[Quartz] Mozambique only has one reliable road running from the north to the south of the country, and yet that road has become the backbone of the lucrative heroin trade.
Heroin is likely Mozambique’s largest export since the end of the war, according to a new report that details this underground industry. Officially, its two largest exports in 2016 were raw aluminum and coal, worth $378 million and $678 million respectively. Electricity exports also made $378 million in 2016. Exporting heroin brings in about $20 million per ton, with estimates ranging from 10 to 40 tons of the drug moving through Mozambique each year, according to a new report.
In the more than two decades since the end of Mozambique’s civil war the heroin trade has developed into a tightly regulated network operated by connected families and allegedly sanctioned by the political elite, according to "The Heroin Coast: A political economy along the eastern African seaboard," a report by the Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime published this week. |