The drug coast

HAS FAILED IN G U I N EA-B I SSAU .

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asks the bug-eyed lawyer. /, "That's just rumors and lies, ^ accusations spread by journal-

ists." We sit across from each other on a hot, hungover Sunday morning in Bissau, the sleepy capital city of Guinea-Bissau. For the past hour Dr. Carlos Gabriel l.opes Correia, an attorney for the local drug lords, has been telling me there is no great narcotics problem here. But he can't resist the urge to brag. He wants the world to know he is one of the top lawyers in Guinea-Bissau, a place where the law is

merely notional, the elec­trical grid doesn't func­tion, the soldiers aren't paid tor months at a time and the police don't have handcuffs. This is a country so unstable that the Portuguese airline—

Guinea-Bissau's main link to Europe, operat­ing one flight a week—refuses to leave a jet here overnight tor fear of what lurks beyond the tarmac's edge. When you arrive, those leaving push onto your plane before it is empty. When you step into the humid night outside the terminal, you feel trapped.

"Okay. I'll tell you how it started," the law­yer says, coughing from his cigarette, "how the drugs got here and how people started smug­gling." Correia wears shorts, flip-flops and a shirt that grabs at his belly. He chain-smokes

knockoH Marlboro Lights. Of course Correia will tell me—these cases are all that connect him to the outside world.

The scene outside the attorney's compound hints at a deeper history:

ABANDONED FISHING BOATS IN THE HARBOR: WHERE TRADITIONAL ECONOMIES FAIL. NONTRADITIONAL ONES FLOURISH.

The landscape still hears traces of a ramshackle Portuguese colonialism that gave way to revolutionary dreams and then just to more war and instability. The burned house next door now serves as the neighborhood garbage dump. Stray dogs root around in the trash and wander the vacant streets. Three blocks up the hill the largely empty Avenida da Che Guevara flows into a desolate traffic circle.

Behind the circle lies the abandoned presidential palace, a grand old Portuguese mansion that was burned and looted during the brief civil war in the late 1990s. The building's walls are pocked by gunfire, moss creeps from the roof, and dragonflies hover in its shade.

This is what Guinea-Bissau has become. Once imagined as a model of socialist prosperity, this underdeveloped former colony has become Africa's first full-blown narco state, a political and administrative no-man's-land. The government is disorganized, corrupt and fragmented; its institutions don't keep proper records or maintain normal standards. Now the local forces of law and order have essentially merged with Latin America's cocaine mafias.

Interpol and the United Nations say Guinea-Bissau has become the main transshipment point for cocaine being smug­gled into Europe. For years the Caribbean nations played that role but not anymore. Since 2005 more than 3i tons of cocaine have been seized en route to Europe via western Africa. As an alarmed United Nations report puts it, "Some­thing has shifted, suddenly and dramatically."

Once relatively rare in Europe, cocaine has become a popu­lar drug there. About 140 metric tons of cocaine—nearly a quarter of the world total—is now consumed every year in the European Union. .Most of that passes through western Africa, much of it through Guinea-Bissau.

Guinea-Bissau is perfectly placed between Latin America and southern Europe. With a population of only 1.5 million, the country is about the size of Maryland, with a similar geogra­phy: penetrated by several estuaries and having an archipelago of more than SO low, overgrown islands. Most of the archi­pelago is uninhabited, and many islands have old military-built landing strips. Smugglers wait with speedboats covered in blue tarps by day, ready to pick up drugs by night.

Guinea-Bissau is the third-poorest country on earth. Its per

capita GDP is $600 a year. Though it sounds like a bad joke, peanuts are the biggest export, and the tax on peanuts is the government's largest source of revenue. The total annual national budget, mostly funded through loans and foreign aid, is about equal to the European wholesale value of 2.5 tons of cocaine—a bit less than a month's worth of the cocaine that passes through here.

