Way-Point for Europe's Cocaine | Rest of the world

Way-Point for Europe's Cocaine

Packages of cocaine are displayed after some 800 kilos of the drug were seized and 15 others arrested during an operation targetting an international drug-trafficking ring .

If Guinea Bissau ever had the cash to paint a sign for tourists — and if tourists ever visited — it might read: "Welcome to the world's newest narco-state."

It took me — a stranger in this town — little more than a languid afternoon to locate a sizable drug deal: four men in a sports-utility vehicle pulled into the back lot of my hotel and offered to sell me 15 pounds of high-grade cocaine, for the bargain price of about $77,000 cash.

Were he still alive, Pablo Escobar would have liked this small West African country with its tropical archipelago. Escobar and other Colombian drug lords helped to pave a narcotics highway to the United States in the 1980s, setting off a cocaine plague across urban America.

Now it looks like Europe's turn. While Americans' craving for coke seems to be waning, the drug's popularity is soaring in Europe. These days the cartels — largely Colombian — export about 660,000 pounds a year of the drug to Europe. Last year about 50 tons of the drug were seized by police in Spain, and another 30 tons in Portugal — compared with about 74 tons seized in all European Union countries in 2004, according to the most recent figures from the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug Addiction. It's not hard to see why drug dealers like Europe: The continent's open borders make illicit trading easy. And the euro has risen to about $1.34, sending cocaine prices to above $37,000 per kilogram — a good 40% higher than in many American cities.

One hitch is geography. Europe is thousands of miles from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, where the world's coca leaves grow. And European airports are armed with sophisticated surveillance. So the drug lords need transit points in which to store and process massive quantities of cocaine, before dividing it among thousands of small-time smugglers, who are desperate enough to risk sneaking it into Europe.

Guinea Bissau — the world's fifth-poorest country — is perfect for a key role in the multi-billion-dollar industry. Its capital Bissau is a decrepit relic on which the government has not slapped a lick of paint since the Portuguese decamped in the 1970s. There are few telephone lines and almost no electricity; even the president's office has a generator chugging outside. The average person earns about $722 a year and dies at 45. The judicial police offices have no working communications radio or computer. Its four police cars need repair, and anyway, there is no money for gas. In theory, police officers earn about $100 a month. But like the judges, soldiers, bureaucrats and cabinet ministers, they have not been paid since January, because the country has no money; civil servants received only three months' pay last year. "There is no plane. No radar. Nothing," says an African military officer stationed in Bissau, who spoke in low tones away from local officials, and was too scared to be named in this story. "This is an open space where you can do anything."

The Colombians clearly agree. They began moving into Bissau in 2004, declaring themselves fish or cashew-nut exporters. In reality, say Interpol, E.U. and African officials, they coordinated industrial-sized shipment and storage of cocaine. Guinea Bissau's landscape, like its crippling poverty, was perfect: The 186-mile coastline has dozens of uninhabited islands, which provide discrete delivery points for drugs. And there are good aerial drop-off points too, at remote air strips built by the Portuguese decades ago, which have sat abandoned for years, since the country has no planes.

Last September the judicial police raided one of the Colombians' houses, and hauled off about 1,300 pounds of high-grade cocaine and the two Colombian tenants. Later that day a group of soldiers surrounded the police compound, demanding that the drugs be transferred to them. Holed up in their yard with armed men at the gate, the police complied. Toward midnight, the soldiers loaded the cocaine into a vehicle and drove it to the Treasury building, where they placed it in a locked vault, according to criminal judges in Bissau. Within days, the drugs had vanished. The country's Supreme Court then ordered the Colombians' released; the men have not been seen since.

In April some gutsy radio journalists in Bissau broadcast a call for villagers to report details of mysterious activities. Locals in the southern village of Kufar used their mobile telephones to call the station, and report the involvement of at least a few military people. "People called and said: 'Here is a plane landing. Now they are offloading packets. Now the military is coming, the military is loading it and driving towards Bissau,'" a local journalist recalled.

The judicial police then tried another raid. They borrowed gas money and drove 31 miles south of Bissau, where they intercepted a drug convoy. In a car with two military men, the police found another 1,390 pounds of cocaine. The men were placed in a military brig, from which they were quietly released a few weeks later. When I arrived in May, a military official told me that the men were "away at a tribal circumcision ceremony for a few months." Guinea Bissau's traffickers appear to have found deep divisions among officials, with a few attempting to end the massive cocaine trade, while most benefit from its mega-profits. Top officials concede that some within their ranks are aiding the traffickers, presumably for large payments. "There are people in power who are connected to it," says Naval Commander Jose Americo Na Tchutu, one of the country's highest ranking military officers. "It is sad to say but it is true."

The country's criminal judges say that government officials have compelled them against their will to release those arrested on drug charges. Sitting in his office in Bissau, Judge Andre Lima says: "The military has impunity and we have no protection." Most law-enforcement officials were too afraid to speak to me. Officials who try to crack down against the cartels have hardly been supported or praised for their efforts. In early June the government dismissed the judicial police chief Orlando Silva, who oversaw the drug raids last November and last April. And journalists say they are discouraged from exposing the drug trade.

Spurred on by their success, the cocaine gangs have now expanded into other African countries. In Mauritania in May the crew of a Cessna 441 twin-prop aircraft registered in the United States offloaded about 1,390 pounds of cocaine at an airport in the north of the country, and took off again, before abandoning the plane in the desert.

African officials say they have too little money, weaponry or personnel to stop the rocketing drug trade, and need the West to intervene. "Cocaine is a big, big problem," says Barnabe Gomes, spokesman for Guinea Bissau's president Joao Bernado Vieira. "We need help to do something. We are even asking the United States to help us."

Gomes might get his wish. U.S. officials have lately begun pressuring European governments to crack down hard on the continent's new party drug. They argue that it could be used to fund terror organizations, and that cocaine smuggling networks are built partly on the old hashish routes from North Africa. The Madrid train bombings in March 2004, which killed 191 people, were partly financed by hashish smuggling. "We are seeing increasing incidents of the use of drug barter for munitions in terror attacks," the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency director Karen Tandy told a law-enforcement meeting in Madrid in May.

A new operations center opened in April in Lisbon to coordinate anti-drug efforts — including with U.S. officials. The center is so far being run by seven countries — Spain, Ireland, Britain, the Netherlands, Portugal, Italy and France — which plan to begin surveillance flights over the Atlantic from July. They will also try to intercept Latin American drug vessels before they reach Africa or Europe, according to European drug officials.

Africans are grim about their prospects for success. A journalist in Bissau who has sneaked into Europe on smugglers' boats from West Africa says local boatmen know how to dodge surveillance, having spent decades smuggling people, goods, fuel — and drugs.

At least some of those drugs ended in the hands of the four men outside my hotel in Bissau. After concluding that I was not a likely customer, they drove off. But here in the world's poorest narco-state, they are likely to find a customer soon, and so send another load of cocaine to Europe's streets.

http://www.time.com/