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