Cartels traffick meth through ‘Pacific highway’ to Fiji villages
WRITTEN FOR AND PUBLISHED BY ABC AUSTRALIA, An indepth look into Fiji’s effort to fight Mexican drug cartels trafficking meth through the Pacific Drug Highway. The first part of a multi country colloboration between members of the Pacific Local Journalism Network of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
By Lice Movono and Nick Sas
Sun 1 SepSunday 1 September
It’s Manoa Ravouvou’s job to protect his village.
As the “head man” of his home on the outskirts of Lautoka, just north of Fiji’s tourist hub of Nadi, he checks in visitors and makes sure his community is clean and tidy.
But lately, he’s had much bigger issues to deal with.
“We found the needle only one or two metres from the village,” Mr Ravouvou told the ABC.
“The drugs, they’re damaging the minds of our children … and then they’ll have no future.
“That’s why we’re trying [our hardest] to protect our village from drugs.”
Mr Ravouvou is not alone.
Across Fiji, once quiet, innocent villages and towns are encountering a new menace: methamphetamine.
It’s been deemed a national crisis, with drug-related deaths, both from addiction and suspected gang activity, on the rise.
Experts have reported meth use in children as young as 10 years old, with meth use spreading wildly among teens and young adults.
In Fijian villages that have never encountered this type of addiction before, they’re at a loss.
“It’s a very sad thing for our communities,” Fiji’s Home Affairs Minister, Pio Tikoduadua, told the ABC.
“It’s affecting our children, our youth, in a big way. We fear for their future.
“Because we are small, even the smallness of our [drugs] problem is really big for Fiji. I don’t want it to be downplayed, we want to be honest about it.
“This problem of drugs is everywhere. It’s everywhere.”
And the problem starts 10,000 kilometres away, on the other side of the Pacific.
‘Whatever it takes’
For Fiji, being in the middle of the vast Pacific ocean — with its crystal blue waters and pristine reefs — is part of its appeal for the almost half a million Australian tourists that visit the country every year.
But these days, it has become its major vulnerability.
From Mexico and the Americas, drug cartels are targeting the isolated island ports of Fiji — and neighbouring island countries Samoa and Tonga — to import huge amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine.
The ports, which often have under-resourced border controls and a lack of basic detection technologies, are then used as transit points to push drugs onto the lucrative markets of Australia and New Zealand.
Watch the Video storyL Duration: 3 minutes 57 seconds.
It’s being labelled the Pacific “drug highway”.
And now, inevitably, the product is seeping into local Fijian communities, like Mr Ravouvou’s.
Earlier this year, Fiji’s problem was well and truly thrown into the international spotlight.
In one of the biggest drug busts the world has seen, a staggering 5.25 tonnes of methamphetamine was found in two Fijian homes, both just a five-minute drive from Nadi International Airport.
The meth had a market value of roughly $2 billion.
The stash was so big, next door neighbours at one of the homes thought the drug traffickers were simply moving bricks or building supplies.
Police have since charged 13 people, and insiders involved in the case have told the ABC police only stumbled upon the meth after a chance arrest of someone trying to distribute a small proportion of the drugs locally.
The ABC understands prosecutors are investigating the links of those involved to cartels across the world, because the product was due to be smuggled into the Australian market after being taken onto Fiji soil via an on-water barge.
For the head of Fiji’s navy, Commodore Humphrey Tawake, the bust is just a drop in the ocean of what he suspects is rampant activity in the waters of the Pacific.
“These guys (the cartels) are so organised … They’ll do whatever it takes to achieve their mission, they’ve got unlimited resources,” he told the ABC.
“They’ve got the capacity and the money to do it.”
He said private yachts, often owned by Australians, were being used to transport the drugs, with the boats turning off their navigation systems to try to avoid detection.
“It’s a challenge,” he said. “We have 1.3 million square kilometres of ocean to monitor.
“We track the vessels, [and] their routes are well established, but they (the drug smugglers) change them. They’re so smart in how they do it, but we have to be ahead of the game [and] we have to think like them and have to have the right resources and we have to have the right information at the right time.
“I think that’s something we can do better on.”
Captain Tawake said they needed more on-water resources in order to seriously put a dent in the smugglers’ operations.
“We would be much more effective if we had that visibility out at sea,” he said.
“It’s one thing to have this technology, but it’s another thing to be visible out there.”
However the Fijian navy suffered a major setback in June when one of its two Australian-gifted patrol boats, RFNS Paumau, ran aground on its maiden voyage.
It has been out of action since the incident and is still being assessed for repairs, if it can be salvaged at all.
‘Children doing injections’
Back on the streets of Fiji’s capital, Suva, local police say they are increasingly busy dealing with what they call “the white drugs”.
Local police took the ABC on a drive at night to show first-hand what they were dealing with.
On what she says is her regular patrol route, Suva officer Elenoa Digitaki points to a nondescript bus stop close to Fiji’s national parliament building.
“That’s where the children are doing injections,” she said. “Just there, at the back of the bus stop.”
Later, on a walk around Suva’s waterfront, she points to another two regular hangouts for users — both in the open and both just metres from the CBD.
“This is where they go,” she said. “We see it all the time.”
Aporosa Lutunauga, the Fiji Police Force assistant commissioner, says there has been a big change over the past decade.
“Before, it was just the green drugs,” he said.
“That was then. Things have changed.
“Now we have a big challenge to fight this new menace that is with us, and that is the white drugs.
“We are not a narcotic state. We are not, say, Philadelphia. We are not Chicago. We are far from that. But we need to have all hands on deck to fight this.”
Fijian Home Affairs Minister Pio Tikoduadua says it all adds up to a critical conversation Fiji has to have.
“The conversation is, how can we stop this thing from going on? How can we save our children? How can we eradicate drugs from our community?
“It gives me great hopes that the community are rising up to confront this problem and save their children.”
Posted Sun 1 Sep 2024 at 7:17amSunday 1 Sep 2024 at 7:17am, updated Mon 2 Sep 2024 at 3:23pm
AN ABC Story | PORTFOLIO LICE MOVONO
