The assassinations of Guinea-Bissau’s President Joao Bernardo Vieira and his Army chief have highlighted the importance of West Africa to the global drug trade. (The drug “highway” runs from South America and the Caribbean to Western Africa and then into Europe and Russia).Experts consider the former Portuguese colony as Africa’s first “narco-state” under the late Vieira's rule. "It’s an easy country to actually be active if you're mafia, an organized crime lord", said a senior official with the UN Office on Drugs and Crime to BBC News. The power vacuum in Guinea-Bissau may bring more instability to the country, while nations in the area like Senegal, Sierra Leone and Guinea face potential collapse.
Vieira was gunned down by mutinous soldiers hours after his rival- military commander Gen. Batista Tagme Na Waie- died from a bomb attack. But were Latin American drug gangs the brains behind the dual murders? An article in csmonitor.com brings up that possibility:
In recent years, Colombian drug cartels have begun flying small planes across the Atlantic, landing on tiny islands dotting the Guinean coastline. Since Guinea-Bissau has no navy to patrol its waters, the cartels were free to unload tons of cocaine destined for Europe. The drugs were then distributed to impoverished African migrants, who would carry the drugs north by boat to the shores of France, Italy, and Spain…Vieira's killing comes days after authorities arrested the son of Guinea’s late president and accused him of drug trafficking.
"This recent set of killings can be explained [as] the action of the drug traffickers, who would not allow anything to get in the way or to obstruct their links with Europe," says David Zounmenou, a senior researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in Tshwane, formerly known as Pretoria.
Image- CBC (“President Joao Bernardo Vieira of Guinea-Bissau, shown here in 2006, died early Monday morning. (Thierry Charlier/Associated Press).”)
Online Sources- The Latin Americanist, Yéle Haiti, Voice of America, Times Online, The Telegraph, BBC News, csmonitor.com
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