Word: bissau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Guinea-Bissau Assassination Tit for Tat Joćo Bernardo Vieira, the longtime President of this volatile West African nation, was assassinated by army troops on March 2 in apparent retaliation for the killing of a general hours before. The speaker of parliament, Raimundo Pereira, was sworn in as the state's interim President and is required to call elections within 60 days. Since winning independence from Portugal in 1974, Guinea-Bissau has been racked by poverty and upheaval, becoming in recent years a key transit point for cartels smuggling drugs from South America to Europe...
When I visited Bissau in April 2007, members of the judicial police would speak to me only in secret, for fear of being attacked by drug traffickers. The small force - which had not been paid for four months - operated out of a cluster of crumbling buildings with no telephones or electricity. Four cars - the entire fleet of the judicial police - sat idle on the premises. The police had no money...
Viera had publicly criticized the drug traffickers yet seemed powerless to prevent them from opeating in his country - perhaps partly because of the involvement of some top military officers, according to regional sources. In an interview with TIME in Bissau in 2007, a high-ranking West African military officer who asked not to be named said Guinea-Bissau's government and mlitary allowed drug traffickers to operate "not because of a lack of resources but a lack of political will...
Beginning around 2005, Colombian traffickers began arriving in Guinea Bissau, smuggling in cocaine worth about 10 times the country's annual GDP, according to U.N. officials. The cartels found ideal terrain for their massive trafficking operations. The dirt-poor country has few natural resources and only 1.6 million people. And there are dozens of remote tropical islands, with about 24 airfields built during colonial days. There the traffickers flew small aircraft, dropping hundreds of pounds of cocaine almost weekly direct from Colombia. According to European Union drug reports, the cocaine was then smuggled in small quantities into Europe. The government...
...also increasing its involvement in West Africa. "We are working a lot closer with our African counterparts to share information," he said. "We are opening new offices in West Africa." Despite the upheaval Mazzitelli believes that the deaths of two men, who have wielded huge power in Guinea-Bissau for decades, could help to pave the way to democracy. "This could be a golden opportunity for the international community, and for Guinea-Bissau, to move ahead, get rid of the past, and reform the security sector," he says. That all depends, though, on who fills the power vacuum...