Word: bissau
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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...
...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...
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...