Word: africa
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...Guinea-Bissau had the money to paint a sign for arriving visitors, it might read: welcome to the world's newest narco state. This small country in West Africa is such a perfect base for cocaine operations that it could have been designed by Pablo Escobar himself. Escobar and other Colombian drug lords poured untold tons of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s, setting off a narcotics epidemic across urban America, and leading to drug wars which have taken decades and billions of dollars to combat. (See TIME's photo-essay "Guinea-Bissau, the World's First Narco...
...Africa provided the cartels the way stations they needed to create an efficient global smuggling machine. According to a senior drugs intelligence officer at Interpol, the cartels now export between 200,000 and 300,000 kg a year to West Africa destined for Europe. "What is emerging is a substantial trafficking scheme involving suspects on three continents: Africa, Europe and South America," says the officer, who could not be named. "This is one of the world's biggest generators of illicit cash...
...Marcos, director of Spain's Intelligence Center Against Organized Crime in Madrid. The routes and methods vary. Some cocaine is shipped on large vessels directly across the Atlantic, often having been processed at sea. Marcos says this cocaine is sometimes dropped overboard attached to floating buoys, then collected by Africa-based traffickers. The rest is flown from Latin America on twin-prop planes to West Africa, where it is offloaded and shuttled to Europe on smaller planes or via boat...
Interpol estimates that about two-thirds of all the cocaine destined for Europe flows through West Africa. Some of the shipments that law enforcement authorities have been able to track down have been enormous. In May, a Cessna 441 twin-prop aircraft registered in the U.S. offloaded 630 kg of cocaine at an airport in Mauritania, and took off again. The crew then abandoned the aircraft in the desert about 125 km away and fled. Mauritanian police believe the scheme involves European dealers, and have questioned Belgian and French citizens. In early June, police in Belgium said they had cracked...
...photographs of the young soldiers reminded me of similar portraits that appeared in TIME during the Vietnam War. How many more photographs will it take before President George W. Bush admits the mistake and brings the troops home? Geoff Walton, EAST LONDON, SOUTH AFRICA...