Word: bissau
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...leading African connection in this growing global network is Guinea-Bissau. The fifth poorest country in the world was perfectly suited to playing a key role in the coke trade. The average person in this country of 1.6 million people earns about $720 a year and dies at 45. The capital, Bissau, is a decrepit relic on which the government has not slapped a lick of paint since the Portuguese colonials decamped in the 1970s. There are few phone lines and almost no electricity. Even the President's office building has a generator roaring outside. The judicial police headquarters...
Like its poverty, Guinea-Bissau's landscape proved ideal for drug cartels. Its 350-km coastline, with 50 or so uninhabited islands, offers excellent drop-off points for drug vessels, and planes can deliver drugs to any number of Portuguese-built airstrips that have been abandoned for years as the country has no planes. "This is an open space where you can do anything," says a military officer from another African country who is stationed in Guinea-Bissau as part of a cooperation agreement. "There is no plane. No radar. Nothing...
Colombians began to rent houses in Bissau in 2004, declaring themselves exporters of fish or cashew nuts, while in reality coordinating industrial-sized shipment and storage of cocaine from Latin America. One afternoon, an undercover detective drives me around Bissau to point out the mansions where the Colombians live. Erected on dirt lanes, they have Romanesque columns, walls with kitsch pastoral mosaics, and satellite dishes on their Spanish-style tiled roofs...
...GUINEA BISSAU...