Cocaine Cartels

For a quarter century, Luis Antonio Navia worked as a high-level cocaine transporter for all of the major Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, including Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel, and flooded the United States and Europe with cocaine before his dramatic arrest in Venezuela in 2000 during the 12-nation Operation Journey.

Pablo Escobar was the King of Cocaine, the wealthiest and most violent criminal in the world. By the 1980s his Medellin Drug Cartel was responsible for smuggling several tons of cocaine into America each and every day. The end result was hundreds of millions of dollars in cash profits.

In recent years, the Netherlands and Belgium have become major drug trafficking hubs in Europe, with almost 80% of the continent's cocaine passing through Rotterdam or Antwerp.