MARSEILLE, France – They work as drug dealers, but the notes they slip to customers in drug baggies begging for help — and their pleas to the police — tell a very different story.
Hundreds of teenagers, often estranged from their families, have been ensnared by violent drug gangs in Marseille, France’s second-largest city.
After being recruited through social media from across the country to act as look-outs or street corner dealers, they soon find themselves trapped.
Authorities in the southern port city have struggled to stem the flow of young people into gangs where they are exploited and abused, a pattern that emerged shortly before COVID.
“We often see minors who have been severely beaten, held captive and who can no longer get out of these networks,” said Marseille’s public prosecutor, Nicolas Bessone, who now openly refers to the practice as human trafficking as authorities shift their approach.
Cases that lead to prosecution are rare, as victims almost never file complaints.
“There’s a code of silence, no one reports it,” said Bessone.
The climate of fear has been further deepened by the assassination last month of Mehdi Kessaci, a 20-year-old who wanted to be a police officer, who was likely killed to silence his older brother Amine, an anti-drug campaigner.
Hakim — not his real name — traveled south from the Paris region at the end of 2020 when he was 15 thinking to make a fast buck, but things quickly went wrong.