The military runs the show in Guinea-Bissau, but corruption at the top means lower officers and their men go unpaid for months and can barely survive on the wages when they are dis­bursed. Thus, these armed men are susceptible to bribery. The judges are weak, and there is no prison—like the presidential palace, it was destroyed during the civil war.

"It all started in 2005," says Correia. "A famous European trafficker was moving drugs out of here in a boat headed toward Senegal. The U.S. embassy in Dakar found out— someone here told them—and they got the Senegalese coast guard to intercept the ship. The smuggler dumped his load overboard. Well, it all washed up in Biombo. The farmers thought it was fertilizer and put it on their crops, which all died." The lawyer erupts in a smoky laugh.

We are at Correia's home, sitting in the courtyard, a con­crete slab surrounded by crowded rooms. A woman washes clothes in a plastic bucket. Several fat children wander around. Behind the lawyer sits a motionless young man who stares at me with bloodshot eyes.

"There was this kid from Biombo who had been living in Germany," says Correia. "He came home for a celebration and saw all this cocaine. He bought 10 kilos and took it to Europe. He made hundreds of thousands of euros."

The kid in question is Augusto Bliri, one of the most famous drug dealers in Bissau. Bliri started trafficking in drugs in Europe about a dozen years ago, moving product from Por­tugal to Germany. He affects the hip-hop style of American gangstcrdom. He presents himself as an underworld entrepre­neur who likes to bankroll big basketball games and has tried to produce a few local music videos.

In 2006 Bliri was busted and actually convicted and sentenced to four years in jail. "The conditions they had him in were very bad," says Correia. "He was in a base­ment. This made him get sick. [continued on page 98)

DRUG

(continued from page 40) Because he was sick, I forced the judge lo have him released."

Was Bliri guilty'-1 Is he really a drug smuggler? "Absolutely," says Correia, grinning. "He's a professional." Augusio Bliri himself is unavailable for comment— "away on business."

Another case Correia handled was more serious and involved defending two Colom­bians after a shoot-out on September 26, 2006. The Judiciary Police—the only armed force in this country that doesn't seem to be up to its neck in drug money—arrested two men: one by the name of Juan Pablo Cama-cho, the other calling himself Luis Fernando Ortega Mejia. The raid netted laptops, firearms, radios, 674 kilos of cocaine and $39 million in various currencies. It was the biggest bust the country' had ever seen.

But then a funny thing happened. The money and drugs were put into the trea­sury vaults for safekeeping. The next night, armed men wearing military uniforms seized both the cocaine and the cash. (The military claims the thieves were impostors, but few believe that.)

As for the Colombians, with no evidence, there was no case. They walked, and Cor­reia gained his second great victory. He's now trying to get back their cash and lap­tops. The Colombians are said to have left the country, skipping bail, though one of them was interviewed in the Portuguese press shortly after his arrest. He claimed to be a simple businessman planning to move his wife and four children to Bissau from Colombia. The story hardly made any sense. And then the man was gone.

The hotel I am staying in—a single-story maze of red-tiled hallways and clean, cavernous rooms—briefly became inter­nationally famous last year when French intelligence agents and local cops arrested two Al Qaeda terrorists here. The Al Qaeda men had traveled through Senegal and Mauritania after murdering a family of French tourists. They figured the lawless­ness of Guinea-Bissau would shield them.

The restaurant and its open-air patio are empty. Brazilian soap operas and clown shows play on the TV in the lobby. Occa­sionally, Portuguese and Spanish import-export men pass through. They all tell me they're here to buy cashews.

It's time to explore the nightlife. I catch a cab, or rather I step out to the old Euro­pean sedan that always waits in front of the hotel, never seeming to have any busi­ness—its driver is forever either polishing the hood or reading a newspaper. I wade through the local Portuguese with my semi­functional Yankee Spanish. The driver will give me a tour of Bissau.

