Former drug traffickers reveal their methods to import meth and cocaine into the Pacific, as authorities look to turn the tide on smuggling
By Tonga reporter Marian Kupu, Samoa reporter Adel Fruean and the Pacific Local Journalism Network’s Nick Sas Australian Broadcasting Company September 4, 2024
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-05/tonga-samoa-drugs-meth-cocaine-traffickers/104298376
Senituli* describes it as “easy” — that was, until he got caught.
Sitting in a bare room inside Tonga’s only prison, wearing a traditional Tongan short-sleeve shirt, the former drug trafficker is not the image of deep-rooted criminality you’d expect.
For one, he’s at retirement age and the soft-spoken 67-year-old grandfather was still trafficking until he was caught in 2019.
It isn’t until Senituli describes, calmly and methodically, how he routinely brought 10kg bags of crystal meth and cocaine from the United States into Tonga, and then to the New Zealand market, that his true nature is revealed.
For Senituli, trafficking was all about working “contacts” — in this case, paying off airport workers to allow him to import drugs.
“I was working at the airport in Los Angeles and we had plenty of baggage handlers [on the take] there,” he told the ABC’s The Pacific program.
“We had them in Fiji and here in Tonga too.
“Everywhere I went — even to Europe — I was connected to people there. Even connected with pilots, air hostesses I worked with, I would give them a share of course, a dealer’s share.”
In a rare insight into the strategies used by criminal networks in the Pacific region, the ABC spoke to a number of former drug traffickers and dealers, such as Senituli, about how they manipulated often under-resourced border controls and isolated ports and airports, to bring drugs into the region.
It is part of what is now being described as the “Pacific drug highway”.
Experts say drug cartels and outlaw motorcycle gangs are now targeting nations such as Tonga and neighbouring island countries Fiji and Samoa to import huge amounts of methamphetamine and cocaine.
They are bringing drugs into the Pacific, using these countries as transit points as they attempt to smuggle product into the huge lucrative markets of Australia and New Zealand.
For another prisoner, Sione*, in jail for seven years for trafficking, the reason Tongans are being targeted is simple.
“We’re poor,” he said.
“It was an easy way of people making a lot of money.
“[The importing of drugs] is pretty widespread.
“Regardless of what the police are doing, I don’t think it’s going to stop … it’s never going to stop.”
He said he would pay off customs officers to allow the drugs in.
“Everybody loves money, money gives everybody power, gives everybody what they want,” Sione said.
“So that’s [why] it happened. This [paying off customs officials] is where it comes from.”
‘It doesn’t stand still’
Both Sione and Senituli were caught and jailed before the drug trafficking trade became much more organised and lucrative.
Today, they believe it is far more organised.
And in Tonga, it has spread to the world of outlaw motorcycle gangs.
Police say they disrupted a move to establish the Comancheros gang in Tonga with a drug bust last month seizing several kilograms of methamphetamine.
Two of the 17 people arrested in the raids were allegedly Comancheros gang members, and police confiscated dozens of Comancheros jackets, T-shirts and patches.
n announcing the arrests, Tonga police said the outlaw motorcycle group had grown its presence in the country and was involved in illegal activities.
A recent Lowy Institute report said organised crime groups from outside the Pacific had played a central role in the region’s drug market, driving growth in local drug production and consumption.
And as some Pacific nations struggle with international drug smuggling operations, leaders at the Pacific Islands Forum last week endorsed a new Australia-funded policing initiative to bolster law enforcement in the region.
In announcing the decision, Tonga’s Prime Minister Siaosi Sovaleni said the region needed a “Pacific-owned and Pacific-led” initiative to tackle its increasingly serious criminal challenges.
And Pacific Island countries are looking to disrupt drug trafficking before it comes ashore.
Australia’s Chief of Navy Mark Hammond told the ABC that drug trafficking in the region was a challenge that “doesn’t stand still”.
It’s very expensive, time-consuming and challenging to deal with it once it gets ashore,” he said.
“To the greatest extent we can disrupt these criminal activities at sea, before the drugs come ashore and affect our families and communities, that’s in all of our shared interests.”
On Wednesday, the US assistant secretary for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, Todd Robinson, said there were “very serious criminal networks” operating in the region.
Mr Robinson is heading to Tonga this week to discuss policing in the region, as Pacific countries continue to call for more help to police their borders and vast ocean.
While in Fiji, its government is talking about setting up a specialist drug enforcement agency to combat drug trafficking and criminal networks operating in the country.
A massive mountain’
Over in Samoa, the problem of drug importation is leading to addiction in communities — and it’s being met via a traditional approach.
So fed up with drugs infiltrating his community, the mayor of Faleatiu, Matagi Tufanua Pati, has implemented a uniquely Pacific system in his village.
“Within our village, Faleatiu, there are over 10 families that do these things, drugs,” he said.
“The punishments that our village has implemented for those found with cannabis or growing it is 200 pigs and in the form of cash it’s $2,000 tala [$1,100].”
The village has also started to station guards at its gates to physically stop drugs from coming in.
“We have a boom barrier located in the entrance of the inland road of the village,” he said.
During evening prayers, men guard the village until midnight.
ddiction services team leader at The Salvation Army Samoa, Sailivao Aukusitino Senio, said clients have told him meth has become widely available in the country.
“Our fear is having young people involved with drugs,” he said.
“We’re facing a massive mountain here. So we need 10 other or more services, like the Salvation Army here,” he said.
“But we also need to be careful, we need to have properly trained clinicians.”
Back at the Tongan prison, drug trafficker Senituli says he is “full of regret” about his role in trafficking drugs.
In 2019 he was found with 2kg of meth in Tonga, on the way to New Zealand — one of his smaller packages.
He was sentenced to 12 years in prison.
“My family was shocked with what happened, they didn’t know the work I was doing,” he said.
“I appeared to them as a good person, but I’m actually dangerous inside.”
He says he hopes people learn from his mistakes — and no one follows his path.
“I’ve ended up in prison as a result, I see the suffering of the people,” he said.
“There’s a lot of people who use drugs that don’t know how bad it can be.
“But one of my regrets is that there’s a lot of good work that I could have done before all this.”
*To protect the families of those involved in these small communities the ABC has used pseudonyms for the prisoners