A recent study has shed light on the links between Latin Am organized crime and West Africa,showing how drug trafficking has corrupted the stateof Guinea-Bissau and spreading through the region.The report from the African Centre for Strategic Studies primarily focuses on the situation in Guinea-Bissau, outlining how Latin Am (DTOs) have established themselves in the tiny coastal nation.However, it also highlights how the influence of drug trafficking is spreading in to other African countries, as traffickers seek new drug routes to Europe.To illustrate the methods commonly employed by DTOs in Guinea-Bissau, the report highlights the case of Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, a Venezuelan pilot apparently linked to Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel. Vasquez was detained in Guinea-Bissau in 2008 after allegedly flying more than half a ton of cocaine into the country. He was released days later by a local judge, but arrested in Venezuela in 2011.
According to the ACSS study, the case of Vasquez sheds light on how the complex web aircraft purchases and registries, front companies, fake business deals, and complicit individuals needed to execute a drug flight extends not only to West Africa & Latin America, but also to Europe and the United States. The plane Vasquez flew into Bissau was registered in Delaware and had been kept at Fort Lauderdale airport in Florida prior to the drug run.
The drug pilot flying the DC-9, Carmelo Vasquez Guerra, for example, had been arrested and released in three separate countries—Mexico, Guinea Bissau, and Mali—before Venezuela finally stepped in and put him (at least temporarily) behind bars. Vasquez-Guerra first gained notoriety when he piloted the DC9 from St. Petersburg Florida. The plane was on its way back to the U.S. from Caracas when it was busted in April 2006 in the state of Campeche, Mexico. While Mexican soldiers were seizing his airplane, arresting the four other members of the crew, and setting up a perimeter ringing the out-of-the-way airport in Ciudad del Carmen, Vasquez Guerra somehow managed to... just slip away. And of course there were the numerous unexplained 'anomalies' in Vasquez Guerra’s ‘escape’ that left unanswered questions, take the DC9's appearance, for example: the DC-9 was curious for a number of reasons, not least of which was the fact that “one of the chief shareholders” of a dodgy outfit called SkyWay Aircraft “is a private investment bank in Dallas which also raised funds for a Mexican industrialist with reported ties to a Cali and Juarez Cartels”
More curious still, the airline kitted-out its fleet with distinctive colours and a seal “designed to impersonate planes from the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.” And when he learned that “SkyWay’s genesis can be traced to In-Q-Tel Inc., a secretive, Arlington, Va., investment group owned, operated, and financed out of the black box budget of the Central Intelligence Agency.
the biggest banks in the U.S., ”Wachovia and Bank of America. The Justice Department charge sheet against the bank tells us for Mexican currency exchanges, “the largest violation of the bank secrecy act, an anti-money laundering law, in U.S. history.”
Subsequent investigations by Narco News revealed that “another Gulfstream II (tail number N987SA), was used between 2003 and 2005 by the CIA for at least three trips between the U.S. east coast and Guantanamo Bay, home to the infamous ‘terrorist’ prison camp,” Bill Conroy reported.
“In addition,” Conroy wrote, “the two SkyWay companies are associated with individuals who have done highly sensitive work for the Department of Defense or U.S. intelligence agencies, public records show and Narco News sources confirm.”
However in a later report,Mark Conrad, a former supervisory special agent with ICE's predecessor agency, U.S. Customs, said that the crashed Gulfstream used to transport drugs and prisoners was controlled by the CIA and “that the CIA, not ICE … [was] actually the U.S. agency controlling the … operation. If this were the case, then “any individuals or companies involved in a CIA-backed operation, even ones that are complicit in drug trafficking, would be off limits to U.S. law enforcers due to the cloak of national security the CIA can invoke.”
In other words, a jet purchased by drug traffickers with funds laundered through an American bank and used in the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” program may have been part of a protected drug operation by U.S. intelligence agencies. An operation furthermore, whose purpose is still unknown.
The report also raises the question of whether Guinea-Bissau is just the first of many African countries to fall under the corrosive influence of drug trafficking. "Guinea-Bissau may be Africa’s first narco-state, but worrying signs in Mali, The Gambia, Ghana,Nigeria,Mozambique,Kenya, and elsewhere indicate that this is not the only country struggling against the hollowing effects of drug trafficking on security, development, and governance," it states.
