Inside the African Operations of the Sinaloa Cartel and the New Generation Jalisco Cartel
Sunday, August 21, 2022
Mexico Today
As the narco-blocades playing out in recent days across several Mexican states and key cities such as Tijuana, Guadalajara, and Cuidad Juárez again painfully showed, the bipolar war between the two largest Mexican criminal groups – the Sinaloa Cartel and Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación (CJNG) – and their local allies and vassals continues unmitigated. Moreover, their bipolar competition has spread around the globe. In Latin America, the competition has pushed up violence – dramatically amplifying conflict and death rates in places such as Colombia and Ecuador and stimulating big increases in homicides in places such as Chile long thought to have effective police forces able to deter violent crime. In the Asia-Pacific region, where Chinese triads rule methamphetamine trafficking, but which features a wide panoply of criminal groups, the foreign policies of the Sinaloa Cartel and CJNG have in recent years also become more provocative. The new Asia-Pacific policies of the two cartels now pose new public safety threats, even though law enforcement agencies in the Asia-Pacific region tend to be far more effective than in Latin America and, unlike their Latin American counterparts, have managed to keep drug trafficking and other criminal violence at minimal levels.
The presence of the two Mexican cartels in Africa, has received even less attention. But it is growing and at least the drug trafficking, if not the cartels themselves, are becoming intertwined with jihadi terrorism and complex local insurgencies.
Africa was catapulted to the radar screen of Mexican trafficking groups after Europe became a key cocaine destination in the late 1990s. Various West African countries were only a relatively short flight away from Brazil and Venezuela, the key staging grounds for the cocaine trade to Europe. Beyond the convenient Transatlantic geography, West Africa came in with other advantages for drug traffickers. Century-old smuggling routes and networks crisscrossing Africa from coast to coast and extensive territories governed by a variety of rebellious tribes and jihadi and other militant groups made drug trafficking through West Africa readily feasible. So did the weakness and corruption of many West African security and law enforcement forces that largely lack maritime and coastal interdiction capabilities, often function as essentially pretorian guards, and frequently have a stake in many illegal economies. The weakness of the West African security forces and their lack of focus on countering drug trafficking was in stark contrast to another smuggling route between Latin America and Europe – the Caribbean – that had become saturated with U.S. and European interdiction efforts. Moreover, the large flotillas of Chinese, Russian, and European vessels fishing illegally along West Africa provided convenient cover for drug reloading, as well as decimated legal livelihoods of already poor populations, rendering them all the more susceptible to participating in drug smuggling. Finally, West Africa featured some of the continent’s most potent drug trafficking networks– namely, Nigerian criminal groups with their extensive connections to Europe and South Asia.
In the early 2000s, the Sinaloa Cartel, soon to be followed by the then-potent Zetas, another large Mexican criminal group, had established presence in Nigeria, Ghana, Mali, and Senegal to move cocaine. Rapidly, a gushing coke pipeline ran from Latin America’s Southern Cone to Europe. Within ten years, at least nine of the largest Mexican and Latin American drug trafficking organizations (DTOs) came to operate in Africa.
With complex layers of government and political complicity in the drug trafficking, Guinea-Bissau emerged as the ultimate narco-state in West Africa. But, melting down under the onslaught of multiple jihadi terrorist groups and insurgencies of various Tuareg tribes, Mali soon followed as another crucial cocaine smuggling vector: Various Tuareg tribes and smuggling networks and even jihadi groups got to cut in on a piece of the coke action when the trade crossed the territories under their influence. The collapse that followed the overthrow of the Muammar el-Qaddafi regime in Libya in 2011, and the subsequent civil war in the country and rise of assorted militias and warlords, provided both weapons and logistical assets for both criminal rackets and politically-motivated violence across the Sahel.
