Why U.S. Airstrikes Are Failing to Stop the Global Cocaine Boom

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BUENAVENTURA, Colombia—The Trump administration’s bombing campaign against cocaine-smuggling speedboats is starting to have an impact on the global drug trade—but not necessarily in a good way.

Thirteen months into the initiative, Colombian navy divers are detecting greater use of “parasites”—metal modules packed with cocaine that traffickers bolt onto the hulls of freighters preparing to steam out of this country’s largest Pacific port.

Deep in the Amazon, smugglers have shifted shipments east, hiding drugs on boats moving through the rain forest’s vast river network. And on Colombia’s long coast, crews evade U.S. military airstrikes by hugging the shoreline in the exact same speedboats the Americans are targeting.

Record supplies of cocaine still arrive in the U.S., Europe and as far away as Australia every day, cheaper and purer than they’ve been in decades, said law-enforcement officials across four continents.

President Trump has celebrated the airstrikes, noting his administration has “made tremendous strides in stopping the flow of illegal drugs into our country.” In the past 13 months, American military drones and aircraft have destroyed more than 70 vessels, killing nearly 240 crew members and depriving criminal groups of $1.5 billion in cocaine, according to U.S. officials.

“The drugs coming in by sea are down by 97%,” Trump said in June. “We’re trying to figure out who the 3% are, because they are the bravest people on earth.”

Yet scholars of the cocaine trade and U.S. officials familiar with the program say drug boats in large numbers still leave Colombia, which produces 70% of the world’s cocaine.

“The boats keep going. The Pacific is vast,” said Ervyn Norza, a former police investigator who researches the drug trade for Rosario University in Bogotá.

Felipe Botero, a researcher for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime, a Geneva-based nonprofit, said the American military campaign gives priority to flash-bang visibility over genuine disruption. Traffickers have responded by spreading shipments across cargo containers, freighters, fishing boats, and submarine-like vessels. Guyana and Suriname have emerged as new platforms for cocaine-laden boats, U.S. and European officials say, while Venezuela remains a critical launchpad.

“This is a policy that’s more about visibility and narrative—showing decisive action—than one that genuinely disrupts organized crime,” Botero said.

The resulting trafficking network is more diffuse and expansive than before the missile strikes from drones and aircraft began. Colombia is growing more coca leaf and churning out more finished cocaine than at any point in its history, United Nations researchers say.

Colombia’s new president has vowed to deliver an iron-fisted response, working with U.S. intelligence to neutralize the commanders of drug trafficking groups and pledging to restart fumigation of drug crops, which ended in 2015. He faces long odds: Clandestine labs produce more than 3,300 tons of cocaine annually and armed groups have nearly doubled their ranks to 28,000 members during the past four years, the Ideas for Peace Foundation says.

The scale of the trade is evident on the streets of drug-consuming countries, where supply is outstripping demand to the point that prices are plunging. In Miami, wholesale cocaine sold for about $16,500 a kilogram this summer, well below the historical $22,000 to $25,000 range. Similarly, European prices have plummeted from $45,000 to as low as $16,000 a kilogram in some cities.

In both markets, purity remains remarkably high, sometimes hitting 98% in Europe, because dealers no longer need to stretch supplies with adulterants.

U.S. officials with deep experience fighting the drug trade said the airstrikes cost traffickers money, strike fear into the smuggling supply chain and prevent some shipments from reaching American cities.

But these officials acknowledge that massive quantities of cocaine continue to flow.

Ric Curtis, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice who tests drug toxicity at a South Bronx harm-reduction nonprofit, said New York City users have a steady supply of high-quality cocaine. Unlike past decades, the samples he receives are rarely diluted with other drugs or products that appear like cocaine, as was the case in the past.

“It’s real coke—I’m surprised,” he said. “The price is right. It’s cheap and it’s widely available, I mean, widely,” he said.

In Europe, the influx is overwhelming authorities. The drugs arrive on container vessels, smaller boats from way stations in Africa, and semi-submersible vessels that cross the Atlantic to rendezvous with ships near Portugal or Spain.

