Cocaine trafficking is breaking records in Le Havre: 14.3 tonnes seized at the port in 2024 compared to only 5.5 in 2023 and 10 tonnes in 2022. Traffic made possible with the complicity of some, notably the dockers who work on the port, but the subject is taboo, the law of silence reigns. Franceinfo spoke with a dockworker who was involved in cocaine trafficking.
This man, who wishes to remain anonymous, wants to tell the story of the story. For months, he was approached and threatened directly on his phone, until the day the traffickers showed up in front of his house one morning: “Five hooded men came to get me, they took me away, sequestered me, showing me photos of my children taken in front of their primary school, or of my wife in front of her work. They told me: 'If tomorrow you don't unload not the coke, we'll go after them.'”
The docker finally accepted. Still very marked by this episode, he assures that he did not need the money but the pressure was too great. He pockets the 80,000 euros to do the dirty work. In the process, he was arrested and sentenced and banned from working at the port.
Since 2017, around fifteen dockworkers have been kidnapped in Le Havre according to the judicial police. A sad reality for Guillaume Routel, lawyer who defends many dockworkers: “What was, ten years ago, questioned by the magistrates themselves who thought it was a false alibi to say: 'I am threatened', today we know that it is true. There are threats, there is intimidation. Those who are cavalier, that is to say they handle containers, are obviously particularly targeted because they are key players in the organization.
“There is also, it must be recognized, money. But money is sometimes money that has been promised to them, without them even seeing the color.”
-Guillaume Routel, lawyer for several dockersat franceinfo
Even the CGT Dockers, which has a monopoly, is turning its back on this issue. After much insistence, this is what Johann Fortier, their general secretary, replied: “We don't want to talk about it because it's such a scourge, it ruins our lives. Obviously, we send messages every day to say that we must resist but it's obvious to say it, it's is less obvious to do so. I do not have the mandate to speak on behalf of the dock workers, I am just their representative. The judicial police have set up a specific line so that dockers can call for help but according to our information, they have not received any calls.
In reality, since the murder of a docker four years ago, Allan Affagard, 40 years old, father of four children, kidnapped, kidnapped and beaten to death, no one dares to speak. The man had contacted the police to denounce the pressure. Myria Le Petit is the lawyer for the Affagard family: “He even filed a complaint and then a few months later, we know the end of the story, unfortunately terrible. There is a before and an after. This affair was an explosion for the world of dockers, for colleagues . And for his family, I don't even talk about it. I say that there was a before and an after, but on the other hand, for the traffic, it didn't stop anything.
And according to another dockers' lawyer, Valérie Giard, the pressure continues even during the trials, even in the courtrooms: “We come to listen to what you say, we come to listen if you swing, if you give information on people who are not in the file.” Relatives of drug traffickers come to physically intimidate the dockers so that they remain silent in front of the judges.
