Word: bissau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Guinea-Bissau is one of the Colombia cartels' most critical points for smuggling cocaine into Europe and, just before dawn on Monday, the tiny West African country plunged into a political power vacuum. At that moment, the long-time president of the country was shot dead in his home just hours after an armed attack on the military headquarters killed his Army chief of staff. The two men were adversaries in a bitter power struggle, one that had fueled a civil war in the late 1990s...
...officers close to the Army chief of staff General Batista Tagme Na Wai blamed those loyal to the president for the military leader's death as a massive explosion destroyed the building he was in on Sunday. Shortly after that incident, according to a Reuters journalist in the capital Bissau, Angolan diplomats took the country's First Lady into safekeeping while President João Bernado Vieira - known by his nickname "Nino" - apparently refused to flee his home. He was reportedly shot in the head by Na Wai's loyalists. (See pictures of Africa's cocaine...
Residents in Bissau said on Monday that they had hidden inside their houses overnight, listening to gunshots resound across the city for hours, until they subsided at about 5 a.m. "Everyone is shocked," the former Minister of Finance Isifou Sanha said by phone from Bissau. "There must be a call to respect the constitution." Military leaders said on Guinea-Bissau radio stations yesterday that they would follow the constitution, by allowing the head of the parliament to run the country until new elections, which are supposed to be held within 60 days. Yet with billions of dollars of illegal drug...
...basic health care, the group said. With policing and the court system in a shambles, Guinea has also become a major hub for Latin American cocaine traffickers, who increasingly use West Africa as the conduit to the lucrative cocaine market in nearby Europe. When TIME visited neighboring Guinea Bissau in 2007, several Colombian cocaine traffickers were operating there, but those traffickers have since moved to Conakry, and several Colombians have recently been found traveling on Guinean passports, says the UNODC's regional representative Antonio Mazzitelli. He recently told TIME that he fears drug-fueled gang warfare in Guinea. "What...
...Inextricably bound up with straightforward criminal markets is a spiraling level of corruption throughout much of the world. For a common strategy of criminal syndicates is the "capture" or "semicapture" of a state. American and European law-enforcement agencies now categorize the West African country of Guinea-Bissau as the world's first "narcostate," a place where the levers of official power are now entirely at the disposal of operations moving cocaine from South America to Europe...