BISSAU, Guinea-Bissau, Nov. 16 -- The failed West African state of Guinea-Bissau, the world's fifth-poorest nation, is in the grip of Colombian drug cartels and others defying global drug prohibition in order to reap the vast criminal profits prohibition makes available by funneling cocaine to Europe, according to a special report published by UPI.
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 trafficking and organized crime fueled by the combination of drug prohibition and the robust demand for drugs which has continued despite the passage of prohibition laws.
Prohibition's woes seem to be spreading around the region, too, UPI reports.
"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 Drug Prohibition and Crime*, according to UPI. "Organized crime is growing indigenous roots."
According to UPI, officials fear that the former Portuguese colony of Guinea-Bissau, a nation inhabited by roughly 1.5 million people, is well on the way to becoming Africa's first "narco-state." The term "narco-state" refers to countries in which the governmental corruption caused by the vast sums of money prohibition redirects into the criminal underground reaches a level sufficient to threaten the viability and legitimacy of the state itself.
Nigeria has been the traditional center of the West African drug trade, according to UPI. But in a classic demonstration of what is known in drug policy circles as the balloon effect -- "push down, pop up" -- South American cartels have responded to increasing US-led interdiction efforts in the Caribbean and Mexico by using Guinea-Bissau and its neighbors as their route to Europe instead. Europe is the world's second largest market for illicit drugs after North America.
The balloon effect is also demonstrated by the results -- or lack thereof -- of coca eradication efforts at the source country level. While coca growing has shifted substantially between the main source countries -- Bolivia, Colombia and Peru -- total coca yields have remained roughly constant. For both growing and trafficking, prohibition has yielded only displacement and replacement, rather than reduction.
In West Africa, this indirect effect of interdiction across the ocean has been striking. From 1998-2003, the typical amount of cocaine seized per year in Africa was 1,300 pounds. But in the first months of 2008 alone, according to UPI, the figure was 5.6 tons, and prohibition agencies admit this is only the tip of the iceberg. Virtually all the drugs seized in Africa have been found along the "Gold Coast," according to UPI. And U.N. prohibition investigators have discovered a new twist in recent months, according to UPI, Asian cartels sending heroin in the direction, across the Atlantic to the U.S. market.
Guinea-Bissau is at the heart of the African cocaine boom. The "ramshackle country," according to UPI, has since 2003 seen a mushrooming of trafficking via aircraft and fast boats from Venezuela, the South American hub for trans-Atlantic bootlegging operations -- earlier this year prohibition agencies estimated that one-quarter of the cocaine used in Western Europe passed through West Africa, according. Jungle airstrips built by Portugal during their 13-year colonial war, which ended with independence for Guinea-Bissau in 1974, have helped draw much of West Africa's bootlegging there. So have the nation's largely unmonitored 82 outlying islands -- Guinea-Bissau has no navy, nor any prisons, for that matter, according to UPI. It's generally believed that politicians and the country's armed forces are deeply involved with the cartels -- a more extreme version of the Mafia-government collusion that developed in the U.S. during alcohol prohibition.
Guinea-Bissau has also seen a slate of political murders this year, described by UPI, in which the hands of drug cartels were seen. The episode is reminiscent of Colombia's prohibition wars during the Pablo Escobar days, with assassinations of the president, the army chief, a presidential candidate and a former defense minister. The U.N.'s Costa drew a parallel between the cocaine trade and the slave trade that drew the European powers to the region two centuries ago, according to UPI: "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."
David Borden, executive director of the anti-prohibitionist organization StoptheDrugWar.org, accused Costa of blurring the issues. "European cocaine use isn't devastating West Africa, American drug prohibition is doing that. Remove cocaine and cocaine profits from the criminal underground, by enacting some form of legalization, and organized criminal organizations around the world will shrink and fold."
* The actual name of the agency is "U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime."
