West Africa has increasingly become a point favoured by Latin American drug cartels because of weak local law enforcement and a largely unsupervised coastline. The drugs are flown or shipped across the Atlantic and then onto markets in Europe. The past years have seen large cocaine seizures in other countries in the region including Ghana, Guinea Bissau, Senegal and Sierra Leone. The UN warned in a report that West Africa risks becoming an epicenter for drug trafficking from South America to Europe.
Every year, at least 50 tonnes of cocaine from Andean countries are transported through West Africa towards Europe, where they are worth $2bn (£1.3bn), according to the UN.
The problem is getting worse, the UN says, with seizures of drugs representing the "tip of the iceberg".
The White House has singled out Guinea-Bissau as a warehouse refuge and transit hub for cocaine traffickers from Latin America, transporting cocaine to Western Europe.
Kwesi Aning, head of research at the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Training Centre, said he was alarmed at the amount of money being splashed around in Ghana ahead of the past presidential elections. He was referring to people "running for parliament, who are ministers, wanting to run for president". "Politicians say they are determined to fight drug trafficking, but many question whether the political will exists in a society where corruption is a major problem". He added.
According to the recent US cable released by wikileaks, Ghana's leader has said he is concerned that drugs traffickers compromise elements of his government. Another cable says President John Atta Mills requested airport drug-screening equipment for his personal entourage.
Officials from West Africa met in Cape Verde in 2008 to discuss the problem. The head of the UN office on drugs and crime, Antonio Maria Costa, said the conference in Cape Verde was important in calling attention to "the work that's needed to protect these countries so as to protect Europe".
He said economic weakness of West African states allows traffickers to prosper, and that corruption was a problem. "Some of the political leaders, or members of families of political leaders, some of the high officials, including law enforcement officers are involved, or in any event turn a benign eye." Singling out Guinea-Bissau, he said, "Drug traffickers are starting to consider a lot of other options on the West African coast".
How and why West Africa, particularly Guinea-Bissau was conquered by the drug cartels:
West Africa has become the hub of a flow of cocaine from South America into Europe, now that other routes have become tough for the traffickers.
US drug enforcement agents report that the old cocaine channels through the Caribbean, markedly Jamaica and Panama, have become more intensively policed, forcing the Colombians to develop new routes to traffic cocaine. The increasing might of Mexico's powerful drug cartels has forced the South Americans to search for trafficking routes to Europe across the Atlantic rather than through Central America.
Moreover, the West African coast can be reached across the shortest transatlantic crossing from South America: either by plane from Colombia, with a re-fuelling stop in Brazil; or by ship from Brazil or Venezuela. The boats leaving South America travel only by night, remaining motionless by day, covered in blue tarpaulins to avoid detection from the air. The journey can be completed in four to five nights travelling this way.
Once ravaged by the transatlantic slave trade, the West African coast is again 'under attack', says the Executive Director of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Antonio Maria Costa, who calls the impact on Africa of Europe's cocaine habit an echo of that of slavery. 'In the 19th century, Europe's hunger for slaves devastated West Africa. Two hundred years later, its growing appetite for cocaine could do the same.'
The seizure of West Africa by Colombian and other drug cartels has happened with lightning speed. Since 2003, 99 per cent of all drugs seized in Africa have been found in West Africa. Between 1998 and 2003, the total quantity of cocaine seized each year in Africa was around 600kg. However, by 2006, the figure had risen five-fold
The street value of the drugs trafficked far exceeds gross national product. A quarter of all cocaine consumed in Western Europe is trafficked through West Africa, according to UNOCD, for a local wholesale value of $1.8bn and a retail value of 10 times that in Europe.
Nigerian drug gangs have always been an energetic presence on the global trafficking scene, but the target of the South American traffickers have been the 'failed states' along the Gold Coast, where poverty is extreme, where society has been ravaged by war and the institutions of state can be easily bought off - so that instead of enforcement, there is collusion. In addition, no more so than Guinea-Bissau, whose weakness makes it a trafficker's dream prey.