First stop is the Avenida da Che Gue­vara. There are two cafe bars here where the few NGO types and foreign business­men park their SLVs and drink beer at sidewalk tables. Strolling up and down the avenue are the young women of the nighl: roy. well-dressed local girls looking for rich

temporary boyfriends to take them out, as well as a few drunken and addicted Nige­rian hookers who in their clipped English accost any white man.

Then we head along a dark tree-lined avenue. The traffic is minimal, the moon­less night unbroken by street lamps. Thick old trees, planted generations ago by Por­tuguese colonialists, stand over the road, their smooth gray trunks slowly muscling up through the flagstones and leaning out from the walls and courtyards. The head­lights of passing cars briefly reveal an occa­sional pedestrian but only a few. Farther out, toward the edge of town, the canopy of old trees gives way to open space.

In the middle of one barren lot sits the Palace Hotel. This is where Bliri hangs out. It's a new and gaudy structure. Inside, bottles of whiskey cost $80. This is where the children of the country's elite—the generals and ambassadors—party on week­ends. Set back from the road, the Palace is a tinted-glass box approached by a long rise of steps, like a Chinese-built Versailles. When it's hopping, the place is mobbed with suave young men and beautiful young women in tight miniskirts, stacked up on high heels, their hair perfectly coiffed. The tables are packed with cliques of friends try­ing to talk over the pounding reggae and Afropop. The desperate attempt to scream exclusivity only heightens the feeling of iso­lation that defines this country.

Interestingly, few people here do cocaine. Use of the drug has not caught on among the better-off in Bissau, and the poor struggle just to buy rice. But one girl tells me she saw Bliri snort cocaine at the Palace—"right off the table!" Then she adds, "He always has a gun."

"I am ashamed to say this, but the highest levels of the military here are involved in drug trafficking," says Edmundo Mendes, the top antidrug cop in Guinea-Bissau. Mendes is second in command of the Judi­ciary Police. Its offices, arranged around a muddy parking lot, are dark because the electricity is off. They have only two jail cells. One is crowded with 19 men awaiting trial, none on drug charges. In the other is a woman who allegedly killed her child.

As I interview Mendes two of his officers interrupt to complain there is no gas for one of the Judiciary Police's two cars. He rum­mages around for the keys to the other.

Mendes unfolds a sad tale: The police have nine redundant divisions controlled by five different ministries. These little plots of armed power are run as the per­sonal fiefdoms of vying big men—soldiers, ex-guerrillas and party cadres who have known and often hated one another for 40 years. They are of the generation that won independence from the Portuguese, and they treat Guinea-Bissau as their personal property, the spoils of their war. These dysfunctional fiefdoms have become tribal, each controlled by an ethnic group. Each piece of the state struggles against the others for access to resources. Most refuse to cooperate with European law enforce­ment in the fight against trafficking.

The big man in charge of the Judiciary Police is actually a woman, Lucinda Aucarie. Above her is another woman, the justice minister, Carmelita Barbosa Rodrigues Pires. Pires is one of the more powerful women in the country's hierarchy, though she controls a force of only 63 undercover detectives. Those who know her say Pires has a social conscience and worries the drug economy in Guinea-Bissau may be its final undoing.

For whatever reason, she seems to run a clean, relatively accountable operation, which makes her competitors hate the Judiciary Police all the more. When I visit Guinea-Bissau both women are out of the country. 'Just away on vacation" is all Mendes will say. Later in my trip I hear about the death threats against Minister Pires.

The threats get worse throughout the summer. When I follow up by phone from the States, the minister puts me off with no real explanation. I want an interview or at least an opportunity to e-mail her a few questions. Her office demands I explain my request in a notarized letter and send it as a PDF attachment. I comply with this silly for­mality, but they keep putting me off without really saying no. A friend of mine in Bissau, a young Lisbon-educated sociologist, tells me the situation is becoming too intense. He and others suspect the minister feels trapped between the international antidrug

efforts—by October, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon is publicly calling for sanc­tions—and the increasingly powerful narco elements in her own government.

