Word: guinea
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...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 revenues in the impoverished country some political analysts predict...
...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...
...killings come after months of turmoil among the country's neighbors, in a region which has been beset by Latin American drug traffickers, who are increasingly using West Africa as a way station for cocaine smuggling into Europe. Military officers in neighboring Guinea mounted a coup last December hours after that country's president Lansana Conte died. Conte's administration had been seen as particularly friendly to the foreign drug lords. Last week, Guinea's military coup leaders arrested several politicians and military officers in the capital Conakry, charging them with drug smuggling for the Colombian cartels. The late President...
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...