While open drug trade of cannabis, hash, and soft drugs is tolerated in Christiania, an autonomous region in Copenhagen, Denmark, that all could end if the area can’t clean up its act, the capital city’s mayor warned.

Copenhagen, Denmark Lord Mayor Sophie Hæstorp Andersen told local paper Ekstra Bladet that growing violence has to end or she will shut down cannabis and drug trade in Christiania.

The Guardian reports that Andersen threatened to close Pusher Street’s drug trade if the 1,000 or so people living in the Christiania commune comply with her plan.

Since the 1970s, Christiania or Freetown Christiania in the Christianshavn borough in Copenhagen has been the nation’s “Green Light” district. Think of it as mini Amsterdam, complete with comparable canals and architecture and open tolerance of soft drugs and cannabis. 

Bådsmandsstræde military base on the island of Amager was transformed into a commune in 1973 with an autonomous government. Hippies and anarchists established a Social Democratic government structure and made the area a permanent “social experiment.” The first thing you see when you enter Christiania is a mural of a fan leaf, as well as a fist smashing a hypodermic needle, signifying the area’s rule of no hard drugs. 

Since around 1980 or so, hash—Europe’s popular form of cannabis—has openly been sold on Pusher Street, which is why the area enforced a strict no photo rule. But organized crime sours the picture, and it’s not the utopia it used to be.

“The violence and crime around Pusher Street has now reached a level we neither can nor want to deal with,” Andersen told Ekstra Bladet. “In Copenhagen, I believe we must have room for Christiania. It is both skewed and alternative. It’s creative. But this harsh, organised violence must be written out of the future around Christiania.”

A 23-year-old man was shot and killed in Christiania on October 26, as a rash of violence was reported in the area. It reminds some about a grenade attack in 2009.  “We are afraid that the situation will develop into a gang war in Christiania,” the area’s spokeswoman Hulda Mader said. But keep in mind that Copenhagen at large is one of the safest cities in the world, and that crime is comparably lower than other parts of the world, adding to the reason they don’t want crime entering the picture.

Andersen warned that she’s not playing games anymore. “That is why my message is also that if the Christianites make it clear that they are ready to close Pusher Street and replace it with something else then we in the municipality of Copenhagen are ready to support putting together a plan to find out what should happen to the street.”

After the incident last October, Christiania’s hash trade moved from its original spot on Pusher Street up to near the area’s main entrance. “Enough is enough,” Mader said. “We have disclaimed responsibility for what goes on in Pusher Street. It is not something that we, as private individuals, can oppose. Now there have been repeated episodes of violence, and we simply think that it has become too dangerous for us.”

Christiania is currently run by the Foundation Fristaden Christiania, while the Housing and Social Affairs Agency owns the ramparts and runs the state’s Christiania Secretariat.

A joint dialogue will soon take place between the Foundation Fristaden Christiania, Copenhagen Municipality, Copenhagen Police, the Housing and Social Affairs Agency, and the Castles and Culture Agency. All groups meet regularly. The Technical and Environmental Management in the Municipality of Copenhagen will also work together with the Foundation Fristaden Christiania on the future public housing in Christiania.

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According to a report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “The COVID-19 pandemic had a disruptive effect on drug markets. With international travel severely curtailed, producers struggled to get their product to market. Night clubs and bars were shut as officials ramped up their attempts to control the virus, causing demand to slump for drugs like cocaine that are often associated with those settings.

“However, the most recent data suggests this slump has had little impact on longer-term trends. The global supply of cocaine is at record levels. Almost 2,000 tons was produced in 2020, continuing a dramatic uptick in manufacture that began in 2014, when the total was less than half of today’s levels.”

According to The Guardian, production “of coca, the drug’s base ingredient, spiked 35% in 2020-21, surpassing pre-pandemic levels.”

“The pandemic was a bit of a blip for the expansion of cocaine production, but now it has rebounded and is even higher than what it was before,” said Antoine Vella, a researcher at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and who contributed to the report on cocaine.

The UN report says that the “surge is partly a result of an expansion in coca bush cultivation, which doubled between 2013 and 2017, hit a peak in 2018, and rose sharply again in 2021.

“But it is also due to improvements in the process of conversion from coca bush to cocaine hydrochloride. In parallel, there has been a continuing growth in demand, with most regions showing steadily rising numbers of users over the past decade. Although these increases can be partly explained by population growth, there is also a rising prevalence of cocaine use. Interceptions by law enforcement have also been on the rise, at a higher speed than production, meaning that interdiction has contained the growth of the global amount of cocaine available for consumption,” the report continues. 

While the cocaine trade has long been concentrated in major hubs like Colombia, that might be changing. As Vella told The Guardian, “I think we need to shift away from thinking of cocaine as being a European/North American problem because it’s also very much a South American problem.” 

“The cocaine trade in Colombia was once controlled by just a few major players. As a result of a fragmentation of the criminal landscape following the demobilization of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC) in 2016, it now involves criminal groups of all sizes, structures and objectives. But, signs of consolidation of some of these groups have recently emerged. These developments have led to an increasing presence of foreign actors in Colombia. Mexican and Balkan criminal groups have moved closer to the centre of production to gain access to supplies and wholesale quantities of cocaine,” the report says. “These foreign groups are not aiming to take control of territory. Instead, they are trying to make supply lines more efficient. Their presence is helping to incentivize coca bush cultivation and finance all stages of the supply chain.” 

The report continues: “In established cocaine markets, the proportion of the general population using the drug is high. But these markets only cover around one-fifth of the global population. If the prevalence in other regions increases to match established markets, the number of users globally would increase tremendously because of the large underlying population. This type of market convergence has already been happening in the case of Western and Central Europe, where purity levels and prices have harmonised with the United States, although prevalence of cocaine use in Western and Central Europe has not yet reached the level in the United States.”