In Guinea-Bissau, says the UNODC, the value of the drugs trade is greater than the national income. 'The fact of the matter,' says the Consultancy Africa Intelligence agency, is that without assistance, Guinea-Bissau is at the mercy of wealthy, well-armed and technologically advanced narcotics traffickers.'
Geographically, West Africa makes sense. The logical things is for the cartels to take the shortest crossing over the ocean to West Africa, by plane - to one of the many airstrips left behind by decades of war, or by drop into the thousands of little bays - or by boat all the way. A ship can drop anchor in waters completely unmonitored, while fleets of smaller craft take the contraband ashore.
A place like Guinea Bissau is a failed state anyway, so it's like moving into an empty house.' There is no prison in Guinea-Bissau, he says. One rusty ship patrols a coastline of 350km, and 'You walk in, buy the services you need from the government, army and people, and take over. The cocaine can then be stored safely and shipped to Europe, either by ship to Spain or Portugal, across land via Morocco on the old cannabis trail, or directly by air using "mules".' One single flight into Amsterdam in December 2006 was carrying 32 mules carrying cocaine from Guinea-Bissau, an archipelago of 82 islands. The airspace is un-patrolled. The police have few cars, no petrol, no radios, handcuffs or phones.
The official admitted 'this has happened quickly, and the response has been tardy. They're ahead of the game.' Moreover, it did not help that most Western diplomatic presence had left Bissau during the fighting, preferring to operate from neighbouring Senegal. The US and Britain shut up shop in Bissau in 1998, the Americans only last July reopening a diplomatic office in response to the cocaine raids.
Guinea Bissau's cocaine Calvary began three years ago when fishermen on one island found packages of white powder washed up on the beach. They had no idea what the mysterious substance was. 'At first, they took the drug and they put it on their bodies during traditional ceremonies," recalls local journalist Alberto Dabo. 'Then they put it on their crops. All their crops died because of that drug. They even used it to mark out a football pitch'.
The real decisive moment came when two Latin Americans arrived by chartered plane, armed with $1 million in 'buyback' cash, which the locals gleefully accepted. The two men were apprehended by police, but released. 'When people found that it was cocaine and they could sell it,' says Dabo, 'some of those fishermen bought cars and built houses.'
As well as the favourable location, in Guinea Bissau the cocaine gangs have found a country where the rule of law barely exists. 'It's an easy country to be active if you're an organised crime lord,' says the deputy regional head of UNODC, Amado Philip de Andres. 'Law enforcement has literally no control for two reasons: there is no capacity and there is no equipment'.
A further development highlighted by the DEA and UNODC is that Guinea Bissau and other West African countries are being targeted by Asian and African cartels trafficking heroin across the Atlantic in the opposite direction, to the US. Last year, the DEA and police in Chicago tracked nine West Africans who had moved heroin originating in South-east Asia through various West African countries, markedly Guinea-Bissau, to the central US.
Estimates vary as to the cogency of the Colombian presence, but one observer suggests there are as many as 60 Colombian drugs traffickers in Guinea-Bissau. Colombians have bought local businesses, including factories and warehouses, and built themselves large homes protected by armed guards. They and their local hired help flaunt their liberty to operate - and the money they make from doing so.
Cocaine seizures in West Africa:
In 2007, the governor, mayor and other top police officials were arrested in the town of Boke in northern Guinea, after an aircraft allegedly carrying a large quantity of cocaine mysteriously landed and took off. Police Commissioner Moussa Sackho Camara said that some suspected drugs traffickers were arrested, but were later free from detention without his knowledge. Mr Camara said that the fight against drug trafficking was a tough one, given the highly placed people involved in the business on the one hand, and the lack of equipment on the other.
In the same year, Guinea-Bissau's justice minister said she has received death threats over the arrest of five people suspected of drug s trafficking. Her comments came two days after Guinea-Bissau's attorney general also said he had received death threats.
The arrests were made after at least one plane thought to have arrived from South America was seized last. Authorities arrested three Venezuelans as well as the head of air traffic control at the airport and his deputy.
Drug-sniffing dogs had indicated the plane was carrying cocaine, but authorities had to wait. The incident reportedly involved a stand-off between judicial, police and the army, who tried to stop the police boarding the planes.
