The wooden canoes stacked on the putrid beach of Mbour’s main port tell two stories. Once these locally made, satellite-equipped pirogues did a busy trade shipping out thousands of young men for the perilous journey to Europe. Now they have begun to export a far more profitable clandestine commodity to Europe’s shores: cocaine.
Local guide Abdoulaye Boubacar explains: “The trade in humans has moved south; now people move drugs instead.”
Gesturing at boys scavenging for fishing nets that might be worth fixing on the tar-stained sand, he adds: “You can see why this can be attractive.”
Some 3 210kg of cocaine have been seized off Senegal’s seaboard this year, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the country’s largest haul to date. Last year police found over a ton of cocaine in a single boat in Mbour, a town of 70 000 people. Earlier more than two tons were discovered in a safe house outside the capital Dakar, 100km north, destined for the coast.
European donors and local politicians worry that Senegal, an oasis of stability in a politically turbulent region, is gradually succumbing to cocaine’s lure. “South American cartels have set up here,” said Abdoulaye Niang, one of Senegal’s anti-narcotics policemen, pointing to structured networks of Senegalese, Colombians and Europeans running regional operations.
But Senegal is one piece in the jigsaw of West African countries that have become a cocaine smuggler’s paradise. They offer unmonitored coasts, poorly paid officials, porous borders and booming informal markets.
Traffickers initially targeted Guinea-Bissau, but Senegal’s relatively solid roads and good telecommunications infrastructure has seen the traffickers move northwards. Ghana and Guinea-Conakry are other preferred entry points, according to the UN. Mali, Nigeria, Senegal and Guinea-Conakry are favoured conduits for couriers.
The UN estimates that 50 tons a year, worth almost $2-billion at European wholesale prices, passes through West Africa. This exceeds some countries’ national income.
Some cocaine leaves Colombia in planes small enough to fly at 2 000m, making them undetectable by radar. They land, often at night, in towns such as Boke in Guinea-Conakry, from where the convoy is transported under escort to the city for storage.
Last month the son of former president Lansana Conte confessed on television to being involved in drug trafficking.
In the nightclubs beloved by Dakar’s nouveau riche, Spanish and Portuguese accents are increasingly heard amid French and Wolof orders for imported French wine. On the city’s arid outskirts, metallic and glass office buildings are rising.
One local businessman said that whole construction sites were being funded with drug money. “Senegal is doing well economically but when you see the pace of construction it doesn’t add up. Hundreds of millions of dollars are being smuggled and laundered here,” he said.
Antonio Mazzitelli, head of West Africa’s UNODC office in Dakar, points out that Senegal has become West Africa’s largest source of European cocaine, with 434kg caught in 105 separate mule seizures in the past two years.
South American drug cartels often pay their Senegalese allies in kind — with a cut of the smuggled cocaine. Autonomous Senegalese smuggling units have now sprung up, sometimes taking advantage of the country’s global diaspora of Muslim entrepreneurial networks embedded as street traders in Europe, car dealers in the US or import-export dealers in Hong Kong.
The European seizures are a fraction of what gets through — mostly to the UK and Spain, Europe’s two biggest cocaine markets. Averaging over 4kg a mule, it’s indicative of the risks young Senegalese are taking.
Drug summit hopes to snuff out trade
Cocaine production has surged across Latin America, unleashing a wave of violence, population displacements and corruption. This is the backdrop to a crucial UN drug summit this week in Vienna, writes Rory Carroll.
More than 750 tons of cocaine are shipped annually from the Andes, forcing peasants off land, sparking gang wars and perverting state institutions.
Last year almost 6 000 people died in drug-related violence in Mexico, which is showing signs of spilling northwards into the United States. More than 1 000 have been killed this year.
A new trafficking route between South America and West Africa has grown so quickly that the 10th latitude corridor has been dubbed Interstate 10.
Commentators largely agree that insatiable demand for cocaine in Europe and North America has thwarted US-led efforts to choke supply and inflicted enormous damage on Latin America.
“The war on drugs is a failure,” said Cesar Gaviria, Colombia’s former president and co-chair of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy.
“Prohibitionist policies based on eradication, interdiction and criminalisation have not yielded the expected results. We are farther than ever from eradicating drugs.”
The commission is urging a “paradigm shift” to a public health approach, including decriminalisation of marijuana.
The strategy of President Evo Morales, an indigenous coca farmer and Washington critic, has been to expel US narcotics agents, let farmers grow coca for medical purposes and order local security forces to root out the cocaine element. Bolivia will lobby the UN summit to decriminalise coca.
Reports by the Brookings Institution and Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron, the latter endorsed by 500 economists, have joined the chorus demanding change.
The European Union and some Latin American countries want a strategy based on “harm reduction” measures, such as needle exchanges. But holdovers from the Bush administration are lobbying Barack Obama to stick with traditional US emphasis on supply.
Even Colombia’s president, Alvaro Uribe, who backs Washington’s drug war, has sounded the alarm.
“Organised crime could destroy us all,” he warned regional leaders recently. —