Cocaine country

This tiny country has been crippled by Colombian drug cartels shifting their focus from Americans paying in ever-weaker dollars to Europeans paying in increasingly valuable euros. They are responding to the pressure for cocaine in Britain, Spain and Italy, as the US market has leveled off.

Guinea-Bissau, one of the world’s poorest nations, has become the epicentre in Africa for the cocaine trade, according to US, European and UN officials. The country has 63 federal police officers, no prison and a population that lives largely in thatched-roof homes on dirt roads with no electricity or running water.

According to Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, who recently visited Guinea-Bissau, said the country could become Africa’s first “narco-state.”

While mysterious foreigners tool around Guinea-Bissau’s crumbling roads in expensive Porsche and BMW sport-utility vehicles, the country’s 1.5 million people are suffering because of global currency fluctuations and because European “bankers and models want to snort,” Costa said.

“This isn’t even our problem—we do not produce cocaine here, but it is destroying our future,” said Lucinda Barbosa, chief of the judicial police in the former Portuguese colony.

Government officials said drug smugglers bribing local people with small amounts of cocaine are creating addicts in a nation that never had them. They said the drug trade has led to rampant corruption at high levels of government, threatening the economic and political stability of a country.

The UN Development Program ranks Guinea-Bissau 175th out of 177 nations on its Human Development Index. The UN drug and crime office has noted that the national budget of Guinea-Bissau is roughly equal to the value in Europe of 2 1/2 tons of cocaine.

The country’s main attractions for the cartels are its weak government and coastal waters dotted with scores of uninhabited islands. Officials said the drug traffickers send ships and planes loaded with cocaine to West Africa. Some is unloaded at abandoned airstrips in the islands off Guinea-Bissau; more is dropped at sea and picked up by small boats.

The cocaine is then broken up into still smaller loads and sent on to Europe—in 2006, Dutch police discovered on one flight, 32 people travelling from Guinea-Bissau with hidden cocaine.

Sometimes, the plastic-wrapped bricks of it have washed ashore, where confused villagers tried using the unfamiliar substance to fertilise their crops or paint their walls.

So Barbosa, the police chief, is attempting to fight sophisticated cartels from her primitive downtown office, with 63 officers, half of whom have guns. The department has no handcuffs, one laptop computer, sporadic electricity and hole-in-the-ground toilets. Barbosa, 47, said: “This is the most dangerous thing we’ve ever seen,” she said.

The city of Bissau is what charming looks like after decades of neglect. The few paved streets are filled with potholes, and rusting cars sit on the roadsides, covered with red dust. Piles of garbage smoulder, while flocks of vultures spar with skinny dogs for the tastiest bits.

At night, bereft of power, the city is virtually pitch-dark except for the dim glow from cooking fires, oil lamps and candles. Many people live on bowls of a mushy mix of rice, ground cashews and sugar.

The city is full of jarring signs of incongruous wealth—the exclusive restaurant selling a plate of jumbo shrimp for more than $50, the grocery store selling Johnnie Walker Green Label whiskey for $132. At the brightly lighted X Klub, a downtown bar and disco, a burly bouncer in a tight black T-shirt stood guard over the Mercedes sedans and BMW SUVs parked outside at midnight, while inside foreign men chatted with dolled-up local prostitutes sipping drinks along the wall.

“The traffickers have a paradise here,” said Constantino Correia, a top Justice Ministry official “A place where criminals can do whatever they want is not a state. It is chaos.”

Portugal and a handful of other countries, the European Union and the United Nations have pledged more than $6 million to help overhaul the justice system, Correia said

In Quinhamel, a village about 22 miles west of Bissau, the country’s only drug rehab centre sits at the end of a long dirt road. Domingos Te, an evangelical pastor, opened the centre in 2002 for people addicted to alcohol or marijuana. Now, he said, “cocaine use is rampant.”

As he spoke, a patient at the centre ran screaming through the dirt courtyard and out the gate. Four men brought him back. Te gave him a mild sedative.

“We don’t know where it comes from,” Injie said. “But now everyone has it. Every family.”