Word: guinea-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...
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...
...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...
...world's GDP. 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...
...TIME's photo-essay "Guinea-Bissau, the World's First Narco-State...