A pioneer in developing new drug markets and trafficking routes in faraway places, the Sinaloa Cartel came to dominate the cocaine trail running through Africa. But just like in Asia, it did so through a rather hands-off approach — letting the myriad of local criminal and militant groups move the cocaine — with only a minimal presence on the ground in the Sahel. Instead of micromanaging the African part of the smuggling, the Sinaloa Cartel has mostly focused on getting the cocaine into Africa and then moving it from the Africa’s northern shores into Europe. The Zetas tried to keep, if not pace with the Sinaloa Cartel, at least a foothold in Africa. But by 2017, their overextension in Mexico and dramatic decline there also eviscerated their overseas activities. The newly-emergent and hyper-violent and expansionist Cartel Jalisco Nueva Generación followed the Sinaloa Cartel into Africa. Both are now implicated in the cocaine trafficking there, though the Sinaloa Cartel is still by far the key external actor and the critical enabler of the Transatlantic drug trade.
In North Africa, such as in Morocco, the Mexican cartels’ presence has also served to facilitate cocaine smuggling into Europe. Interestingly, many of the Moroccan cocaine smuggling networks that emerged over the past decade remain by and large separate from the much older groups that for decades had been smuggling Moroccan hashish to Europe. When several years ago I interviewed Moroccan hashish smugglers in the Riff mountains and elsewhere in Morocco, most were adamant that moving cocaine was simply too risky – attracting unwanted attention from Moroccan authorities and European law enforcement agencies. And the mixing of the cocaine trade in Morocco with jihadi terrorism further increased the risks. Far more than solely profit-maximizers willing to smuggle anything (as criminal groups often get caricatured), the Moroccan hashish smugglers were at least as much risk-minimizers. Nonetheless, the Mexican cartels, principally, Sinaloa, did manage to develop a well-functioning network of local facilitators and proxies in the region.
Even less known than the cocaine pipeline in North Africa has been the Mexican cartels’ presence in the center and south of the continent, such as in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Mozambique.
Yet the Mexican DTOs presence there is fascinating: Once again, it was the Sinaloa Cartel that established a beachhead in central and southern Africa. But with impressive foresight, it did so not for moving cocaine, but rather to facilitate the smuggling of methamphetamine precursors from China to Mexico. The expansion of China’s trade with Africa provided a particularly convenient cover as Chinese shipping containers carrying consumer goods to Africa could hide the synthetic drug precursors.
How the Mexican DTOs have operated in Africa is also significant. Like in the Asia-Pacific region, they have predominantly stuck to a very small on-the-ground presence, much less visible and extensive than their footprint in Latin America. And indeed, much less visible and extensive, than is, for example, the presence of Chinese and Vietnamese wildlife trafficking networks in Africa. Mostly, the Mexican DTO footprint has been limited to a few individuals, with the DTOs relying on local African drug smugglers to arrange operations. One such key African collaborator of the Sinaloa Cartel has been Braima Seidi Ba, a dual-national of Guinea-Bissau and Portugal, who in July 2022 was stunningly acquitted by a Guinea-Bissau court ofdrug trafficking charges.
Facilitation meetings between the Sinaloa Cartel and the African business partners have often taken place in other countries, frequently outside of the African continent, such as in Europe.
Although the Sinaloa Cartel’s presence in Africa surpasses other Latin American DTOs in terms of logistical nodes and capacities, local allies, and corruption networks, it is still very indirect and very quiet. African and Latin American counter narcotics officials have told me that the Sinaloa Cartel on the continent has been avoiding getting into local fights. The cartel has not sought to dictate the modalities of the trafficking across the African continent either. Nor has it tried to push local proxies into exclusive relations with the Sinaloa Cartel only. And the reach of CJNG into Africa has simply been too small for that criminal group to attempt to instigate the takeover of Sinaloa’s networks like it has attempted in Colombia, Ecuador, and elsewhere in Latin America. As a Latin American counternarcotics official who had been posted to West Africa told me this spring, “Everyone talks about the presence of the Mexicans in West Africa. We all know how key they are. But we just don’t see them on the ground; they are not flashy, they stayin the shadows. It’s like this over-the-horizon ghost that organizes the whole thing [trade], but lets the locals [African smuggling networks] run with it [the drug trafficking] across the continent.”
But the weight of Mexicans’ footprint, if not their flashiness, in Africa may increase. Like the Zetas a decade ago, the Sinaloa Cartel is reportedly inserting itself into migrant smuggling, including of Africans who try to get to the United States through Mexico. Attempts by Mexican DTOs to recruit, including forcibly, these unfortunate African migrants for drug smuggling facilitation may grow. Already, at least in one instance, the Sinaloa Cartel recruited a Mexico-based Nigerian, whose partner had previously been married to a Sinaloa Cartel member.
