2026-01-07
57 分钟This is The Guardian.
Hi, I'm Jessica Laudis, and I'm the author of The Cartel, The Journalist and the Ganglang Killings that Rock the Netherlands, which was published in 2022.
I became interested in this piece because I reported on the trial of El Chapo Guzman, the leader of the Sinaloa cartel in the US prior to this.
And through covering that trial, I became very interested in illicit economies and what they say about normal societies and normal economies and how they sort of create these parallels almost that operate out of sight but are sometimes almost as large.
And in the case of the air degrees murders, this was a moment of reckoning for Dutch society in which people realized that this thing that had been sort of coexisting, that they had been coexisting with actually was able to kind of puncture this veneer, that this was a society that was without problems.
And while researching, I became very interested in what ideas Dutch society held about itself that were being upheld, how whether or not as the Netherlands was reckoning with this idea that it might be in a situation parallel to one that Italy had been in years before and whether or not it's legal systems, its prisons, it was able to basically handle the level of organized crime that it was now having to deal with.
Well, the amazing thing about this trials, it's not one trial, it's many trials.
The organized crime group that was responsible for the murder has many people involved with it.
And just a couple months ago, people were being arrested for the murder of Peter AirDrivery, is the leader of the, of Taki, the leader of the organization.
is appealing his life sentence and he's looking for lawyers, he's cycled through three lawyers who have all gotten caught up with the legal system for their own involvement in organized crime, which is crazy.
So the trial continues.
It's not going to end anytime soon.
There are complications and wrinkles that keep unfolding.
And meanwhile, the amounts of drugs that are coming into Europe continue to hit record amounts year after year, particularly cocaine.
And what I've been really interested in lately is, in the US, as President Trump has gotten into a very public spat with the president of Colombia about cocaine production, the US has been pulling aid from Colombia, which is the world's foremost producer of cocaine.
And a lot of this is ending up in Europe.
So there are these geopolitical dynamics that stand off between the US and Colombia, could potentially end up with a surge of cocaine into Europe.
On the other end of this, we see through the Erdovris trial how European societies are not totally prepared to deal with this even several years on after the killing of Erdovris.
This episode contains strong language.
The cartel, the journalist and the gangland killings that rocked the Netherlands by Jessica Laudis.