EU lukewarm toward US idea on Venezuela cocaine
ANDREW RETTMAN
09.05.2007 @ 17:44 CET
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS - EU diplomats are lukewarm on US calls for Europe to get Venezuela to curb its cocaine exports, saying the EU has no special relationship with Caracas and no joint customs programme in place.
The slightly baffled response comes after US anti-drug tsar John Walters called for EU governments to lean on Venezuelan president, Hugo Chavez, to curb increasing air and maritime trans-shipments of Colombian-origin cocaine to Europe and the US.
Cocaine was widely used in over-the-counter medicines in the 19th century (Photo: wikipedia)
"I know some European nations have more extensive cooperation with the Venezuelan government and we hope that we can use that to try to cut some of these off," Mr Walters said in Brussels on Tuesday, newswires report.
"We have relations with Venezuela as well as all the other South American states," a spokesman for the Spanish foreign ministry told EUobserver on Wednesday (10 May). "But I couldn't say that Venezuela is closer than any of the others," he added.
Spain - a former colonial power in Venezuela - sees itself as the EU's privileged negotiator on Latin American issues and generally advocates closer EU relations with the leftist, anti-western regimes in both Venezuela and its local ally, Cuba.
An EU official added that Brussels has no "framework political agreement" in place with Venezuela, unlike with Afghanistan, which has recently seen EU judicial and customs experts parachuted in to combat the country's mass-scale heroin smuggling problem.
"We have not developed any deep contacts with Venezuelan [law enforcement authorities]," the EU justice and home affairs official said. "It could be a question to be examined, but it would depend on the amount of drugs that are being sent to Europe."
A recent UN report says "Europe has become the second largest illicit market for cocaine in the world [after the US]. The total amount of cocaine seized in Europe and the number of persons who abuse that drug have increased compared with the previous year [2005]."
The EU's own studies show that, while marijuana is the number one drug in Europe, cocaine is fast becoming number two, with young men in urban centres in Ireland, the Netherlands, Italy, the UK and Spain forming the category of heaviest users.
About 3 percent of EU citizens have tried cocaine at least once. Street prices have fallen since the 1990s but European wholesale prices have increased to as much as €57,000 per kilo compared to €30,000 in the US, with most shipments seized in Spanish ports.
"Cocaine is surging in Europe at levels similar to what America experienced in the 1980s," the head of the US' drug-enforcement body, the DEA, said at an international seminar on drug trafficking held in Madrid on Wednesday, AFP reports.
"Cocaine is very much associated with success, urban lifestyles, a party atmosphere," Julian Vicente, an analyst at the EU's anti-drugs agency, the EMCDDA, added.
A 2005 search by German TV magazine AKTE showed traces of the drug in 41 out of 46 bathrooms swabbed in the European Parliament in Brussels.
