By: Insight Crime
March 15, 2024
Surinamese drug trafficker Brian Blue remains at large months after InSight Crime exposed his suspected ties to the country’s vice president, showcasing his ability to stay off the radar of Surinamese authorities despite his rising international profile.
Three months after InSight Crime revealed that a US Drug Enforcement Administration special agent suspected that Suriname’s Vice President Ronnie Brunswijk had intervened in an August 2020 drug bust linked to Blue, Suriname authorities have not announced any investigation into the trafficker.
Two Surinamese officials told InSight Crime that Blue continues his business as usual in the Suriname drug trade.
Suriname’s Attorney General’s Office (Openbaar Ministerie – OM) and Police Force (Korps Politie Suriname – KPS) did not respond to InSight Crime inquiries about the case. InSight Crime was unable to contact Blue, who does not maintain a public or online presence. A lawyer who had represented him did not respond before the publication date.
Suriname, South America’s smallest country, has long been an important corridor for transporting cocaine to Europe and other parts of the world. In February 2024, Spanish customs seized 8 tons in a container that had been exported from the port of Paramaribo, Suriname’s capital. In March, authorities in Suriname found over 500 kilograms in an airplane about to take off to the Netherlands, and over two tons of cocaine in an apparent stashing location in a rural area.
Who Is Brian Blue?
For decades, Blue has played a key role in the trade. He was convicted of drug trafficking in Brazil, is the subject of an Interpol Red Notice, and his name has appeared in several international drug trafficking investigations.
Authorities in Suriname briefly investigated Blue over a decade ago. But since then, his ability to avoid law enforcement scrutiny in Suriname has become a defining feature of a career that illustrates how widespread corruption can protect identified traffickers.
Blue’s involvement in the drug trade dates back to the 1990s, when he began working under Dutch-Surinamese cocaine trafficker Piet Wortel, according to a high-level Surinamese security official who investigated Blue and who asked for anonymity out of fear of retribution from Blue and Brunswijk.
Around 2002, police arrested him and two others close to Wortel after receiving a tip about a drug plane in the Tibiti area in Suriname’s vast jungle. Police did not find the drugs, but they did find firearms, boats, fuel, and satellite phones that made them suspect it was a drug case. The suspects were let go due to a lack of evidence, the security official said.
In the same period, Blue also led drug trafficking operations in Suriname for a transnational drug trafficking network exporting cocaine from Colombia to Europe via Venezuela and Brazil, according to a Brazilian court sentence. The sentence also said he frequently traveled to Brazil to settle the details of trafficking operations with his associates.
The scheme ended in 2005 when Brazilian authorities seized two shipments totaling 550 kilograms of cocaine and arrested Blue’s Brazilian partners. Convictions followed in 2010, and Blue, who was never arrested, was sentencedin absentia to 21 years in prison. At some point in the following years, he was also put on the Interpol Red Notice list.
An Expanding Network
Blue’s conviction in Brazil apparently did little to sever his ties to the drug business.
In 2010, former dictator Desi Bouterse returned to power as Suriname’s president. At the same time, the Suriname Police Force (Korps Politie Suriname – KPS) appeared to lose interest in Blue’s activities, according to August van Gobbel, a former police commissioner who headed the KPS intelligence bureau and later the serious crimes department during those years.
“Between 2010 and 2020 he was not on the radar of the intelligence department of the police,” he said.
Van Gobbel added that he did not recall Blue having an Interpol Red Notice at that time. Interpol does not always publish its red notices, so it can be hard to track.
Still, foreign law enforcement kept repeatedly connecting Blue to the cocaine trade.
In 2012, Dutch police tapped the phone of Blue’s 1990s ally, Piet Wortel, as part of a criminal investigation. In the recorded conversations, Wortel mentioned one of Blue’s nicknames, “Beppie,” in relation to a plane with 400 kilograms of cocaine that had broken down in the Tibiti region of Suriname’s jungle.