Certainly, in Europe, the on-the-ground presence of the Mexican criminal groups is expanding. And with it, come many questions and risks, as I will discuss in the concluding piece in this series.
Drug cartels target West Africa as vital route to move cocaine
Africa Defense Forum
5th May 2022
Cabo Verdean police intercepted a boat in early April suspected to be involved with international drug trafficking. The Brazilian boat contained more than 5 tons of cocaine.
The operation, which included help from the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, U.S. Navy, Brazilian Federal Police and the National Crime Agency of the United Kingdom, resulted in the arrests of fiveBrazilians and two Montenegrins.
The bust underscored the reality that West Africa is a major stop on the cocaine route from South America to Europe.
“West Africa, as a region, is very vulnerable, due to corruption, unemployment, poverty,” Maria-Gorreti Loglo, African consultant for the International Drug Policy Consortium, told news organization VICE Media. “It makes it very conducive for drug traffickers.”
Drug seizures in West Africa rose during the early 2000s before declining in 2008, indicating a drop in drug trafficking. But experts say cocaine production in Latin America has reached unprecedented levels and demand in Europe has soared. Between 2019 and 2021, record cocaine busts were reported in Cabo Verde, the Gambia and Senegal. The amount of drugs trafficked through the region is hard to gauge, but some experts value the cocaine business in West Africa at $2 billion annually.
The amount of cocaine seized in the region increased tenfold between 2015 and 2019, according to the United Nations.
“The recent upsurge detected since early 2019 therefore threatens once again to send shockwaves of instability through the states of this coastal ecosystem,” wrote Lucia Bird in a policy brief for the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GIATOC)
In West Africa, each cocaine transshipment hub has an international airport, a seaport with a container terminal and regional road networks, according to GIATOC. Shipping containers are a particularly effective way to transport drugs into West Africa, as the region has a low capacity to physically screen containers moving through its ports.
International airports in the region are useful for trafficking smaller quantities of drug and are often used by dealers from Latin America.
Two major road networks run drugs through the region. One goes through Mali, through Senegal, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Burkina Faso, or the northwest border with Mauritania, before leading to Niger and Libya and, eventually, other markets. The second road runs along the coast from Guinea-Bissau to Mauritania, where fishing boats take the drugs to Europe, according to the GIATOC study.
Many nations in the region share governance characteristics that are favorable to emerging drug hubs, such as “concentrated power, resources in very few hands, no oversight and no separate functioning judiciary,” the GIATOC study argues.
Former Bissau-Guinean Justice Minister Ruth Monteiro told the BBC in 2020 that the country was a “paradise” for drug traffickers, adding that the activities of drug traffickers also fund militant Islamist activity throughout the region. The U.N. agreed, reporting that drug trafficking has provided funding for insurgency and terrorist groups around the globe.
In March 2019, Bissau-Guinean authorities seized almost 800 kilograms of drugs hidden in a Senegalese-registered truck loaded with frozen fish.
“After our investigations, we were convinced the drugs were on the way to al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb,” Monteiro told BBC.
In response to the region’s emergence as a hub on the cocaine route, the West African Coast initiative was launched in 2009 to enhance law enforcement and criminal justice capacity and a number of European Union-funded projects have helped strengthen port capacities against illegal trafficking, according to the GIATOC study.
AIRCOP, a U.N. program, has also helped strengthen the security capacity of agencies at international airports in Latin America, the Caribbean and West Africa.
The drugs do not simply transit through the region; they also are sold in West African communities which has resulted in a rise in drug use. A restaurant owner in Guinea-Bissau told Harvard International Review that “this country is being destroyed by drugs.”
“They’re everywhere. A few weeks ago, the man who used to be my gardener offered to sell me [about 15 pounds] of cocaine.”
In Liberia an epidemic of former child soldiers addicted to drugs live on the streets of Monrovia, the capital city.
“The enemy is attacking the most brilliant children,” Joshua Blahyi, a former warlord who now works with drug-addicted youth, told Al-Jazeera. “The nation is going to be strangulated if we don’t rescue these guys.”
