Word: guinea
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...Guinea-Bissau had the money to paint a sign for arriving visitors, it might read: welcome to the world's newest narco state. This small country in West Africa is such a perfect base for cocaine operations that it could have been designed by Pablo Escobar himself. Escobar and other Colombian drug lords poured untold tons of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s, setting off a narcotics epidemic across urban America, and leading to drug wars which have taken decades and billions of dollars to combat. (See TIME's photo-essay "Guinea-Bissau, the World's First Narco...
...leading African connection in this growing global network is Guinea-Bissau. The fifth poorest country in the world was perfectly suited to playing a key role in the coke trade. The average person in this country of 1.6 million people earns about $720 a year and dies at 45. The capital, Bissau, is a decrepit relic on which the government has not slapped a lick of paint since the Portuguese colonials decamped in the 1970s. There are few phone lines and almost no electricity. Even the President's office building has a generator roaring outside. The judicial police headquarters...
Like its poverty, Guinea-Bissau's landscape proved ideal for drug cartels. Its 350-km coastline, with 50 or so uninhabited islands, offers excellent drop-off points for drug vessels, and planes can deliver drugs to any number of Portuguese-built airstrips that have been abandoned for years as the country has no planes. "This is an open space where you can do anything," says a military officer from another African country who is stationed in Guinea-Bissau as part of a cooperation agreement. "There is no plane. No radar. Nothing...
...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...
...cover story "Africa's Oil" [June 11]: Africa is still the least developed of continents. It has to be given a chance to rise without dictators who are groomed, financed and put in power by the West. From Gabon to Nigeria to Guinea, it is the same story: a hundred cronies surround a dictator who connives with oil companies to amass wealth while millions live in dire poverty. Western governments and their oil companies must step in and stop the looting! Just as Western banks do not accept al-Qaeda's money, so too should they refuse African dictators' stolen...