The JP's archrival is the Ministry of the Interior. Run by Cercorio Biote, it operates less like a ministry than like a gang, a net­work of kinsmen who seem to be involved in smuggling. In April the internecine struggle turned bloody: Members of an interior ministry SWAT team broke into Judiciary Police headquarters to torture and kill an officer who had threatened the operations of a drug gang.

I press Mendes for confirmation of stories like this, for details and names. He is ner­vous. He fidgets and tries to avoid specifics. His lonely office begins to feel like a hide­out. The window by his desk is shielded by metal bars. Outside, a lush tree rises over the building, allowing only a murky green light to filter in. The office manages to be both barren and cluttered: The shelves are largely empty of papers, but what few exist are stacked haphazardly, spilling over, neglected, in disarray.

The young interpreter with whom I'm working is the somewhat sheltered daugh­ter of a prominent ambassador; she becomes frightened by Mendes's nervousness. Here's a cop who is uncomfortable saying things that are a matter of public record. A fear lies upon the city like a pall. It is expressed in the way no one asks any questions and never wants to answer any. Eventually Mendes says that among the military men making money on drugs are the head of the navy, Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, and the armed forces chief of staff. General Batista Tagme Na Wai.

Critics of the Judiciary Police wave away its antinarcotics efforts as nothing more than pandering, playing up to European donors and hustling rich countries for aid grants. Indeed, the EL1 has pledged 2 mil­lion euros' worth of training to the JP. But that's chump change when compared with the income from one cocaine shipment. Ultimately, the ragtag JP is well-meaning but outnumbered.

In Bissau's weekly newspapers and on one of its communitv radio stations, a few local

journalists have had the guts to report on the government's links to drug trafficking. Bui the price has been high. One writer, Allen Yero Emballo, had his home raided by the military. He was beaten, and his papers were seized. As the soldiers departed they told him, "Next time we"ll leave the papers and just take your head." Emballo soon decamped for France.

Fernando Jorge Pereira also had trouble. He writes for papers in Bissau and for Por­tugal's Expresso. I meet him at his house one evening. A wall of lush green plants stands between us and the potholed street outside. Nearby is a stadium of sorts: a raised basket­ball court flanked by cement bleachers. It is hot and there is no electricity for a fan, so we sit in the caged-in patio of Pereira's small colonial bungalow, its cement walls stained

with mildew. I take notes as he speaks. After about an hour and a half the light has faded into dark shades of blue, and my note­book has faded away in the darkness.

Pereira explains how he started by investigating some Colombians who ran a car dealership at the edge of town. "It was strange that they showed up here and started such a busi­ness," says Pereira. It soon became clear the business—import­ing, exporting and selling used cars for cash—was a front for drug and money-laundering schemes. Like many such schemes, it operated for a while and then quietly closed up.

In' May 2007 Pereira was feeling particularly ballsy: He went out to the island of Bubaque, a known staging point for the drug trade, and lay in wait to photograph a small plane he knew

would be landing. The security forces were also there and arrested Pereira, threatening him with imprisonment. Since then he has backed of! the drug story. "It is too risky if I am going to continue living here," he says.

Few people know how the western African cocaine trade works. The sub-rosa world of smuggling is necessarily opaque. Regional and international police forces all admit ignorance. "Even we speculate on how it really works," says Mody Ndiaye, a Sen­egalese detective who now acts as a drug specialist in Guinea-Bissau for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. His office is on the top floor of Bissau's high­est building, a six-story office block on a muddy road. He has a sweeping view of

the swamp and the dump, in which white cranes pick for scraps.

Several factors have caused South Amer­ican traffickers to pivot toward Europe. The U.S. cocaine market is saturated, but cocaine use in Europe is on the rise, and the euro is strong. More robust antinar-cotics enforcement in Central America and the Caribbean has increased the cost of business. And there's the rise of metham-phetamine production and trafficking out of northern Mexico—competition from a cheap imitation.

