Word: guinea
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...enough weaponry or personnel to stop drug trafficking. "Cocaine is a big, big problem," says Barnabé Gomes, spokesman for the country's President, João Bernardo Vieira. "We need help to do something." He says what's needed is Western intervention to stop traffickers transiting through Guinea-Bissau: "Europe is not doing much to help. We are even asking the United States to help us." In Bissau's crumbling port, Portuguese naval Sergeant Jorge Padua says he arrived last March to help Guinea-Bissau apprehend illegal fishing boats plying its waters. "The government has never asked...
Desperate for an arrest, Guinea-Bissau's judicial police finally borrowed cash for fuel and hired cars to drive 50 km east of Bissau, where they intercepted the convoy the villagers had described. They found 635 kg of cocaine, worth about $80 million in parts of Europe - more than one-quarter of Guinea-Bissau's annual gross domestic product. Inside the car were two military men, whom officials in Bissau recognized as bodyguards of a senior army officer. The police burned the cocaine, but the military later quietly released the two arrested men without charge. Having witnessed such things, senior...
After months of failed attempts to stop the trafficking, Guinea-Bissau's judges claim that the military has effectively blocked any effort to end the trade and that it's protecting the cartels. "The military has impunity and we have no protection," says Judge André Lima. He says the military has forced judges to sign release orders for those arrested on drug charges. "What is sad is that we are forever prosecuting people who steal one chicken or a cow," says Lima. "But [cases involving] drugs will never get to court...
Meanwhile, as the cocaine trade with Europe booms, the cartels have also spread into other African countries. "It's not just Guinea-Bissau," says Antonio Mazzitelli, West African director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime. "It is also Liberia, Sierra Leone, Ghana and others" - countries, in other words, where the justice system has all but collapsed, where prisons are overcrowded, and where there are too few judges and courtrooms to provide efficient trials...
...TIME's photo-essay "Guinea-Bissau, the World's First Narco-State...