STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
The drug trafficking charge against Venezuela's former leader, Nicolás Maduro, revolves around cocaine. The accusation spans Democratic and Republican administrations. So what exactly is Venezuela's role in the cocaine supply chain? Darian Woods and Stephan Bisaha of The Indicator from NPR's Planet Money looked into it.
STEPHAN BISAHA, BYLINE: Ioan Grillo is a journalist based in Mexico City. He's been on the drug trafficking beat for 25 years.
DARIAN WOODS, BYLINE: Ioan says the cocaine trade starts in the high altitudes of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. That's where the coca plant is grown.
IOAN GRILLO: Quite an ordinary-looking plant.
BISAHA: Coca leaves are harvested by the farmers living in those remote mountainous areas, often with pretty limited road access.
GRILLO: They're like small farmers who grow this crop. And then they'll sell the leaves, or they'll turn it into paste.
WOODS: That paste can be chucked in a backpack and taken by motorbike to the next step in processing, purification and crystallization.
GRILLO: You turn the paste into a kilo brick of cocaine.
BISAHA: These kilo bricks are so standardized that cocaine producers will often put a seal on them to mark whose cocaine this actually is. And this is important because the cocaine producers are often different from the next stage in the chain, the trafficker. Trafficking these days rarely goes straight from Colombia like it used to. Several decades ago, intense U.S. law enforcement efforts meant that direct routes were too likely to get caught.
GRILLO: The traffickers then flipped and said, OK, we'll move it through Mexico.
WOODS: Mexico already had the illicit smuggling infrastructure because of marijuana and heroin trafficking. And so the country was ripe for the cocaine trafficking trade.
BISAHA: In the 2000s, at the same time Mexico's role in the cocaine trade was growing, the U.S. government was working with Colombian authorities to really crack down on Colombian airspace.
GRILLO: So then it becomes easier to bring it over the border to Venezuela, fly it to Mexico on planes from Venezuela.
WOODS: So this is when cartels and groups start operating in Venezuela. Venezuela starts to become a more material player in the cocaine supply chain.
BISAHA: Thanks to solid demand for cocaine in the U.S., the price of a gram could go anywhere between $60 and $200. In other words, that kilogram brick went from a price of about $2,000 in South America to $60,000-plus in the U.S. But of course, there were a lot of expenses along the way.
GRILLO: Bribing vast amounts of officials and paying for armies of killers and all of these kind of things.
WOODS: So a lot of money going to corrupt officials, which brings us to the question - is the Venezuelan government involved in the cocaine trade like the Trump administration claims?
BISAHA: According to an indictment from the United States against Nicolás Maduro and others unsealed this weekend, Maduro's government facilitated the importation of tons of cocaine into the United States. The indictment builds off a similar one in 2020.
GRILLO: I do think they're credible accusations. I did an interview with a guy who ran airplanes of cocaine. The Venezuelan government then were totally, you know, on board. So these are not claims that suddenly came from nowhere a couple of years ago.
WOODS: Of course, the U.S. and Europe provide the demand for cocaine. That's what motivates turning a barrel of green leaves in the Andes into cocaine crystals, trafficking them across land, sea and air to get to the Mexican border, smuggled across the U.S. and sold on the street.
BISAHA: Stephan Bisaha.
WOODS: Darian Woods, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF AARON PARKS' "ROADSIDE DISTRACTION") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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