Over the past three years South Ameri­cans looking to open markets in the EU have started using western Africa as their transshipment area. Ndiaye says the Latin Americans here do not operate as a cartel of any sort. In reality, organized crime is

less organized than we usually suspect. "It goes deal by deal, and the networks change according to the relationships of the indi­viduals in them," he says. "It is opportunis­tic and ad hoc, not formal organizations."

Nor are there many Latin Americans here at any one time. Reading a few reports on Guinea-Bissau's drug trade, you get the idea the place is overrun with mustached Colombians. In fact, the drug scene is much quieter. The illicit foreign businessmen appear much like their legitimate counter­parts: They live in secluded, well-guarded haciendas, or they stay at one of the nice hotels. They drive Land Rovers. They wear clean pressed clothes that never seem to be sweaty. But it's hard to tell who's export­ing cashews and who's exporting cashews packed to conceal cocaine.

In western Africa there has long been a class of independent foreign business­men involved in importing and exporting. You find them from Angola to the Congo and up through the west, small pockets of Portuguese, French, Italians and lots of Lebanese. They live with their families in fortified frontier-style luxury and travel back to the old country two or three times a year. Their walled-off hilltop compounds are clustered above the ragged towns where they do business exporting (timber, rubber, cocoa, coffee, diamonds and baux­ite) and importing (machinery, electronics, pesticides, guns, medicines and grains). To the extent that cocaine traffickers have partnered with this class of colonial mid­dlemen, they have also blended in.

"I think there are only about nine Latin

Americans here, says John Blacken, a former U.S. ambas­sador to Guinea-Bissau. Like most countries, the U.S. no longer has an embassy here, so I meet Blacken in his cluttered office in an old colonial building in downtown Bissau. "They are here and have connections to the government," he says, "but they keep it all very low-key."

"There could be 20 to 40 or maybe 50 Latin Ameri­cans involved in the cocaine trade all across west Africa," says Antonio Mazz-itelli, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime's director for western Africa. "They are very fluid, mobile and spread out."

Mazzitelli believes Latin American smugglers visit Guinea-Bissau to make arrangements with local criminal networks, but he isn't

sure it cocaine is sold to locals or it the locals handle the cocaine for a fee. At first the local links seemed to be extensions of the Ghana­ian and Nigerian gangs that have long dom­inated the western African underworld, but the deals increasingly involve new networks formed in Guinea-Bissau. The locals have contacts in the military, friends and family who can provide security and access to air­strips, the port and warehouses.

The cocaine itself is produced in Colom­bia and Peru, with much of the raw coca leaves being grown in the jungles of Bolivia. From Colombia and Peru the cocaine enters Venezuela and eastern Brazil, jumping-off points to Africa. From the eastern edge of Latin America the narcotics travel across the Atlantic in cargo ships or large yachts. These boats are met at sea by trawlers

and smaller boats that smuggle the drugs ashore. Another common method is to use small passenger planes fitted with extra fuel tanks for the transatlantic flight. The drugs are resold and/or broken into smaller loads that are then shipped to Europe. The prod­uct may go (o yet another western African nation before heading north, or it may be exported directly from the port at Bissau to Lisbon or Rotterdam.

Most drugs leave western Africa hidden in cargo containers, stashed in loads of hard­wood, cashews, peanuts, yams and even African arts and crafts. Only a fraction of the intermodal shipping containers entering Europe are opened and physically searched. Another common smuggling method is the use of paid couriers who swallow drugs or simply stash the product in their luggage on the weekly Air Portugal flight to Lisbon. In 2006 Dutch authorities found 28 west­ern Africans carrying cocaine on a single flight from Mali. A year later they found 22 smugglers on a flight from the neighboring country of Guinea-Conakry. "We think this indicates a pretty constant flow using com­mercial air travel," says Emmanuel Leclaire, assistant director for drugs and criminal organizations at Interpol. According to local UN personnel who spoke on condition of anonymity, diplomats from Guinea-Bissau have even used diplomatic mail pouches to smuggle cocaine.

