West Africa has become an increasingly important transit hub for trafficking cocaine to Europe as international criminal networks exploit the region’s lack of resources to combat drug smuggling, experts warn.
The ”tightening of border controls in the Netherlands and in Spain as well as the reinforcement of security in the United States after September 11 forced South American traffickers to tackle the European market via West Africa”, said Fabrice Pothier of Senlis Council, an independent global think-tank fighting against narcotics trafficking.
The drug cartels ”have established a relay system in the Gulf of Guinea, where received drugs are re-packaged for smuggling into Europe, in a similar way it is done in eastern Europe by the Russian or Turkish mafias in trafficking heroin,” he told Agence France-Presse.
While authorities in the region acknowledge the phenomenon, Pothier said they ”certainly ignore the problem” and refuse ”to acknowledge the blame for failure to appropriately respond”.
In its annual report published in March based on the records of seized drugs in 2004, the International Narcotics Control Board (INCB) raised alarm bells, warning that drug traffickers are turning ”more and more to West Africa”.
”West Africa has assumed such an importance in the cocaine route to Europe where the traffickers have set themselves up all along the coast with logistic bases equipped with landing strips,” confirmed to AFP Antonio Mazzitelli, regional manager of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (UNDCP).
”The importance and the relocation of the bases are visible in particular in Guinea-Bissau, where organisations from Colombia, Venezuela or Mexico have settled,” Mazzitelli added.
Poverty-stricken Guinea-Bissau ”offers many opportunities [for the traffickers] because of the security forces’ lack of resources — they have neither cars nor radios and thus cannot police the territory,” he explained.
”In this country in recent months there has been a notable increase in the seizures of cocaine and arrests, which can be regarded as the tip of the iceberg,” said the UN drugs control chief.
Mazzitelli warned that the drug cartels were also diversifying into smuggling illegal immigrants and precious stones, making it more difficult to combat them.
While conscious of the fact that many countries in the region have other pressing priorities, Mazzitelli warned that due to lack of state policies on security issues ”certain countries are likely to be invaded by the traffickers”.
He fears that Guinea-Bissau, Guinea and Mauritania are likely to be consumed by the drug-trafficking flame as the region offers fertile ground for criminal organisations due to conflicts and economic crises.
”A country that traffics drugs is a country that consumes,” noted Pothier. ”These countries encounter a triple problem: traffic, production and consumption,” he said.
To effectively counter the drug problem, there is need for economic policies to address the core causes of the people’s hardships, he said. — AFP
