Drugs threaten stability in Guinea-Bissau

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau, Nov. 16 (UPI) -- The failed West African state of Guinea-Bissau, the world's fifth-poorest nation, is in the grip of Colombian drug cartels and others funneling cocaine to Europe.

U.N. officials recently warned the Security Council that the country's fragile political stability, shaken earlier this year by the assassination of its president and several other leading figures, is being threatened by drug trafficking and organized crime.

And the trouble seems to be spreading around the region.

"West Africa is now on the verge of becoming a source of drugs, not only a transit area," declared Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. "Organized crime is growing indigenous roots."

The fear is that Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony with a population of some 1.5 million, is well on the way to becoming Africa's first narco-state.

Nigeria has traditionally been the center of West Africa's narcotics trade, but the South American cartels have in recent years targeted the largely poverty-stricken, war-ravaged countries along the region's so-called Gold Coast.

But now that the traditional smuggling routes into the United States and Europe through the Caribbean and Mexico have become too dangerous, the South American cartels are using Guinea-Bissau and its neighbors as the back door to Europe, the world's second-largest narcotics market after North America.

The ramshackle country is the nearest landfall in Africa for the cartel shipments carried by aircraft and fast boats from Venezuela, the South American hub for trans-Atlantic smuggling operations.

Since 2003 this clandestine trade has mushroomed. Earlier this year counter-narcotics agencies estimated that one-quarter of the cocaine used in Western Europe passed through West Africa.

Much of that goes through Guinea-Bissau, using jungle airstrips built by the Portuguese military during a 13-year colonial war that ended with independence in 1974, or its archipelago of 82 outlying islands, largely unmonitored.

Since there is no navy to patrol them, the islets are ideal transit points for the smugglers, who thrive in a country where the rule of law barely exists and corruption is rife. There isn't even a prison.

Since 2003 virtually all the drugs seized in Africa have been found along the Gold Coast.

In 1998-2003 some 1,300 pounds of cocaine a year were seized in Africa. In the first nine months of 2008 alone, the figure was 5.6 tons -- and that's considered only the tip of the iceberg.

In recent months, according to U.N. investigators, there's been a new twist -- Asian cartels are pushing heroin the other way, back across the Atlantic to the U.S. market.

Guinea-Bissau is now a nirvana for the narcotics cartels, which have become so embedded that politicians and the country's ragtag armed forces are generally believed to be deeply involved with the traffickers.

The country's leaders have constantly fought over Guinea-Bissau's meager resources, and there have been numerous coups over the years. But the hands of the drug cartels were seen in a particularly murderous episode earlier this year.

It began March 1 with the assassination of the army chief, Gen. Tagme Na Waie in a time-bomb explosion in army headquarters in Bissau, the capital.

The following day President Joao Bernardo Vieira, who took power in 2005, was shot dead in his residence by soldiers loyal to Na Waie, his longtime tribal enemy and political rival who had accused him of involvement in the narcotics trade.

In June presidential candidate Baciro Dabo and former Defense Minister Helder Proenca were assassinated on the eve of the launch of an election campaign.

Despite the political tension triggered by the killings, the country managed to hold peaceful elections, and President Malam Bacai Sanha was inaugurated on Sept. 8.

But the drug barons are still operating unhindered and seemingly employing the divide-and-rule tactics the Portuguese colonists once used against those who fought for independence in the 1960s and early '70s.

The U.N.'s Costa draws a parallel between the cocaine trade and the slave trade that drew the European powers to the region two centuries ago.

"In the 19th century, Europe's hunger for slaves devastated West Africa," he said. "Two hundred years later, its growing appetite for cocaine could so the same."