GUAYAQUIL, Ecuador — The drug lord had already escaped the law in three countries, and he planned to do it again.
In less than a decade, Dritan Rexhepi had built a smuggling business that ran from the fields of Colombia to the ports of Ecuador and on to the streets of Europe, Italian and Latin American investigators said, rivaling the influence of Mexico’s powerful cartels. His brand, carved into cocaine packages, was “Bello” — beautiful.
The Albanian’s rise from gunman in his home country to transatlantic kingpin is part of a global explosion in the cocaine industry, a trade that is far bigger and more geographically diverse than at any point in history.
South America now produces more than twice as much cocaine as it did a decade ago. Cultivation of coca crops in Colombia, the origin of most of the world’s cocaine, has tripled, according to U.S. figures, and the amount of land used to grow the drug’s base ingredient is more than five times what it was when the infamous drug lord Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993.
And production keeps soaring. A record 2,757 tons of cocaine was produced worldwide in 2022, a 20 percent increase over 2021, according to the most recent global drug report from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.
“It’s going up and up and up,” said Thomas Pietschmann, a research officer at the UNODC. “A few years ago, people were saying the future is synthetic drugs. … Right now, it’s still cocaine.”