56 International The EconomistNovember 23rd 2019
2 Drug markets, like other forms of organ-
ised crime, thrive best in places where the
governments cannot or will not resist
them. Trafficking then makes weak, dirty
institutions even weaker and dirtier.
Guinea-Bissau’s appeal is partly geo-
graphic. The country is a mere 3,000km
from Brazil—about as close as Africa and
South America get—and reachable by small
aircraft fitted with fuel bladders. With over
80 islands, most uninhabited, it is easy to
drop off drugs undetected, or to smuggle
them in from boats. In the early days of the
trade, when cocaine washed up on beaches,
locals did not know what it was and used it
as detergent or make-up. Now they know.
Guinea-Bissau’s politics are ideal for
drug barons. Politicians need money and
violence to gain and hold high office. Co-
caine can pay for both. On November 24th
voters will choose a new president. Cam-
paigns involve hundreds of cars, huge
wodges of cash and even helicopters, none
of which is readily available in a poor coun-
try. “The relationship between state weak-
ness and the emergence of the drugs trade
is seen very clearly” in Guinea-Bissau,
writes Hassoum Ceesay, a historian.
Colombian traffickers probably arrived
in the country some time before the 2005
election, on the invitation of João Bernardo
“Nino” Vieira, Guinea-Bissau’s longest-
serving president, who needed to raise
money to fund his electioneering. Traffick-
ers were brazen—in the military airport in
Bissau sits an abandoned Lear jet flown
from Venezuela full of cocaine—and the
drug money quickly exacerbated Guinea-
Bissau’s long-standing instability.
Soldiers killed Vieira in 2009, hours
after his army chief of staff died in a bomb
blast. Many locals suspect that Latin Amer-
ican cartels set up both murders. In 2012
the then head of the army, Antonio Indjai,
launched a coup d’état, possibly to try to
protect his alleged cocaine-trafficking
business. He is still wanted by America’s
Drug Enforcement Administration (dea),
which in 2013 arrested an accomplice, the
former head of the shipless navy, José
Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, who served four
years in an American prison.
Latin American cartels probably con-
trolled the cocaine seized in September.
Elements of the National Guard and the
customs authorities are said to have waved
through the drugs. Powerful Bissau-Guin-
eans protect it for a cut of the profits and
less powerful ones do the grunt work.
“Everybody knows what the deal is,” says a
former deaagent who worked in west Afri-
ca. “Drugs are protected by big people, the
top people,” says one Bissau-Guinean jus-
tice-department official.
The judicial police force, which grabbed
the drugs, is among the cleanest parts of
the state. It gets international support. But
the government starves it of the resourcesit needs to investigate the drugs trade. Offi-
cers lack boats or cars; sometimes they
cannot even pay for mobile-phone credit,
says Fernando Jorge Barreto Costa, the
force’s deputy director. Judges refuse to is-
sue arrest warrants, or order the release of
suspects. According to the Journal of Mod-
ern African Studies, in 2007 the public pros-
ecutor released several Colombians on bail
using cash that had been seized during
their arrest. When the judicial police re-
fused to release them, Aristides Gomes, the
prime minister at the time, intervened, ar-
guing that the men should be released and
the “bail money” forfeited to the state.
Guinea-Bissau is not the only place in
west Africa to be afflicted by cocaine. In
February nine tonnes were found in a ship
in Cape Verde. In June police in Senegal
seized 800kg hidden in cars on a boat from
Brazil. And traffickers have political allies
throughout the region. The eldest son of
Lansana Conté, the late president of Guin-
ea-Conakry, was jailed for 16 months there
for his involvement in the drugs trade.
East Africa is plagued by heroin. Better
enforcement in Turkey has pushed traf-
fickers south. Their product is smuggled
out of Afghanistan via Pakistan or Iran, and
moved on fishing dhows around the Gulf of
Arabia and down to Kenya and Mozam-
bique. From there, it can travel to Europe
and America hidden on container ships or
inside passengers on commercial flights.
What are the consequences of the shift
in smuggling routes? Drugs need not cause
wars—if they did, the Netherlands, which
produces much of the world’s ecstasy,
would be a hellhole. But they do give people
something to fight over, and bankroll
armed groups that were already fighting for
other reasons. The police say the drugs
seized in Guinea-Bissau this year were on
their way to Mali. Tuareg and Arab rebels
wrestle for control of drug routes across
the Sahara desert. In July the unimposed
sanctions on a Malian, Mohamed Ben Ah-
med Mahri, for funnelling gains from drug-
trafficking to Al-Mourabitoun, a militant
group from northern Mali. Gangs that havebuilt up political connections and stashes
of weapons can move easily into new rack-
ets such as kidnapping or extortion.
In more peaceful countries, drugs still
strain weak political systems. Suspicions
have been voiced in Kenya’s parliament
about the alleged past involvement of Mike
Sonko and Hassan Joho, the governors of
Nairobi and Mombasa, the two biggest cit-
ies, in drug-trafficking. Both men deny in-
volvement. Kenya’s government generally
co-operates with international efforts to
stop trafficking, say local diplomats—
probably because the trade helps to finance
the opposition. In Mozambique the domi-
nant political party, Frelimo, mostly con-
trols heroin-smuggling itself, says Joseph
Hanlon of the London School of Econom-
ics. The revenues pay for local power-bro-
kers to get out the vote.
Being a transit country has other down-
sides. Smugglers often pay their contacts
in drugs to sell locally. (This is easier and
cheaper than laundering money.) The
world’s second-biggest market for cocaine
is Brazil, a major transit country. Heroin is
a scourge in east Africa; crack cocaine be-
devils west Africa (though it is dwarfed by
the abuse of prescription opiates). At a
treatment centre run by Catholic priests in
Bissau, young men, most of them crack-co-
caine addicts, say the drug can be bought
for 2,000 west African francs ($3.50) a
gram, a tenth of the price in Europe.Diverted traffic
Mexico offers a glimpse of how drug-traf-
ficking may further evolve. As demand in
the United States has changed, due to the
partial legalisation of cannabis and a surge
in opioid use, traffickers have diversified.
Tighter security on the border also favours
heroin and fentanyl, which are less bulky.
A truckload of marijuana is worth about
$10m, says Everard Meade of the University
of San Diego. $10m of cocaine would fill the
boots of several cars. But $10m of heroin
can be smuggled inside two briefcases.
So long as drugs are illegal, criminals
will profit from them. Whatever the police
do, cartels will adapt. Mr Gibbons of the
ncasays that in Britain some Colombians
now run vertically integrated businesses—
controlling supply at every level from pro-
duction in the Amazon down to distribu-
tion in British cities. In Brazil the First
Command of the Capital, a São Paulo-based
drug cartel, has taken control of nearly all
of the value chain by building plants to pro-
cess cocaine paste in Bolivia and forging
links with crime bosses in Europe. Italian
traffickers have hired divers in Brazil to at-
tach magnetic boxes filled with drugs to
the bottom of ships, to be removed by a sec-
ond set of divers when the ships arrive in
Europe. As Allan de Abreu, a Brazilian jour-
nalist, points out: “The police are always
one step behind the traffickers.” 7All-time high
Global,1998=100Source:UNODC *Includesmorphine,heroinandopiatesOpiumSeizures*Production1980 1820004003002001000CocaineSeizuresManufacture1980 1720004003002001000