The drugs also move north from Guinea-Bissau by land, in trucks through Senegal and Mauritania and across the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast of Morocco. Tran­sit through this lawless interior is secured by bribing local security and militia forces. On occasion, it appears, Europeans are

involved in this link as well: Not long ago a Frenchman driving a Land Rover full of cocaine was arrested in Mauritania.

Increasingly, the western African drug trade—and its associated money launder­ing—works through legitimate front com­panies. The Colombians Correia helped to freedom claimed they were restarting an old construction firm. Sociedade Metro-politana de Construcoes is housed in the now defunct branch of a Portuguese mul­tinational that years ago built a new, some­what modern port facility. Police say a small group of Colombians bought SOMEC and now use it to store and smuggle cocaine and launder money.

Another interesting firm is Cervejas e Refrigerants de Guinea-Bissau. A state-run company that closed during the late 1990s, it was purchased by a Moroccan in 2006. It has huge warehouses near the port that were locked but clearly occupied when I visited. Edmundo Mendes of the Judiciary Police asked me not to poke around too aggressively because the JP is trying to crack the case. The company says it will be up and running soon. "They don't produce anything. They don't bottle anything," says Mendes. "This Moroccan owner, we don't know who he really is." Mendes and the L'NODC suspect cocaine is hidden in refrigerant bottles and trans­ported north overland.

Still another method involves the airport. A woman who ran part of the ground operations at the small national airport describes how the military would regularly take over the airport to allow small planes to land and take off at the far end of the runwav.

"In the middle of the night the military would come in and just push us all aside," she says. "Planes would land and take off, and they would say, 'Those are tourist flights, charter planes going to the islands.' But it would be at three in the morning."

European authorities want western .African states to crack down on cocaine. Aid is on offer to local cops who at least make the gesture of combating drugs. Midsummer 2008 saw a flurry of arrests. First, a small Venezuelan-registered jet bearing a fake Red Cross sign was seized after it forced its way onto the tarmac of the Lungi Interna­tional Airport in nearby Sierra Leone. The plane held about 1,500 pounds of cocaine, and the police soon arrested more than 60 people, including the brother of Sierra Leone's transportation minister, three Ven­ezuelans and eight other foreigners.

Then Senegalese police noticed a group of about 15 Latin Americans were regularly shutding between Brazil, Bissau and Dakar. The police started running background checks on these men before issuing them visas, but then the group stopped coming to Senegal and started traveling through Guinea-Conakry instead. The mysterious Latin sojourners included Colombians, Mexicans, Venezuelans and a Guatemalan.

In early August the military in Guinea-Bissau seized two planes at Bissau's inter­national airport. One was a Gulfstream jet registered in Venezuela. Details were kept quiet, but there seems to have been a standoff between the military and the Judi­ciary Police. The police arrested the jet's three-man Venezuelan crew and the local head of the air-traffic control tower. But in a familiar pattern, the military seized the plane and would not allow the J P to search it, then claimed it contained no drugs.

Another plane, which apparently came to fix the Gulfstream, was also impounded. A few weeks after this botched bust Justice Minister Pires announced she was receiving more death threats and warnings to drop her investigation.

The crisis took a strange turn on August 8, 2008 when one of the biggest traffickers in Bissau—head of the navy, good old Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto— was arrested by his main competition, the military, on the orders of General Batista Tagme Na Wai. "We have foiled a coup attempt that was to have been carried out early on Thursday by a group of officers," said a military spokesman. Was the army-vs.-navy struggle related to money and drugs? It's hard to tell.

Then on November 23, just after local elec­tions, there was a second attempt: About a dozen gunmen attacked the presidential resi­dence. During the short but bloody shoot-out President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira was pinned down in his bedroom. The attack­ers were repelled, and a few were arrested, among them a navy sergeant named N'tchami Yala, who is said to be close to the now dis­graced Rear Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto.

