Whack-a-mole: West Africa's expanding drugs trade
In the mid-2000s, most major South American drug cartels were struggling to ship their product to Europe and expand their ever-growing networks. The waters around the coasts of Spain and Morocco, the traditional trans-shipment point for drugs bound for the European market, faced an increased police presence, with a level of political stability that enabled authorities to work effectively in mitigating the flow of narcotics in the region. This level of pushback, coupled with Europe’s growing demand for cocaine, led traffickers to consider alternative routes with which to transport cocaine and increase their supply. For most traffickers, a region of interest would include three central components. The first would be a proximity to the target market,
the second would be weak political and social institutions, and the third would be an air of lawlessness. It was this set of criteria that led traffickers to their new transhipment point: West Africa. And specifically, to the tiny nation of Guinea Bissau, a former Portuguese colony with a history of socio-political instability and a penchant for corruption.
Guinea-Bissau has long been labelled the world’s first narco-state, with drug traffickers operating with a level of impunity that is rarely seen elsewhere in the world, along with clandestine support from the nation’s government itself. In 2013, José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, one of the country’s highest-ranking government officials, was captured by the DEA and indicted on trafficking charges in the United States. Cocaine seizures in the country are also uncharacteristically large for a nation as small and socioeconomically underdeveloped as Guinea-Bissau is, with a seizure
in September totalling 1.8 tonnes. However, since a spate of arrests by foreign bodies the early 2010s against many of Guinea-Bissau’s highest-ranking narco-traffickers, the drugs trade in
the country has been diminished to an extent. Although the country is still a notable transhipment point for narcotics, and most dealers and traffickers still operate with relative impunity, the situation has largely been improved in the nation, with traffickers moving to new and more remote locales to deliver their product.
This movement by traffickers led them to another former Portuguese colony just over 900 kilometres away from the coast of Guinea-Bissau, and a country more famous for its stability and droves of British tourists than for its degraded political institutions. Cape Verde, an island nation of just over 500,000, has recently become the home of a fledgling narcotics trade, one that is eating
away at slums throughout the country, and contributing to a cocaine epidemic and a surge in gun possession. More importantly, the drugs trade in Cape Verde has become an ingrained part of
life in the nation, with rumours that the narcotics trade helped to finance the tourism industry, and with an influx of newly addicted users turning to crime to support their habit. Despite Cape Verde’s government attempting to stop the flow of narcotics in the country, Venezuelan and Panamanian cartels, along with other South American paramilitary groups, have strong connections to violence in the nation and have issued death threats to senior officials on numerous occasions.
West Africa’s booming drugs trade is enabled by its funding. Most of the cocaine that is brought through West Africa to Europe is smuggled by terrorist groups and their affiliated branches, with organizations such as Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, along with others, working in conjunction with traffickers to take narcotics north by land. Many of the countries that these
groups pass through, from Niger to Libya, have been wracked by instability and violence in recent years, meaning that almost no scrutiny is placed on trafficking organizations whilst passing through the porous borders they traverse. The dark underbelly of the trafficking industry in West Africa lies in the methods which traffickers use, advertently helping to fund terrorist
groups in the region, and indirectly contributing to the flow of human trafficking and arms smuggling that further destabilizes many of the nations affected by the narcotics trade.
The narcotics trade in West Africa, therefore, seems to be a problem that will affect the region for much of the foreseeable future. The nations in which the trade primarily takes place, along with the methods that traffickers use in increasing the flow of drugs, guarantee that it is virtually impossible for most underfunded West African states to actively pursue and indict persons of interest. Furthering this political impunity, the sheer number of West African coastal nations with high levels of corruption and instability allows most traffickers to easily mobilize and uproot their trade
by simply changing which port they operate from, creating a perennially effective game of Whack-A-Mole which authorities simply can’t win. Africa’s drug trade, and the consequences that come with it, are an issue in a region where socio-political threats are both frequent and imminent, ensuring that for now, there is little to be done but watch with a wary eye in a region where,
according to one Cape Verdean, “drugs are easier to buy than water.”