Wortel also said he asked “Bouta” and “Dino” for help with the shipment. Police believed Wortel was referring to Desi Bouterse, who had been convicted of cocaine trafficking in absentia in the Netherlands in 1999, and his son, Dino, who was later convicted of cocaine trafficking in the United States in 2015, where he is still in prison.
Bouterse’s intervention in the 2012 incident saved the stranded cocaine, after which the then-president received half of the load, Wortel said in the recorded conversation. Police did not receive any reports about stranded drug planes in Tibiti in that period, according to a KPS spokesperson interviewed by media outlet de Ware Tijd.
Several years later, Brazilian investigators linked Blue to drug trafficking during 2017 and 2018. This time, police suspected Blue was an essential contact in Suriname for some of Brazil’s biggest cocaine traffickers, including Luiz Carlos da Rocha, alias “Cabeça Branca.”
Brazilian authorities dismantled much of the Brazilian part of the network. Despite strong suspicions that Blue was the Surinamese trafficker referred to as “Magro” in taped conversations, the Brazilian investigators did not bring charges against him.
“We could not get enough confirmation to take him to court … although we are very convinced that it was him,” a Brazilian federal police investigator who worked on the case but wished to remain anonymous told InSight Crime.
While investigating Blue, Brazilian investigators attempted to collaborate with Surinamese authorities, but this strategy backfired. In intercepted conversations, the Brazilians heard the traffickers talking about confidential information from the investigation they had shared with the KPS.
Brazilian police also overheard traffickers boasting about their protection in Suriname.
“Here we rule half the land… The other half is in our pocket,” a Brazilian trafficker said in a taped phone call.
Still at Large
The arc of Blue’s career suggests his ability to escape justice depends largely on his influence and contacts within the Surinamese government.
“Blue surely has multiple corrupt police officers in his pocket,” a Surinamese law enforcement official, who wished to remain anonymous, told InSight Crime.
Even after President Chandrikapersad Santokhi entered office in July 2020, replacing Bouterse, Blue has managed to avoid being targeted by authorities.
Santokhi had a reputation as a crime fighter from his period as Suriname’s chief of police, boasting successes that included the arrests of major drug traffickers such as Guyanese Roger Khan. But Santokhi’s Vice President Ronnie Brunswijk’s ties to the drug trade are well-documented and longstanding. In 1999, he was sentenced for cocaine trafficking in the Netherlands and in France. As recently as February 2024, a police officer who had also been his bodyguard was convicted for drug trafficking.
Blue appears to have benefitted from a relationship with Brunswijk.
Just weeks after Brunswijk and Santohkhi entered office, in August 2020, DEA investigators shared information with Colombian counterparts about an incident days earlier in which they suspected Brunswijk had intervened to retrieve a seized cocaine load. The high-level Surinamese security official confirmed the account to InSight Crime. The investigator said Blue owned the load and paid Brunswijk for the intervention.
When InSight Crime revealed this in November 2023, the story made headlines in Suriname for weeks and spurred Brunswijk to issue public denials and threats to sue InSight Crime. But the revelations came as little surprise to many in Suriname, as it was far from the first time that top political leaders had been tied to the drug trade.
The government is unlikely to want an investigation into Blue, which could damage the already fragile relationship between Brunswijk and Santokhi, who have little in common apart from a need for each other’s support to keep the governing coalition alive.
Public discontent with a seemingly untouchable elite has been further strengthened by economic hardship in the aftermath of Suriname’s 2020 economic crisis, while possible social investment financed with massive projected oil profits is still years away.
“The bottom line is that Suriname is in the middle of sorting out its future, public discontent is high, and a younger generation is increasingly frustrated by what they see as the corrupt nature of the state and government,” Scott MacDonald, founding director of the Caribbean Policy Consortium, told InSight Crime.
Blue’s proven ties to the drug trade and possible connection to Brunswijk show an unwillingness to tackle powerful criminal players and high-level corruption.
“The case of Brian Blue, with alleged ties to the vice president, only reinforces a negative public perception. If nothing else, the optics could not be worse,” MacDonald said.