his mother, Yolanda Salazar Tarriba, is the link between Ireland and the Sinaloa cartel, as she is a relative of Maria Alejandrina Salazar, first wife of the infamous former cartel leader Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
Salazar Tarriba is serving 18 years in prison after trying to send 61kg of cocaine to Europe to prospective customers. Her brother Ricardo Salazar Tarriba was sentenced to 23 years for his involvement.
O’Shea Salazar is on the run in Mexico, wanted for drug-trafficking offences in Chile and is suspected of involvement in the crystal meth haul.
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The intelligence services believe O’Shea Salazar acts as an agent for the Sinaloa cartel, which employs 185,000 people around the world. But he is not the only one working with drug lords. The Kinahan organised crime group and many other Irish gangs have for decades engaged with Colombian cartels.
These relationships, if not confronted, have the potential to turn Ireland into an integral part of the global narcotics supply chain. They also present an existential threat to Irish and European security.
South America’s cartels are not just violent but are among the most advanced and entrepreneurial criminal organisations in the world, capable of corrupting law enforcement, customs and government agencies. Capitalist by nature, they are similar in structure to multinationals with vertical hierarchies. They are also fiercely competitive, focused on growth, continuous expansion and making a return on their investments.
As a consequence, drug shipments from the continent have surged in recent years. A record 303 tonnes were seized in 2021, according to figures from the EU’s drugs monitoring agency. The true volume of cocaine reaching Europe, often concealed in steel containers arriving in Antwerp and Rotterdam entrepots, is possibly multiples of this.
But when considering the threat posed to Ireland and the EU by traffickers, context is everything. The quantities of cocaine arriving in Ireland are still relatively small. For example, at Antwerp, which is the largest cocaine trafficking hub in Europe, 110 tonnes were seized in 2022, according to customs authorities.
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It is being targeted because huge shipments are easily smuggled into the entrepot. Only 2 per cent of the container freight that passes through is scanned, though there are plans to scan all containers coming from “high-risk” countries by 2028. As matters stand, only 5 per cent of such shipments are checked.
Large consignments of cocaine and other drugs are being smuggled into Ireland — but not on this scale.
To confront the menace in Ireland and Europe, the gardai with their partners in the customs service and in Europe have replicated structures adopted by defence and intelligence services across the West to confront terrorism. They no longer act unilaterally but as part of an alliance.
“Gone are the days when countries just worried about what’s happening in their own island. There is now seamless co-operation with all agencies across Europe and further afield,” Boland said. “Huge quantities of cocaine are being seized not just in Ireland but across Europe, west Africa and the Caribbean. This is having an impact.”
The officer pointed to an increase in the wholesale price of a kilo of cocaine in Ireland, which has risen by 25 per cent in the past three months. “This would indicate that law enforcement operations are having an impact. It also sends out a message to say Ireland is not a soft touch. They are losing ships and money each time a haul is captured. It acts as a deterrent,” Boland said. “We have learnt a lot from tackling the Kinahan cartel. Law enforcement now approach this from multiple angles.”
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Cartels such as the Sinaloa open and establish new smuggling routes based on several factors but they are mainly driven by a combination of a search for profit coupled with the potential for success.
Nathan Jaccard, an expert on South American cartels with the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project in Bogota, said he viewed the Sinaloa cartel’s attempted use of Ireland as a logistics hub as one which stood alone.
He suspected the cartels had decided to go to the expense of shipping drugs to Ireland for onward transit to the southern hemisphere on the basis they would generate a handsome profit.
“What is the margin? In Australia and New Zealand, drug prices are very high, so these are very profitable and interesting markets for cartels. A gram of cocaine in Sydney can cost more than €200. The same gram costs up to €80 in Dublin, and less than €8 in Bogota,” he said.
“That’s why Oceanian countries, with high living standards, are now considered to be attractive. Drug trafficking is like any type of transnational business. As long as there is a profit and the infrastructure to set up an operation, it is probable that someone will try,” he said.
The drug cartels of South America are among the most violent criminal groups in the world. They have turned vast swathes of Mexico, Chile, Ecuador, Colombia and Brazil into lawless regions where murders, assassinations and corruption flourish. Ecuador, once a peaceful country compared with Colombia and Peru, is tackling a crime wave in which the murder rate has increased ninefold since 2017. Authorities there seized nearly 47 tonnes of drugs in the past few weeks alone. It is hard to overstate the scale of the violence. Murders and the assassination of political figures are daily events.
Do they pose the same threat to Irish towns and cities, or European capitals, where they have local representatives or agents in place?
“I think something might be heading Europe’s way that they are completely unprepared for,” said Toby Muse, an expert on the Colombian cartels and author of Kilo: Inside the Deadliest Cocaine Cartels.
“The profits involved in cocaine are so much that they can make it very easy to start a culture of corruption. People can be paid fantastic amounts of money to look the other way. Once that corruption seeps into the system, it becomes very hard to eradicate.”
Muse, who described the cocaine trade as pure capitalism, added: “There’s often a golden period, where everybody makes money at the beginning, when cocaine becomes cheap and easy to get hold of. The criminal organisations grow but they get bigger, train their soldiers and get more arms. They make so much money so there was no reason to quarrel. But then there comes a point when they get tired of sharing the market and try to take it away from their competitors and war breaks out.”
Anna Sergi, a lecturer in criminology and organised crime at the University of Essex, views the threat posed by the Sinaloa cartel through a different prism. She said there were structural and complex reasons why cartels could engage in extreme violence across South America, conditions which were not easily replicated in Ireland and across Europe.
Like other experts, she said the presence of cartel figures or agents in Europe was nothing new. “Supplying a very lucrative trade is a story as old as time. Colombia brokers have been in Europe for decades,” she said.
Sergi is less inclined than some to believe the cartel’s forays into Ireland will result in an increase in gangland violence here similar to what has happened in countries such as Colombia — though she accepts there may be local issues.
“They usually kill each other. They engage in a very different type of violence in their home countries for all sorts of structural reasons. The violence we have seen in Holland and Belgium in recent times is less intense than what we are seeing in Latin America,” Sergi said.
The real threat posed by the cartel’s presence in places such as Ireland, she suggested, concerned the potential for the criminals to introduce new products, engage in feuding to control the trade and possibly oversupply the market.
Virtually every cartel has stocks of cheap cocaine and other drugs available to ship due to overproduction. Cocaine production in Colombia has jumped from 1,400 tonnes annually to close to 1,800 tonnes, according to the United Nations. If Ireland and any other country were to be flooded with cheap cocaine or some other product, the consequences for health and security could be catastrophic.
The state is already awash with cocaine. Use of the drug has doubled since 2002–03, with more men aged 25 to 34 using cocaine than ever before, according to the Health Research Board. The number of people seeking treatment for addiction to crack cocaine, which is made from cocaine powder, has jumped by 400 per cent in recent years. Its prevalence is linked to an increase in violent assaults and robbery.
“What we are seeing is an evolution of a business that has been in existence for a long time,” Sergi said. “We keep on assuming there is a strategy on all sides, on the South American side and on the European side, while most of the time they are just trying to manage the business and grow it. In this sense nothing has really changed.”
