Word: spain
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...consumption of the drug has tailed off, according to U.N. figures released in June. Although only 3% of Europeans report having taken cocaine, according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction in Lisbon, officials say the figures are far higher in urban areas of Britain, Spain and the Netherlands, and that it's gaining popularity across Europe. Cocaine use is now higher in Spain than in the U.S., according to the U.N., and authorities fear that the Continent may be heading down the same path from which the U.S. has just started to emerge. Some admit that...
Europe's open borders are a strong draw for traffickers, because they allow smugglers to move with relative ease across the Continent, which contains millions of people with money to spend. The strong euro is also a lure. A kilogram of uncut cocaine wholesales for about $40,000 in Spain - roughly double the U.S. price. (In Russia and Norway, one kilogram can fetch up to $120,000.) Divided into street-sized amounts, a kilogram can earn five times those figures. Since moving in on Europe in the mid-'90s, the cartels - overwhelmingly Colombian, but also Venezuelan and Mexican - have hugely...
...European governments are faced with the challenge of outwitting traffickers thousands of kilometers away. "They are looking for safer routes and methods," says María Marcos, director of Spain's Intelligence Center Against Organized Crime in Madrid. The routes and methods vary. Some cocaine is shipped on large vessels directly across the Atlantic, often having been processed at sea. Marcos says this cocaine is sometimes dropped overboard attached to floating buoys, then collected by Africa-based traffickers. The rest is flown from Latin America on twin-prop planes to West Africa, where it is offloaded and shuttled to Europe...
...problems of the Paris banlieue," says Mohamed Laarbi, neighborhood spokesperson, "not of the Casablanca ghettos." He cites a litany of examples of official neglect contributing to the poverty and despair in Príncipe. Still, when a string of suicide bombings struck Casablanca and Algiers this spring, Spain's border police quickly sent extra troops to shore up Ceuta's border with Morocco...
...Spanish government delegate to Ceuta Jenaro Garcia-Arreciado insists the city is safe. "Certainly we're closer to terrorist nuclei, but the threat isn't any greater here than on the mainland. And given all the security forces in Ceuta, we are, paradoxically, one of the safest cities in Spain." He points out that with the help of Morocco, which appoints Ceuta's imams, the city keeps radical messages out of Príncipe's mosques. But Yalila Liazid, director of the Sidi Embarek Koranic school and daughter of Ceuta's most important imam, isn't so sure...