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| Americo Bubo Na Tchuto |
The spreading influence of Latin American DTOs has also contributed to the development of African organized crime networks, according to the report, which are now keen to step up their involvement in drug trafficking. "What was initially a transshipment problem has turned into something larger, more complex, home grown, and destabilizing,"
The presence of Latin American DTOs in Africa is irrefutable; according to a UN report, up to 50 Colombian drug lords are in Guinea-Bissau, where they coordinate drugs moving in and out of the country. According to UNODC estimates, cocaine trafficked through West Africa has a street value of approximately $2 billion per year, roughly equal to Guinea-Bissau's GDP, so Latin American DTOs are capable of offering head turning sums to
already corrupt officials.
The extent of this corruption was revealed by a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) sting operation in April, which resulted in the arrest of several Guinea-Bissau military officials in international waters. The officials involved believed they were brokering a weapons and drugs deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Among them were coup plotters Bubo Na Tchuto and Indjai, and the latter has now been charged in the United States, but remains at large in his homeland.
As part of the deal negotiated with the DEA, Bubo Na Tchuto believed he would be paid $1 million for every ton of cocaine brought into the country -- an astronomical sum in Guinea-Bissau, which has a per capita GDP of about $551.
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| Antonio Indjai |
market in Europe. According to the UNODC, in 1998 the value of the European cocaine market was a quarter of the US market; a decade later it was almost on
par.The exponential growth in Euro cocaine consumption has pushed Latin American DTOs to seek out new trafficking routes to exploit the market. With a poorly monitored transport corridor linking Guinea-Bissau to two of Latin America’s largest drug departure countries for cocaine headed to Europe, Brazil and Venezuela, it is an ideal layover for drug shipments heading north.The invasion of Guinea-Bissau has allowed Latin American DTOs to get a foothold in Africa,but it is not the limit of their ambitions.
The presence of Sinaloa Cartel elements in N. Africa has been well documented in recent years,while the 2009 recovery in Mali of a crashed drug plane that set off from Venezuela suggests that air routes are expanding throughout the region.The political instability caused by the presence of DTOs is not reserved to Guinea-Bissau,either. The empowerment of groups with access to drug money and the impact this can have was demonstrated last year when Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) -- which earns millions of dollars from trafficking drugs through North Africa -- capitalized on a coup to take control of the northern half of Mali. Meanwhile, in West Africa, a recent study from the US Strategic Studies Institute reported the presence of Colombian drug lords in Guinea, opening up the possibility that Guinea-Bissau's closest neighbour could be the next domino to fall.
Night after night, members of Conte's own family in Guinea, along with senior figures in the police, army and customs, have gone on the show to confess their involvement in what amounted to the world's first-ever "cocaine coup".
A special airstrip was built for cartel planes to land in the north of the country, complete with a hotel for smugglers to stay in. When visiting cartel members from Colombia and Venezuela stayed in the capital, Conakry, they were entertained in a house belonging to the former first lady and escorted by presidential guards. Cocaine packages were even sent to Europe using diplomatic pouches.
At the heart of it all, meanwhile, was no less a figure than the late president's own
eldest son, Ousmane, who would personally clear shipments as they arrived at Conakry
airport in a plane marked with "Red Cross" symbols.
"I acknowledge that I was in the drug business, and I regret it," he told the nation in a
taped confession, in which he begged for forgiveness. Along with two of his brothers and
the former chiefs of the army and counter-narcotics police, he is now among more than 20
once-feared figures from the old regime who are facing trial.
Diplomats say there is no doubt that tons of the drug really were being given safe passage
through Guinea, passing on across the Sahara to Europe in the cocaine equivalent of the
Paris-Dakar rally. What has been exposed was long an open secret in Conakry, as shown by
the large numbers of Hummers, BMWs and other luxury cars that cruise what are otherwise
some of the poorest streets in the world. Until recently, many were to be found in the car
park of the counter-narcotics squad, where the scope for backhanders used to be so great
that it was inundated with transfer requests from other $100-a-month police departments.
When one foreign diplomat attended an official burning ceremony of a police "seizure" of
a ton of cocaine, the packets turned out to have substituted with a fake white powder.
"Cocaine smuggling in Guinea has become a major concern, both in terms of the supply to
Europe and the corrupting impact it has one Guinea's governance and law enforcement
agencies," said one Western official.
The growth of trafficking in Guinea and neighbouring west African states such as Guinea
Bissau, Liberia and Sierra Leone began around four years ago, when smuggling direct to
Europe across the Atlantic became harder in the wake of increased maritime security.
Latino cartels, facing an already saturated market in the US, used Nigerian middlemen to
scout for contacts region-wide, and found perfect business partners in the politicians, police and generals of West Africa's bankrupt, war-ravaged coastal capitals.