Europe is trying
to stop Guinea-Bissau's drug trade by throwing money at the traffickers.
January 6, 2016
BISSAU,
Guinea-Bissau — The headquarters of the Judicial Police, the government agency
charged with prosecuting Guinea-Bissau’s war on drugs, sits on a dusty street
in the middle of this deceptively quiet West African capital city. Inside is
the country’s only drug-testing laboratory, a recent addition thanks to a surge
in European Union funding to curb the flow of illegal narcotics north toward
its borders.
Without guards or
metal detectors, the lab hardly feels like the front line in a war against
violent criminals thought to be trafficking billions of dollars worth of
cocaine each year. But officials say the assorted vials and testing equipment
here represent an important, if limited, first step toward routing the South
American cartels that have ventured thousands of miles from their home turf to
stake out an ideal drug transit point in one of Africa’s weakest states.
“We want to
diminish 80 to 90 percent of the drug trade flowing into Guinea-Bissau,” said
Sargento Natcha, the lab’s soft-spoken coordinator, as he tested a small sample
of cocaine with a kit bought with donor funds. “The EU has promised to send
more equipment.”
But the odds are
stacked against Natcha and his team at the lab. Key players in the country’s
notoriously corrupt government — the same government that must act on any leads
produced by the lab — are thought to be backing the drug trade. The United
Nations has dubbed Guinea-Bissau, an impoverished nation of 1.7 million,
Africa’s first “narco-state.” For decades, its governing elite is known to have
opened the country to South American drug barons who use it as a base for
smuggling vast quantities of cocaine to Europe, according to the United Nations. According to the United
Nations, 60 percent of the cocaine consumed in Western Europe makes its
way through West Africa.
The routes are
varied, with some drugs transported through the Sahara — passing through Mali,
Mauritania, Algeria, and Morocco and then on to Southern Europe — and other
shipments crossing the Atlantic bound for the United States. Guinea-Bissau is a
key hub in both cases. According to a 2012 U.N. report, an estimated 50 Colombian drug
lords were based in Guinea-Bissau,
operating alongside members of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel. The report estimated that they were flying 2,200
pounds of cocaine into the West African nation every night.
Smugglers have
gained a foothold in the tiny West African nation in part because of its
persistent political instability, experts say. Since independence in 1974, the
military has participated in nine coups or attempted coups and no elected
political leader has ever served a full term in office. Current President José
Mário Vaz fired two prime ministers in 2015, deepening a political crisis that
has strengthened the resolve of the military brass to protect cocaine
trafficking as their key source of income.
“During military
dictatorships [that lasted until 1994] the military was used to getting
benefits [from drug trafficking],” said Miguel Trovoada, head of the U.N.
Integrated Peacebuilding Office in Guinea-Bissau, adding that desire to control
the drug trade has fostered political instability since then. “In all the
coups, the military didn’t take over governance responsibilities, leaving that
to others.”
Much of the
country’s ruling class is now thought to be implicated in the trade, forming
what Mark Shaw, a professor of criminology at the University of Cape Town in
South Africa, calls an “elite protection network” for the cartels. Senior
military figures in particular provide security and logistics to South American
drug cartels in exchange for money and drugs, according to Shaw.
Examples of
corrupt military officials abound: In 2013, the former army chief of staff,
Gen. Antonio Indjai, was indicted by a federal grand jury in New York for trying to
import cocaine into the United States, though he denies the allegations and
remains a free man in Guinea-Bissau. Likewise, former navy chief José
Américo Bubo Na Tchuto was captured in a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
sting in 2013 and a year later pleaded guilty to importing narcotics, including cocaine, into the
United States.
The international
community has gradually woken up to the problem. The United States, European
Union, and United Nations, in particular, have invested billions of dollars in
recent years in battling the drug trade and supporting development. In addition
to Natcha’s lab, aid dollars have helped set up a transnational crime unit that
supports the government’s anti-corruption department, according to Mário José
Maia Moreira, the representative of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
in Guinea-Bissau. Moreira said his office is also working to obtain boats that
can be used to conduct seizures, since the country’s counternarcotics units
currently lack operational vessels.
But progress has
been slow. Moreira estimates that dozens of tons of cocaine still move through
Guinea-Bissau every year, a figure that he reckons is less than in the past but
still worth more than “the entire annual military budget of many West African
countries.” This year, only 11 kilograms of cocaine have been seized so far —
or a tiny fraction of the estimated total that flows through the country en
route to European countries every year.
“If you were a
drug smuggler from South America, wouldn’t you choose Guinea-Bissau,
considering the system and the fragility of the country itself?” said Moreira.
“The authorities are still very fragile in terms of resources.”
A recent report
by the respected Jane’s
Intelligence Review confirms Moreira’s assessment. In addition to
accusing the military for being “complicit” in the drug trade, the report
concludes that Guinea-Bissau “remains an important hub for cocaine trafficking
to Europe, despite the anti-trafficking initiatives of the United Nations and
other international organisations.”
Outside the
capital city, drug smugglers operate virtually unmolested by authorities. In
the fishing village of Kassumba, a known smuggling hub near the border with
Guinea, law enforcement has no visible presence at all. White sandy beaches and
palm trees give the impression of calm, but the reality is very different:
According to the UNODC’s Moreira, smugglers drop sealed packages containing
small quantities of cocaine into the coastal waters here. The packages are
retrieved by local fishermen and passed on to military officials and politicians,
who oversee their safe transport to Bissau.
Those members of
the security services that are not a part of the official smuggling racket
remain woefully under-equipped. On Bubaque Island in the Bijagós island chain,
an archipelago of mostly uninhabited land known as a center for smugglers, five
hours by slow boat from Bissau, a soldier named Djibril Sanha explained how
he’d been tasked with combating drug trafficking and illegal fishing, but had
been given virtually no resources.
“We have no
boats, no communication devices, and only our mobile phone,” he said in an
interview. “I don’t understand what I’m doing here. You give us a head and
stomach but no legs.”
Despite billions
of dollars spent over the last decade by international donors, the weakness of
West African states like Guinea-Bissau continues to attract opportunistic
traffickers. Much of the aid has simply been swallowed up by corrupt officials
who are in on the game; some of what was promised was never disbursed because of
fears that this might happen.
Meanwhile, collaboration between drug traffickers and the government has only
deepened, according to U.N. officials.
Back in the
drug-testing lab in Bissau, the scale of the challenge before officials like
Natcha was clearly on display. The coordinator furnished a list of names of
traffickers who had been caught at the airport in 2015 with cocaine in their
stomachs: None was carrying more than 2.5 kilograms (about 5.5 pounds). But
more importantly, none had any known affiliation with the government.
Photo credit: TONY KARUMBA/AFP/Getty Images
Correction, Jan. 6, 2016: Europe is trying to stop Guinea-Bissau’s drug
trade. An earlier version of this article misspelled the country’s name in the
subheading as Guinea-Bisseau.
Fonte: http://foreignpolicy.com/
Fonte: http://foreignpolicy.com/
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