Cocaine Highway. Alex Perry
of midday heat and evening downpours. Even the street dogs sweat in Bissau City. The one benefit of all this decay and torpor is that the place takes no time at all to get to know. The need to move as little as possible means everyone arranges themselves within half a mile of each other in the city centre, around a handful of cafés and restaurants serving octopus salad and chilled carafes of vino verde.
When I first began visiting Guinea-Bissau in September 2012, it was five months after General Antonio Indjai, a corpulent chicken farmer whose family connections catapulted him from private to general during Guinea-Bissau’s civil war in the 1990s, had overthrown the government. General Indjai had taken part in an earlier coup in 2010. But this time he had acted alone, installing a replacement government as his personal front.
Political calamity had been accompanied by economic. That same year the global price of cashews had plummeted and Bissau’s entire legitimate economy was now tied up in 60 million tons of raw nuts that, since they could now only be sold for a loss, were rotting on the docks. That depression only made the cars more incongruous. Parked in the rutted road outside a neighbourhood restaurant a block from my hotel were a bright yellow Hummer, a brand new Range Rover, an Audi Q7 and a Bentley – more than half a million dollars in cars. Just as out of place were their owners, who included a bald Eastern European man talking on a satellite phone, his shirt open to show a gold medallion the size of a CD, and seven neatly bearded Lebanese young men silently sipping water. “Nobody even pretends any more,” said a European honorary-consul I met. “It’s the only business in town.” Diplomats estimated the amount of cocaine moving through Guinea-Bissau had doubled to 60 tons a year since Indjai’s coup. At that kind of volume, the trade was worth twice Guinea-Bissau’s official GDP.
At his offices in a backstreet just back from the centre of Bissau City, I met Joao Biague, the 44-year-old national director of the judicial police and, as such, Guinea-Bissau’s lead anti-narcotics officer. Joao had no money to run an effective operation. Once, the UN Office for Drugs and Crime had given his squad five cars. But they had suspended their support after Indjai’s coup and, without it, the judicial police had no gas money. Joao did have about a dozen mobile phones and around 20 men, whom he deployed in the bars and cafes around town, like the Kallista and Papa Loco’s. He also watched the cars. “I know how many Hummers there are in Guinea-Bissau,” he said. “If I see them moving, I know something is happening.”
With no resources to stop the trade, Joao spent his time studying it. Cocaine, he discovered, had been transported across the Atlantic for thousands of years. In 1992, tests on several 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummies found traces of cocaine and nicotine, both of which originated in the Andes, suggesting not only that the trans-Atlantic drug trade was several millennia old but that Egyptians or Africans crossed the ocean 2,500 years before Christopher Columbus.[1]
In the 16th century, Spaniards and Portuguese colonizers had noted how South Americans chewed the coca leaf to suppress appetite and boost energy. The cocaine alkaloid was first isolated in Europe in 1855 and for a few decades it was used by doctors as an anaesthetic, proscribed by Sigmund Freud as a mood enhancer, given to children as a treatment for toothache, mixed with wine in a blend given divine endorsement by Pope Leo XIII, used by the Antarctic explorers Ernest Shackleton and Captain Robert Scott, and even included in the original recipe of Coca-Cola, which fused the drug with the kola nut. But attempts by southern American plantation and factory owners to improve the productivity of their black workers by giving them cocaine had, by the early 20th century, led to a string of stories in the New York Times about “Negro cocaine fiends” who murdered and raped at will. The same year a pamphlet, The Drug Habit Menace in the South, relayed how as a result of taking cocaine “sexual desires are increased and perverted, peaceful Negroes become quarrelsome and timid Negroes develop a degree of ‘Dutch courage’ that is sometimes almost incredible.”[2]
The backlash against cocaine, and its consequent prohibition in 1914, suppressed its use for half a century. But in the late 1960s, Colombian growers began tapping the new American appetite for drugs. President Richard Nixon’s declaration of a “war on drugs” in 1973 did little to dent demand. In fact, by the turn of the millennium, the cartels had discovered that their business growth was flat-lining not because of efforts to stop them but because the Northern American market was saturated. That, said Joao, was when the cartels realized the European market was still comparatively under-developed and that half-way to Europe, within range of small planes and fishing boats, were a series of eminently corruptible African countries with little in the way of law, government, air-forces or navies.
In 2004 fishing trawlers, go-fast powerboats, small jets and cargo twin props with custom-enlarged fuel tanks began shuttling across the Atlantic. “Highway 10,” so-called because the route roughly followed the 10th parallel, was born. At the beginning of the decade, Europe’s cocaine market was a quarter of its American equivalent. By its end, the two markets matched each other at 350 tons a year. There are now 14-21 million cocaine users in the world, equating to one in 100 Westerners, rising to around three out of 100 in Spain, the US and the UK.[3]
Africans rarely own the drugs they move, something their Latin American, Middle Eastern and European bosses tend to reserve for themselves. But transporting is lucrative work nonetheless, and the syndicates quickly recruited customs officials, baggage handlers, soldiers, rebels, government ministers, diplomats, even a Prime Minister and President or two. The cocaine was flown in by small plane, then taken overland to another African country and flown out in the stomachs of human mules. Or it was shipped in by speedboat and freighted out again in a sea container stacked inside a pile of a thousand others. It was imported in the stomachs of African exchange students returning home from Brazil for the holidays, then re-exported hidden under tons of iced fish or even driven north across the Sahara in convoys of fat-tired super-charged pick-ups.
To keep ahead of the law, the traffickers switched routes constantly, and quickly extended their reach across the continent. Soon every African country with language in common with Latin America – Angola, Cap Verde, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique – was a trafficking hub, as were all of Africa’s biggest airports – Nairobi, Lagos, Johannesburg and Cape Town. Among the airlines, Royal Air Maroc, which linked Brazil with North and West Africa and Europe, became a smugglers’ favourite, as did Africa’s biggest, South African Airways. In 2009, in the first of five cocaine busts for the airline in two years, an entire 15-person SAA crew was arrested at Heathrow accused of smuggling close to half a million dollars of the drug.
When it came to African countries, the cartels especially liked Guinea-Bissau. It had a coastline of a thousand hidden creeks and 88 islands, some with their own colonial-era air-strips. But with a population of 1.5 million and an average per capita income of $500, the country was too small and too poor to afford boats for its navy or planes for its airforce.
When the traffickers first arrived around 2004, said Joao, “they called themselves businessmen. At first we didn’t understand because there was no business for them to do here.” The first most people in Guinea-Bissau heard of cocaine was in 2005 when farmers on the coast outside Bissau City found sacks of white powder washed up on the beach and, thinking it was fertilizer, sprinkled tens of millions of dollars of the drug on their crops. The plants died. But within a year, cocaine was a mainstay of Guinea-Bissau’s economy. In December 2006, Dutch customs Schipol airport arrested 30 passengers on a single flight arriving from Bissau City all of whom had swallowed several bags of cocaine. Two more passengers were carrying more of the drug in their luggage.
Perhaps the biggest hindrance to Joao’s work was that as a state employee, ultimately he worked for Guinea-Bissau’s biggest cocaine smuggler, General Indjai. It was an isolating existence. Joao had had death threats and rarely slept in the same place twice. When I met him, he looked exhausted and told me he was on the point of quitting not just his job but his country too. “Look, I don’t know about the future of the country,” he said, “but I can tell you what I plan for my future. No country that has been through this has been able to fix it and if I cannot achieve what I want, there’s no need for me to stay.” A few months later I heard he had quit and moved to Italy.
1 For more evidence of this drug use and trans-Atlantic trade see American Drugs in Egyptian Mummies