In April 2007, an estimated 2.5 metric tons of cocaine was flown into a military airstrip in Guinea-Bissau. Two soldiers were arrested in cars packed with 635kg of the drug but the rest of the shipment got through, officials from the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) believe, because the police did not have enough petrol in their cars to pursue the other traffickers.
In 2005, the second of Guinea-Bissau's comedy of errors, 674kg of cocaine, worth about $39m, or 13% of the country's total annual income, was found in the capital, Bissau, after a gun battle. For safe-keeping, it was put in the treasury vaults, where it "disappeared".
Local fishermen in Quinhamel, 30km west of Bissau, discovered strange packets of white powder floating in the sea. With no idea of what the powder was, some used it to provide more flavour to their daily diet of rice and fish, while others thought it might help their crops grow and used it as fertiliser. Eventually, word got out to the traffickers, who turned up in the village to buy back what was left of their cargo after their boat had sunk.
Judges in Guinea-Bissau complain that even if a drugs smugglers are captured, taken to court and convicted - already three rare events - they are often walking the streets again within days. After the only prison was destroyed in a civil war, there is nowhere to hold convicts. If a cell is found somewhere, top military officials often turn up and insist they are freed, judges say. "There is total impunity," Nelson Moreira, head of Guinea-Bissau's inter-ministerial commission to fight drugs, told reporters.
In 2008, Sierra Leone's President Ernest Bai Koroma said he would prevent the country becoming a key transit point for the international drugs trade. His comments follow the seizure by police of a plane loaded with cocaine at an airport outside the capital. The plane, which was abandoned on the runway, was carrying a 600kg cargo, worth an estimated $54m.
Following the seizure of the plane , Sierra Leone police arrested seven foreign nationals - three Colombians, two Mexicans, a Venezuelan national and a US citizen - in a car 10km (six miles) from Freetown's Lungi international airport. Fifty-eight people were held over the seizure of the plane.
Since Sierra Leone has a weak law on narcotics, it has seen traffickers pleading guilty and walking free after paying a fine.
In 2008, Barrels containing about 2.5 tonnes of cocaine were seized from a ship off the coast of Liberia. It was the single largest drug seizure in the country's history, according to maritime officials
During the same year, The Senegalese authorities found an empty sailing boat with 1.2 metric tons of cocaine onboard. The boat was found near the Atlantic Ocean resort of Mbour, with the drugs divided into 50 bags of 24kg each - Senegal's biggest cocaine seizure.
The cocaine was worth some $100m on the streets of Western Europe.
Guinea-Bissau is the most glaring example of the increasing use of West Africa by Latin American cocaine traffickers to get their wares into Europe. The country is wracked by poverty, coups, political unrest and has a coastline full of uninhabited islands, creeks and swamps, providing the perfect cover for smugglers.
Mr Mazzitelli says that the profit on trafficking a single 600kg shipment of cocaine from Africa to Europe was about $15m in 2005. He notes that this is about 20% of all foreign aid to the country in 2006, 14% of annual export revenues and three times the amount of foreign investment. "This shows how vulnerable African states are," he says.
Although there has been a dramatic increase in cocaine seizures in the region, Mr Mazzitelli points out most have been "accidents" - mostly after a plane or boat has broken down and its cargo has then been discovered.
The UK has tried to take preventative action by stationing anti-drugs officers and equipment in the main airport in Ghana's capital, Accra. Eight would-be smugglers were caught within the first six weeks of the operation
Mr Mazzitelli says most West African countries are still reacting to events, rather than taking any pro-active measures. However, he points out that most cocaine is shipped to Africa for re-export, not for local consumption. "Drugs are not a priority for Africa - and never will be - unless the international community makes it one," he says.
After years of wars, chronic instability and extreme poverty, some West African states hardly function. He warns, however, that the inflow of the drugs money has a hugely corrupting influence on already weak states, which could end up as empty shells - cover for officials seeking to become rich.
He says if European countries want to stop cocaine reaching their streets via Africa, they must provide more funds to the police and judiciary - so police officers and judges are paid, they have enough petrol in their cars and prisons to lock up those convicted.
"Otherwise it is a lost battle," he warns.
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