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In December, Peru’s president, Pedro Castillo, tried to shut down congress to prevent its members from impeaching him. His orders were not obeyed, and hours later he was arrested on charges of rebellion and conspiracy. Awaiting trial, Castillo is believed to be held in a police prison in Lima – the same police prison that houses another former Peruvian leader, Alberto Fujimori. 

Fujimori, the son of Japanese immigrants, served as president from 1990 until 2000. Like Castillo, he tried to shut down congress while in office. But unlike Castillo, he succeeded. Backed by the army, Fujimori completely rewrote the country’s constitution, and might have remained in power indefinitely had he not been persecuted and imprisoned for human rights violations. Revered as a conservative strongman – the strongest in recent memory – Fujimori began his career as a political outsider. When he announced his first candidacy, no one thought he had any chance of winning. Today, historians argue the only reason he did win – and kept on winning for so long – was because of the man at his side: Vladimiro Montesinos. 

Named after the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, Montesinos was born in 1945 in Arequipa to communist parents who desperately wanted to be perceived as rich and cultured by their neighbors. Understanding that the army was the only way in which ordinary Peruvians could gain wealth and power, Montesinos’ father arranged for his son to enroll at the famed Military School of Chorrillos in Lima. Although he was an unremarkable student, Montesinos’ passion for reading and obsession with acquiring sensitive information helped him become the single most powerful person in Peru. Following a roundabout path through life, one that involved short prison sentences and multiple career changes, Montesinos eventually found himself serving as the head of his country’s central intelligence network – the Servicio de Inteligencia Nacional, or SIN for short – and Alberto Fujimori’s most trusted advisor. During this time, he also presented himself as an indispensable ally to both the CIA and Colombia’s Medellín cartel. 

Montesinos entered the drug trade after he was kicked out of the army for an unauthorized visit to the U.S. Freed from military prison, the disgraced and impoverished young officer started working at the law practice of a family member, where he took on soldiers and police officers accused of drug-related offenses. When Montesinos successfully defended the Medellín cartel member Evaristo Porras Ardiles, he gained the interest (and gratitude) of Pablo Escobar himself. After a bacchanal visit to the latter’s Napoles ranch in Puerto Triunfo, Montesinos was not just defending the cartel in court, but also shipping Peruvian coca leaves into Colombia. Pablo’s brother Roberto claims that Montesinos received between $100,000 and $120,000 per drug flight, and that the cartel donated $1 million to Fujimori’s presidential campaign in the hope of expanding their Peruvian contact’s influence.

Their investment paid off. When Fujimori was sworn in as president of Peru, Montesinos took control of the SIN. According to Rafael Merino, who worked with Montesinos at the intelligence service, his newly appointed boss “contacted the main drug mafias in Colombia and Mexico” as soon as he’d settled into his office. Incarcerated criminals corroborate this story. Said Los Camellos drug ring operator Boris Foguel in an interview from October 2000: “Anyone who did not negotiate with [Montesinos] the right to cross-border operations – that is, pay him multi-million dollar bribes – was persecuted to death by the Peruvian authorities, to the point where they would shoot down in mid-flight small planes loaded with cocaine and dollars.”

As SIN-head, Montesinos played an extremely dangerous and delicate balancing act, accepting money from cartels to keep the drug trade going while at the same time working with both the CIA and the DEA to try and shut everything down. This degree of double-crossing was bound to backfire eventually, and it nearly did in 1996. That year, around 170 kg of cocaine was seized aboard a Peruvian Air Force plane transporting military equipment into Russia. Despite extensive investigations, nobody was ever convicted.  

“All the indications,” write journalists Sally Bowen and Jane Holligan in their watershed book The Imperfect Spy: The Many Lives of Vladimiro Montesinos, which I picked up at a book fair in Puno, on the border between Peru and Bolivia, “are that Montesinos remained personally involved with the illegal drugs trade until the late 1990s, perhaps even until he fled Peru. He had power and insider knowledge of the counter-drug efforts, and he let it be known that his influence was for sale.”

The thing that brought Montesinos all the way to the top – his desire for knowledge and control – also proved to be his downfall. During his political career, Montesinos routinely and secretly filmed himself bribing politicians, judges, and other government employees. His idea was to use these tapes as blackmail if necessary. However, this plan fell apart when, on September 14, 2000, one of these videos ended up in the hands of a Peruvian TV station. Exposed, Montesinos turned into a pariah. When Fujimori, in a futile attempt to save his own reputation, tried to lay off Montesinos, the security chief flat out refused to accept his resignation. Holed up inside the SIN headquarters, he started planning a coup, then fled the country when he realized his chances of success were microscopic. With help from the FBI, Montesinos was captured in Venezuela and extradited to Peru. Held inside a maximum security prison, Montesinos – still alive – is constantly facing additional charges as new evidence of his criminal activities gets unearthed. 

Despite his long-term imprisonment, Vladimiro Montesinos still has considerable influence over Peruvian society. Many of his incriminating tapes were spirited away by allies, and people in power remain loyal to him in fear of those tapes getting leaked. Along with Fujimori, Montesinos continues to be admired by Peruvian conservatives who – similar to Trump’s adherents in America – faithfully deny the irreparable damage he has done to their country, not to mention the countless murders he has authorized. Sitting at a bar with some construction workers from Mancora – a beach town in the north of Peru – one elderly gentleman grabbed my copy of Imperfect Spy and told me, “This book is full of lies!” I didn’t reply. My Spanish wasn’t good enough to tell him why I thought he was wrong. But even if it was, I don’t think it would have been my place to tell him anyway.

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