Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Traffickers exploit weak point

Cocaine bound for Europe slips through Guinea-Bissau, where corruption thrives.

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published July 30, 2007

BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau - The fishermen who came across the bags of white powder bobbing in the ocean knew they had found something valuable, but they weren't sure exactly what.

Back in their village, women unwrapped the layers of plastic and sprinkled the contents on their crops, thinking it might be fertilizer.

Soon entire fields were dusted with cocaine, say police who use the incident two years ago to illustrate how easily their country became the world's newest narco-state, a way station for South American cocaine heading to Europe.

"The drug traffickers look for the weakest point. We are the weakest point. Our people don't even know what cocaine looks like," says Inspector Quintinio Antonio, sitting in the dilapidated office of Guinea-Bissau's counternarcotics police.

This island-ringed nation of 1.5-million is a fairly straight 4,000-mile shot across the Atlantic from the coca fields of South America. But geography is only part of the appeal for traffickers trying to get the drug to Europe, where cocaine seizures have quadrupled over the past decade and prices for the drug are now double those in America. The smugglers also need a weak, easily corruptible government and a population ignorant of the narcotics trade.

It's a need born of a changing drug market. The cocaine boom that gripped the United States in the 1980s is now under way in Europe, where consumption has grown two-, three- or fourfold in various countries over the past decade, according to a U.N. report last month.

The demand has made Europe a far more lucrative drug market than America: One pound of uncut cocaine can fetch $21,000 in Europe, compared with $10,000 in the United States, according to U.N. figures.

The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says the world's total supply is around 2.2-million pounds a year. Interpol says 440,000 to 660,000 pounds of the drug enters Europe via West Africa.

Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony, has a language akin to the traffickers' Spanish and a string of uninhabited islands perfect for drug drops.

Police say they know which islands are leased by drug lords, who use front businesses such as hotel construction to justify frequent plane landings. They know the addresses of safe houses used by Colombians. They have license plate numbers of vehicles supposedly used to transport cocaine and the tail number of a plane painted with a blue stripe from which drugs allegedly were unloaded - under military escort - at the capital's airport.

Yet over the past three years, they have made only two major seizures, and the head of the judicial police who led both was sacked - a move many say was retribution from politicians involved in the drug trade.

"The information we have clearly points to the conclusion that traffickers are operating on a large scale and with almost complete impunity" in Guinea-Bissau, says Antonio Mazzitelli, West Africa director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

If drug traffickers were to imagine a perfect base for their operations, they would have conceived something similar to the world's fifth-poorest nation.

Its government is so poor its police cannot afford handcuffs. The judicial police, charged with counternarcotics, has only two working squad cars for over 70 officers. Lacking money for fuel, they often run out of gas during car chases after suspected drug smugglers.

In September, according to police accounts, undercover police were tipped off to a pending drug shipment and, afraid their squad car would break down or run out of gas, they rented a taxi. They arrested two Colombian nationals with almost 1,500 pounds of cocaine, an amount with a street value in Europe equal to one-fifth of Guinea-Bissau's annual gross domestic product.

They squeezed the suspects between two officers in the taxi's backseat, the only way they could think to keep them from fleeing in the absence of handcuffs.

Weeks later, a judge freed the Colombians. The cocaine, which had been placed in the national treasury, vanished.

[Last modified July 30, 2007, 00:54:17]