Laurent Lanier, senior analyst for the European Union Drugs Agency, said the volume is so high that bargain-basement prices are attracting new customers who in the past couldn’t afford cocaine.

“It’s just crazy the amount of cocaine we get in Europe,” he said.

France illustrates the difficulty of containing the supply. In 2025, the country seized a record 92 tons of cocaine, a 204% increase from 2022, said the publicly funded French Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction.

Traffickers have shifted from major gateways like Le Havre in Normandy to smaller ports to evade controls, while airliners bring additional supplies smuggled from French Guiana and French islands in the Caribbean. Supply has outpaced demand so significantly that French dealers now sell small bags for about $11, a previously unheard-of price, while the per-gram cost on the street has dropped 37% over the past decade, said Yasmine Salhi, an economist at the Monitoring Center. Much of the cocaine getting to France then crosses borders to other consuming countries.

The resilience of the trade is clear in Buenaventura, Colombia’s primary Pacific gateway. At the port, police team with analysts in the capital, Bogotá, to profile suspicious vessels heading to transit countries like Ecuador or Mexico. They deploy X-ray machines, drug-sniffing dogs and chemical-trace kits to check cargo.

“The analysts give us all of the information, where it’s going, what it is, why they profiled it,” said police officer Alejandro Gutierrez. “We open the containers, verify and see what merchandise has been switched out.”

Smugglers have learned to embed the drug in charcoal, leather hides, cement and fruit pulp, and then take it out after pickup at a destination port. But on a recent day, officers displayed cocaine they had extracted from otherwise innocuous cargo.

“We’re pretty confident that we stop a lot of it,” said Liborio Cuéllar, who manages one of three vast ports here.

Yet the system has limits. Police inspect only 10% of containers. Lt. Col. Juan Carlos Rojas, who oversees antinarcotics operations at the port, noted that a single container holds thousands of sacks of agricultural products, making universal testing impossible.

“We’re not infallible,” he said.

The challenges extend far beyond the port. Along Colombia’s 800-mile Pacific coastline, traffickers have a maze of swamps and inlets from which to launch cocaine-laden vessels, among them the speedboats the U.S. targets.

Juan Cordoba, who comes from a coastal village and has smuggled drugs, said the networks remain vast and flexible.

“Routes are everywhere, on the water, in the mountains, carried on airplanes, in boats of all kinds,” he said.

Cordoba described one common route: A fishing boat heads north close to the Colombian coast and crosses into Panama. There, it transfers the cocaine to a speedboat that moves it to ports in Central America or Mexico, where it moves by land to the U.S., the final objective.

Traffickers aggressively recruit crews for these runs, and the financial incentives are often too powerful for residents of impoverished villages to ignore.

“You can get a call and they’ll say, ‘You’ll get 180 stacks,’” Cordoba said, referring to 180 million pesos, or about $54,000. “You say, ‘It’s risky, yes, but it is 180 stacks.’”

Traffickers are also increasingly moving shipments south to Ecuador and deep into Paraguay and Bolivia, where containers flow down the Paraná River to the Atlantic. Smugglers exploit regional transit treaties that allow containers to cross into Argentina without customs inspection. Once on the Atlantic coast, cities like Montevideo, Uruguay, serve as jumping-off points for Europe.

But traffickers don’t have to travel south to reach the Atlantic.

Edilberto Cortés of Colombia’s army said another route that has gained prominence as a direct response to the U.S. targeting speedboats is the Amazon, whose sprawling river network offers traffickers numerous routes east to the Atlantic and drug routes to Europe.

While security forces are confiscating more cocaine in the rainforest, the sheer scale of the Caquetá and Putumayo rivers, which run for hundreds of miles into Peru and Brazil, make thorough interdiction nearly impossible.

Driving on a road along the banks of the Orteguaza River in southern Colombia, Cortés pointed to the long boats churning past, piled high with food, fuel and other supplies bound for jungle communities.

“Look at that—they load up tons of provisions,” Cortés said. “Sometimes they carry cocaine, too. How are we supposed to find it among all that tonnage? It’s impossible.”

Write to Juan Forero at juan.forero@wsj.com