Drug lords are laughing at Macron’s ‘meagre’ war on narcotics
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
When Emmanuel Macron travelled to Marseille in March, the French president proclaimed he was launching an “unprecedented XXL drugs clean-up operation” that would spark fear into even the most battle-hardened of drug lords.
He was speaking from France’s second city, a Mediterranean port that suffered 47 drug-related murders last year, including the death of a 24-year-old law student killed by a stray bullet fired by a 15-year-old boy during a gang-related shooting in the street outside her home.
She was sitting in her bedroom when the bullet came through the wall.
After his Marseille announcement, anonymous local drug “caids” chuckled at suggestions it would in any way dent their booming business – despite 900 arrests, including those of two rival gang leaders.
The suggestion was that they would simply be replaced, or carry on operating from jail.
Days later, Mr Macron was photographed in the Amazonian overseas territory of French Guiana, a notorious hub for drug “mules”.
Two months on, France watched footage of two prison officers killed during a successful operation to free a drug trafficker said to have ordered hit jobs abroad and at home, including in Marseille.
As if the symbolism wasn’t bad enough, the gruesome killing, which has two other officers fighting for their lives, occurred on the day a French senatorial commission of inquiry effectively concluded that France was losing the war against drugs under Mr Macron’s watch. It makes for chilling reading.
France is “submerged with drug trafficking”, which is “infiltrating everywhere like an inexorably rising tide”, warned the cross-party report.
“France is [...] at a tipping point: we must act now to contain the contagion,” it went on, underling the “very high” risk of corruption of public and private officials, who are essential intermediaries in drug trafficking”.
In a damning indictment, it found that Mr Macron’s anti-drugs plan to be presented shortly by the government was “meagre” and “not up to the task”.
Far from being confined to the suburbs, drug trafficking was also spreading to “rural areas and medium-sized towns”, where it was eventually imposing its own codes, said the report.
The commission also noted that drug bosses are able to pull the strings “untroubled” from abroad, notably from the United Arab Emirates.
Writing in Le Monde, the two authors of the report, Jerome Durain and Etienne Blanc, a Socialist and a conservative, criticised the “weakness of our public reaction” to the phenomenon.
“Its scale gives us the impression that there is a relationship between the weak and the strong, and that the strong are the criminal organisations and the weakling is the state,” said Mr Durain.
They warned that the “chain of trust in public and private players” was hanging in the balance, pointing to the corruption of unionised dock workers in the port of Le Havre paid up to €100,000 (£85,000) to turn a blind eye to a drug-filled container, to officials paid as little as €25 (£21) to consult classified files.
Mr Macron’s “clean-up plan” received short shrift. It’s all very well attacking drug distribution but that will come to naught if you fail to go after “the transport, logistics, international cooperation” that brought it to France.
All this is manna to Mr Macron’s political enemies, notably the hard-Right National Rally, which is already in pole position ahead of June European elections.
Its leader Jordan Bardella pulled his punches as if not wanting to add insult to injury, but there is little doubt that the political damage is done.