There aren't many luxury hangouts in Guinea-Bissau—three or four clubs in

the capital, one sort of nice hotel on one of the big islands. There is (or was) the Hotel Mar Azul, about an hour outside the capital city. For years Mar Azul was the rural party spot for Guinea-Bissau's small elite—the same crew who now graces the Palace Hotel. But Mar Azul is currently off-limits, part of the drug maelstrom. The locals stay away, and the business has been leased to new owners.

On a suffocatingly still afternoon 1 hire a car and drive out to Mar Azul. At the end of a long, sandy road, the resort finally reveals itself. In marked contrast to the impover­ished landscape around it. Mar Azul sits on the banks of a wide river delta. It doesn't seem truly luxurious. Scattered about the grounds are a few thatch-roof bungalows. At the water's edge is a clean blue swim­ming pool surrounded by a tile patio. Down a few steps is an alfresco restaurant and a bar with a high roof.

There are no guests, and the bunga­lows look sealed up. But the swimming pool is full, the bar is open, and the beer looks cold. The jungle presses up to the water, save for a thin sliver of beach lined with palm-thatch cabins. Several men are working at the water's edge but disappear when I sit down and ask the languid old barman, again, for that beer. Moored just off the beach is a small fleet of speedboats supposedly for use by sport fishermen, but not many of them are visiting.

The trouble at Mar Azul began on Decem­ber 2, 2006 when Caterina Schwarz—the beautiful daughter of a former politician from a Portuguese immigrant family—was leaving after a weekend here and was stopped on the road and roughed up by a group of angry soldiers.

"They smacked me and called me—I don't even want to say. Like, they called me a bitch," says Schwarz. still shocked that a class of men she had been raised to see as servants would act so insanely. She complained to all her powerful friends, but nothing was ever done, and she was told to be quiet.

It seems she had stumbled onto some sort of drug shipment going into or out of the coast near Mar Azul. Word got around that the hotel was unsafe, which led to a boycott by the rich locals. Busi­ness fell off, and Houssein Farhat, the Lebanese businessman who owns Mar Azul as well as a food import-export busi­ness, leased the place to new manage­ment, some of them from Latin America. "I have nothing to do with the business now," says Farhat.

The police and the UN say Mar Azul is a front for a smuggling operation. They are not clear about Farhat's role. As I drink my beer I talk with the new manager. "The new owners, I don't know where they are from, but they speak Spanish," explains Anthony Ferrage. I look out at the five or six speedboats moored off the coast. "The new owners are very interested in the dolphins," the manager says, gesturing to the water. "They want to restart this as an ecotourism business. They want to train the dolphins to swim with the tour­ists. They spend lots of time out on the

water, studying the dolphins. They were also going to try to import some dolphins from Latin America—Mexico, I think. So they go there sometimes."

He says these ludicrous things with a totally straight face, and I nod earnestly.

Guinea-Bissau's government is kept on life support by a UN peacekeeping mission and generous handouts from the Eli. The cen­terpiece of this effort is a military reform program; if that fails, there won't be a func­tioning state, and the country could drift toward Somalia-style ruin.

When I ask to speak with the military about drugs, they send me to the National Defense Institute, the office tasked with implementing the EU-funded transfor­mation agenda. The president is a civilian named Baciro Dja, a player in the ruling party. The offices are situated in a govern­ment compound of old colonial-era build­ings. The walls are freshly painted, the floors newly tiled, and air-conditioning keeps the interior cool and dry. There are even a few desks scattered around. But the place is empty.

Dja's staff consists of two very young men. I arrive early for my interview, sit back and observe: One is watching YouTube videos of women shaking their asses. The other walks back and forth from room to room. Dja's office is clean and uncluttered. He is gracious and friendly. His discourse is equal parts NGO-speak and ham-fisted denial. One moment he's telling me about the byzantine structure of the security sector, then that it doesn't matter anyway because in Guinea-Bissau all relationships are per­sonal. Now he is defensively playing dumb: "1 don't know. You tell me: Is the military involved in drug trafficking?"

