Word: bissau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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After months of failed attempts to stop the trafficking, Guinea-Bissau's judges claim that the military has effectively blocked any effort to end the trade and that it's protecting the cartels. "The military has impunity and we have no protection," says Judge André Lima. He says the military has forced judges to sign release orders for those arrested on drug charges. "What is sad is that we are forever prosecuting people who steal one chicken or a cow," says Lima. "But [cases involving] drugs will never get to court...
...Africans involved, cocaine is a drug used by Europeans and Americans, not them, and the easy money it provides is just good business. "Everybody is saying that this is a blessing from God because the government does not have the money to pay people," says a local journalist in Bissau...
Meanwhile, as the cocaine trade with Europe booms, the cartels have also spread into other African countries. "It's not just Guinea-Bissau," says Antonio Mazzitelli, West African director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. "It is also Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and others" - countries, in other words, where the justice system has all but collapsed, where prisons are overcrowded, and where there are too few judges and courtrooms to provide efficient trials...
...smugglers in their region, see little chance of Europe ending cocaine smuggling. "Even in the U.S. the government spends billions of dollars a year on the Coast Guard, but traffickers are always, always ahead of them," says Kouame of the U.N. narcotics control board. A local journalist in Bissau who has traveled to Europe illicitly with West African smugglers says boatmen in the region are adept at avoiding authorities, having spent decades smuggling people, goods, fuel and various drugs. At least some of those drugs ended up in the hands of the four men who parked behind my hotel...
...TIME's photo-essay "Guinea-Bissau, the World's First Narco-State...