Belgian judge Bart Willocx, President of the Antwerp Court of Appeal, warned Monday the country is at risk of turning into a narco-state as a result of international drug crime and mafia groups forming a “parallel force” in society.
Willocx stressed that the port of Antwerp makes Belgium vulnerable to drug smuggling-related criminality, as it is one of the main entry points for cocaine smugglers in Europe.
“The amount of money that is involved – to influence people, to corrupt people and to bribe – it is so big that it is really a danger for the stability of our society,” Willcocx told The Guardian, adding that Belgium is working to avoid becoming one such narco-state “But it is an evolution and it is a pressure – it is a threat.”
Breitbart News reported in September that the Belgian government was set to deploy its military to Brusells to combat drug gangs in response to the increasingly violent situation in the nation’s multicultural capital. The Guardian noted that, a month later, the Antwerp court published an open letter from an anonymous judge in October.
In its text, written in Dutch, the judge warned that extensive mafia structures had taken hold in Belgium, “becoming a parallel force that challenges not only the police, but the judiciary,” potentially placing the country at risk of evolving into a narco-state.
“We are becoming a state with a lot of corruption, with a lot of threats,” Guido Vermeiren, prosecutor general for the Antwerp and Limburg regions, told The Guardian, and added that he agreed with the anonymous judge’s letter.
Willocx and Vermeiren detailed to The Guardian that the pervasive criminality has spawned violence, shootings, kidnappings, torture and money laundering in the country, with Vermeriren listing several examples, including instances of gangs bribing police and hospital employers to find out confidential information about public servants, such as their addresses — prompting more judges to live in safe houses, some of which are under “permanent protection.”
In another instance, Vermeiren recounted, criminals paid more than 250,000 euro to a port worker to move a single container, noting that port operators who refuse to help gangs face threats.
“They received letters, photos of their children. There were attacks at their homes with homemade explosives,” Vermeiren said.
Vermeiren also warned that gangs groom young people, help them find jobs in the port, and then put pressure on them to do their bidding. He detailed that children “as young as 13” have been paid small sums to break into the port and steal cocaine, and said that the gangs “are not interested in what happens with those people.”
“We really have a problem and we should make more investments in staff and in other resources to cope with it,” Willocx stressed.
The Guardian, citing information from Europol, reported that more than 70 percent of the cocaine that entered Europe in 2024 did so through Antwerp and Rotterdam. The outlet attributed Belgium’s drug problems to surges of cocaine produced in South America — particularly Colombia, the world’s top producer of the drug, and a country that experienced a record-breaking surge in cocaine production in 2023 according to the United Nations.
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