I explain that I am under the impres-

sion it is and rather heavily, too. Toward the end of the interview Dja fixes on me and says, "Now let me ask you a question. Who really sent you? CIA? DEA? Interpol? Why do you wear those boots?"

Like the discussion of dolphins and eco-tourism, it's another ridiculous but sinister exchange. The interview is a joke. It's clear there will be no real reform of the military. The EU doesn't even restrict the travel of Guinea-Bissau's drug-connected generals, who thus have no reason to change their ways. Even L'NODC regional director Antonio Mazzitelli says he is "pessimistic about the possibility of change here."

Why is this place such a mess? The lon­ger I stay in Bissau and the more I read its history, the more I feel the drug prob­lem is like another problem—the coun­try's foreign-aid addiction. The aid began to flow during the country's liberation struggle in the 1960s. Amilcar Cabral, the revolution's charismatic leader, was adept at courting international support. Cuba, the USSR and Czechoslovakia gave the most aid, but Japan and Sweden gave money too. In 1973, on the eve of independence, rivals in the party assas­sinated Cabral, his half brother Luis took power, and the revolution soon devolved into a one-party state.

But the aid kept flowing. Instead of funding field hospitals and training for the guerrillas, it funded vanity proj­ects that looked like economic develop­ment: a paved highway to the airport, a Citroen auto factory that produced about seven cars, and an equally unpro­ductive export-oriented fruit cannery. Rural society—where the majority live as subsistence farmers—was ignored, while in the capital the incestuous politi­cal machinations grew more intense. A coup in 1980 was followed by sporadic

unrest and then a real civil war. By 2006 Guinea-Bissau's external debt was three times the si/e of its GDP.

In some ways the cocaine trade is just another chapter in this story: A small urban clique looks lor free money from overseas. The poorly managed western African war on drugs will likely operate in the same fashion, as an aid scam. This struck me while interviewing Carlos Pinto Pereira, a lawyer who, according to the Judiciary Police, handles paperwork for narco-connected officers. He denies that.

Pereira works in the heart of Guinea-Bissau's old colonial town, which looks like New Orleans's French Quarter minus the paint, the commerce and most of the people. His second-storv office, entered through a cramped stairwell, feels as if it were leaning over the street. Pereira is dressed in a white shirt and dark slacks, and he exudes seriousness, organization and business. "I am not sure I want to talk to you," he says when he finally receives me. "You are very unfair in the Western press. Your governments do nothing. If they wanted to help fight drugs, we are completely open. What will solve this problem? Send Special Forces. Help us defend our borders."

But the army is the problem, no? Why give them money if the generals steal the wages of the troops? "I don't know about that," savs Pereira.

The day before I leave I walk to the port through the narrow streets. In a small bar I meet with the young sociolo­gist who earlier had shared his insights about the justice minister. He has agreed to show me the waterfront. We poke around the fish dock and look at various warehouses, all sealed up. The stench is powerful, and the area is filthy- A muck-smeared lane runs out to a concrete pier along which is tied a cluster of open boats heaped with nets. A few local fishermen lingering on the wharf lament that for­eign fleets overfish the local waters. "No one controls the national boundaries," explains one.

We wander back to town, eventually arriving at a little plaza at the bottom of Avenida da Che Guevara. The small space is overgrown and strewn with trash. On one side stands a huge rusting sculpture of a black-power fist. Opposite that, at the bottom of the empty avenue, is a bust of Amilcar Cabral in his trade­mark wool cap and glasses.

Once conceived as the city's seaside rallying point, the little plaza now encap­sulates the country's failures. The Cabral bust stares out toward the port, where nothing is moving except for a single crane at the end of a long pier. It is load­ing scores of bright-blue cargo containers onto a ship bound for Europe. "Chances are a few of those boxes contain cocaine," says the sociologist. "If you were the smuggler and one of your two containers were seized but the other got through, you would still be rich."