How Illegal Fishing Fuels Cartels, Collapses Communities, and Threatens Global Security: A Law Enforcement Crisis

Environmental crimes like illegal fishing fund drug cartels, displace communities, and destabilize nations. Law enforcement leaders can no longer afford to ignore the evidence. 

When Jacques Cousteau first plunged into the Mediterranean with his iconic red cap and camera, he called the sea “a realm of silence and peace.” But the silence he cherished has been shattered—not by the hum of submarines or the roar of industry, but by the growl of transnational crime syndicates turning the ocean into a highway for drugs, weapons, and human suffering.  

The romantic vision of environmental crime as a “victimless” offense has crumbled. Today, illegal fishing isn’t just stealing fish—it’s bankrolling cartels, destabilizing nations, and trapping millions in cycles of desperation. And law enforcement is racing to catch up.

Illegal fishing, although yet to be considered under the umbrella of environmental crimes in international fora, isn’t just an environmental issue—it’s a direct pipeline to organized crime, forced labor, and terrorism.

The problem isn’t merely that environmental crimes ”converge” with other offenses. It’s that they cause them. When foreign trawlers pillage fish stocks off Senegal, fishermen turn to smuggling migrants to Europe. When cartels poison rivers in Colombia with illegal mining runoff, farmers become cocaine couriers. And when Southeast Asian fishing boats vanish into unmonitored waters, they resurface carrying methamphetamine instead of tuna.  

After years of training law enforcement, I have come to the stark realization that we may find the fish when we look for it on an illegal boat, but miss the suffering of trafficked victims, barrels of smuggled fuel, and tons of cocaine because we look at it from the wrong angle. 

We may find the drug mule at sea, the one pushed to the brink of crime by environmental degradation and cartel threats, but miss the heads of the cartel. 

Law enforcement agencies globally are grappling with a fragmented understanding of this crisis. To dismantle these networks, we must confront the evidence—and recognize that saving ecosystems is synonymous with saving lives. it does not stop at the tree in illegal logging cases, or the fish in illegal fishing cases. 

The Ghost Boats of West Africa

In 2020, 15-year-old Ousmane Faye died at sea as his father tried to smuggled him to Europe on a Senegalese fishing pirogue. He dreamt of becoming a footballer, only to meet his fate at sea. His body was thrown overboard, his father sentenced to one month in jail. “I wanted to surprise my wife,” he told the court… 

This wasn’t an anomaly, it is a pattern. According to the UN, 40,000 migrants made it to the Canary Islands in 2023, 1,000 perished at sea. 

This is the climax of a decade-long collapse. Foreign trawlers, many operating illegally, had stripped Senegal’s waters bare. Senegalese fishermen could no longer catch enough to survive.  

It does not stop at the smuggling of migrants, many of which are fishermen, but it spills over to the trafficking of illicit substances. When people are desperate, they are more vulnerable and may turn to crime. 

$2.3 billion lost annually to illegal fishing in the region, which I have calculated myself alongside law enforcement colleagues and researchers from the region, money that flows straight into criminal networks 

With no fish, fishermen turn to to the only “employers” left: cartels offering life-changing sums to smuggle cocaine to Europe to the United States, or any other destination that would guarantee some income.

Manual, an Ecuadorian fisherman who was jailed in the United States for transporting cocaine, had received $10,000 from a cartel in Ecuador. As a fisherman, he made 50$ per 15 days. The math is brutal, but so are the consequences of the criminalization that is driven not by opportunity but by scarcity, environmental degradation, and despair.    

Now just for an instant, picture yourself desperate, with a whole family to feed, frustrated at the lack of action by your government, with a skill that you cannot use anywhere else but the sea, what would you do?

Meth, Mercury, and Maritime Highways

Half a world away, in the turquoise waters of Southeast Asia, another shadow economy thrives. Fishing boats once used to haul tuna now transport methamphetamine. According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), 70% of meth seized in 2021-2022 traveled on fishing vessels. Crews are often coerced, threatened, or afraid of saying no. 

The pattern repeats in Latin America. In the Amazon, illegal gold mining—controlled by Colombian cartels—poisons rivers with mercury, displacing Indigenous communities. 

Even marine protected areas aren’t safe. 

Obviously, convergence cannot be denied. Drug traffickers in South and Latin America finance and provide logistical support for illegal gold mining operations across the region, including on protected territories, expanding into illegal logging and trafficking in wildlife (including plants, insects and animals). These crimes are often accompanied by other forms of crime such as bribery, extortion, fraud and money-laundering to homicide, violent assault, sexual violence and forced. 

But is convergence the sole reality? 

“We Were Fishermen First” 

In the 2000s, Somalia’s coastline became a free-for-all. Foreign trawlers from Asia and Europe pillaged $300 million worth of tuna and shrimp annually, leaving local nets empty. Illegal trawling not only fueled the emergence of piracy in Somalia, but it directly created it. 

The names of the very first pirate groups that would ask for a meager ransom from captured illegal trawlers to keep the owners out of trouble, were in fact a testament to the intentions of said pirates, the National Volunteer Coastguard or Somalia, or the Somali Marines. 

The lesson? Environmental crime doesn’t just harm ecosystems—it breeds violence… it kills people, and economies.