Word: bissau
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Police sources in Bissau claim the Colombians are protected by the military, which appears to allow them free rein. They are not certain whether the soldiers are paid in return, or whether they are themselves involved in trafficking. Certainly there are signs of a fresh influx of money. In a new neighborhood on the edge of town, about 20 mansions owned by government officials are under construction, many with pools and multiple wings...
Last September the judicial police raided one of the Colombian-rented houses in Bissau and found 674 kg of high-grade cocaine. They drove the drugs and the two Colombian tenants to the police lockup, says Gabriel Madjanhe Djedjo, the judge who handled the case. Within an hour of the arrests, he says, military officers surrounded the compound, demanding the drugs and threatening to shoot their way in. The police relented, and the soldiers loaded the cocaine - stored in 1-kg packets - onto a pickup truck and drove it to the crumbling Treasury building, where they placed...
...April, the country had become so swamped with cocaine that radio journalists in Bissau broadcast an appeal for villagers to phone in with details of mysterious activities. Locals near the airfield of Cufar quickly called on their mobile phones to describe major drug drops. Crucially, they exposed the military's deep involvement in the trafficking. "People called and said: 'Here is a plane landing, now they are offloading packets, now the military is coming, the military is loading it and driving toward Bissau,'" a local journalist told...
...enough weaponry or personnel to stop drug trafficking. "Cocaine is a big, big problem," says Barnabé Gomes, spokesman for the country's President, João Bernardo Vieira. "We need help to do something." He says what's needed is Western intervention to stop traffickers transiting through Guinea-Bissau: "Europe is not doing much to help. We are even asking the United States to help us." In Bissau's crumbling port, Portuguese naval Sergeant Jorge Padua says he arrived last March to help Guinea-Bissau apprehend illegal fishing boats plying its waters. "The government has never asked...
Desperate for an arrest, Guinea-Bissau's judicial police finally borrowed cash for fuel and hired cars to drive 50 km east of Bissau, where they intercepted the convoy the villagers had described. They found 635 kg of cocaine, worth about $80 million in parts of Europe - more than one-quarter of Guinea-Bissau's annual gross domestic product. Inside the car were two military men, whom officials in Bissau recognized as bodyguards of a senior army officer. The police burned the cocaine, but the military later quietly released the two arrested men without charge. Having witnessed such things, senior...