Festering drug cartels’ attack on West Africa
The Nation
February 21, 2022
It seems the chickens are coming home to roost, going by the claim of Guinea-Bissau’s President Umaro Sissoco Embalo that the coup attempt against his government recently “has to do with our fight against narco-trafficking”. Embalo said some of the people involved in the coup attempt had been arrested.
The attack in the capital of the unstable country, which came only about two weeks after the military overthrew the democratically elected leader of Burkina Faso, underscored fears that a recent spate of coups is inspiring others in the region. Illicit drug trafficking by cartels is also being blamed for instability in the region.
The illicit trade
Drug trafficking is a global illicit trade involving the cultivation, manufacture, distribution and sale of substances, which are subject to drug prohibition laws. United Nations (UN) member states recognised the importance of strengthening international cooperation to counter the world drug problem.
The UN’s efforts in countering the problem are based on three major control treaties: the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 (as amended in 1972), the Convention on Psychotropic Substances of 1971 and the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances of 1988. These three conventions attribute important functions to the Commission on Narcotic Drugs and to the International Narcotics Control Board.
Guinea-Bissau, West Africa and narco-trafficking
Though Embalo’s claim could not be immediately ascertained, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) had warned several times that the West African country was at risk of becoming an epicentre for drug trafficking and the crime and corruption associated with it. Guinea-Bissau, especially, became known as a transit point for cocaine between Latin America and Europe in the 2000s as traffickers profited from corruption and weak law enforcement.
An international affairs expert and former top communication officer with ECOWAs, Mr. Paul Ejime, in an interview with The Nation on the issue, said drug trafficking is a serious problem in Guinea Bissau.
“The West African country is a drug-trafficking hub. The military chiefs are involved. It will continue until the country stamps it out. When organised criminals see a place as weak, they will continue to strive. In 2020, Embalo asked ECOWAS to remove its force, now he is asking the bloc to send back the force. Organise criminal gangs are not the people a country can fight alone, because they are very powerful,” he said.
According to him, the drug traffickers have the money to buy weapons and wage wars against governments in power. He added that weapons are very cheap to come by in the West Africa and Sahel regions since the death of Muammar Gaddafi and such weapons were being used by traffickers and criminals in the region.
The UNODC claimed that no fewer than 50 tonnes of cocaine from the Andean countries – mountainous regions of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru – are transiting West Africa every year, heading north where they are worth almost $2 billion on the streets of European cities.
According to the UN agency, most cocaine entering Africa from South America makes landfall around Guinea-Bissau in the north and Ghana in the south. Much of the drugs are shipped to Europe by drug mules on commercial flights. Upon arrival, the cocaine is predominantly distributed by West African criminal networks throughout Europe.
A UNODC report made available to The Nation claimed that between 2004 and 2007, at least two distinct trans-shipment hubs emerged in West Africa: one centred on Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, and one concentrated in the Bight of Benin, which spans from Ghana to Nigeria.
“Colombian traffickers transported cocaine by ‘mother ship’ to the West African coast before offloading to smaller vessels. Some of this cocaine proceeded onward by sea to Spain and Portugal, but some were left as payment to West Africans for their assistance. The West Africans then traffic this cocaine on their own behalf, largely by commercial air couriers. Shipments were also sent in modified small aircraft from the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela to various West African destinations,” the report stated.
Also, Ameripol, an organisation based on the cooperation of police forces throughout the Americas, released a report, which claims that the situation in West Africa demonstrates the flexibility of drug traffickers. “The weakness and poverty in the region make it a good location to establish safe routes,” the report said.
Reports also indicated that the conflicts in Libya and Tunisia in 2011 interrupted the main drug routes to Europe, and the French intervention in Mali in 2013 had the same effect. But this did not stop the traffickers. “Drug trafficking follows a law of physics – it is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed,” Ameripol claimed.
In other words, a crackdown on it in one place, and it will pop up in another. “For this reason, the expansive effect of the countries most committed to the fight against drug trafficking has an effect of ‘welcoming’ organisations in other countries,” Ameripol said.
Drug trafficking as a security threat in West Africa
Executive Director of UNODC, Antonio Maria Costa put it succinctly: “Drug trafficking is having a destabilising impact on security and development in West Africa. Drug cartels buy more than real estate, banks and businesses, they buy elections, candidates and parties. In a word, they buy power”.
According to a UNODC report, a declining United States (U.S.) cocaine market and a rising European one appear to have prompted South American cocaine traffickers to make use of low-governance areas in West Africa as transit zones.
Speaking at the Security Council late last year, Costa said: “Guinea-Bissau has lost control of its territory and cannot administer justice”. The police and justice system, she said, were completely overwhelmed and ill-equipped to deal with the threat posed by foreign criminal groups colluding with powerful local allies. The issue, which had been under-reported in the media, had been breeding silent insecurity in the West African state.
UNODC enforcement team along with Goodwill Ambassador, Alessandro Scotti, witnessed a seizure of more than 600 kilogrammes of cocaine that had been trafficked through Guinea-Bissau in April 2007.
A report presented to the UN Security Council claimed that since 2006, 20 to 40 tonnes of cocaine per year were transiting through the West African region en route to Europe. It asserted that “with 20 tonnes valued at approximately US$ 1 billion on the wholesale market – a sum higher than the GDP of some West African countries – the criminal behaviour and corruption that travel alongside the cocaine are seriously affecting the security of the countries in the region”.
Ghada Fathi Waly, the UNODC Director-General/ Executive Director since 2020, said rising non-medical use of pharmaceutical opioids and drug use disorders are harming health and public safety, as the region continues to be heavily affected by illegal tramadol imports.
She said greater security threats were being posed by cocaine trafficking with West Africa serving as a major transit area for onward shipments to Western and Central Europe, as well as cannabis resin trafficking. “The value of these illicit flows exceeds the national budgets of some transit countries, which is highly destabilising in this complex security situation,” Ms Waly said.
INTERPOL on drug trafficking
The International Criminal Police Organisation, commonly known as INTERPOL, facilitating worldwide police cooperation and crime control, with headquarters in Lyon, France, said criminal networks traffic a range of drugs, including cannabis, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine. It said as international borders become increasingly porous, global abuse and accessibility to drugs have become increasingly widespread.
It said: “This international trade involves growers, producers, couriers, suppliers and dealers. It affects almost all of our member countries, undermining political and economic stability, ruining the lives of individuals and damaging communities. The end-users and addicts are often the victims of a powerful and manipulative business.
“Drug trafficking is often associated with other forms of crime, such as money laundering or corruption. Trafficking routes can also be used by criminal networks to transport other illicit products. As criminals devise ever-more creative ways of disguising illegal drugs for transport, law enforcement faces challenges in detecting such concealed substances. In addition, new synthetic drugs are produced with regularity, so police need to always be aware of new trends and products on the illicit market.”
In two operations, INTERPOL mobilised law enforcement in 41 countries to arrest 287 individuals and seize illicit narcotics estimated to be worth nearly EUR 100 million in Africa and the Middle East.
The results of the operations included 17 tonnes of cannabis resin, valued at EUR 31 million, confiscated from warehouses in Niamey, Niger – the largest seizure in the country’s history. Shipped from Lebanon to the Togolese port of Lomé and then transported over 1,000 kilometres by lorry, the drugs were destined for Libya.
West Africa accounts for three-quarters of tramadol seized globally
It has been discovered that West Africa accounts for three-quarters of tramadol seized globally on the sea. The amount of this banned substance seized in Nigeria – mostly at its ports – rose from less than eight tonnes in 2014 to close to 150 tonnes in 2018. In the whole of West Africa, more than 430 tonnes of tramadol have been seized in the period between 2014 and 2017 alone, with tramadol seizures being recorded in Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Niger, Nigeria and Togo.
UNODC and INTERPOL response to drugs’ security threat in ECOWAS
In October 2008, the ECOWAS, supported by UNODC and the United Nations Office for West Africa (UNOWA) and in partnership with the European Union, held a Ministerial Conference in Praia, Cape Verde, to address the serious security threat posed by drug trafficking in the region. The Political Declaration and Regional Action Plan that resulted from this conference were subsequently endorsed by the Heads of State and Government of ECOWAS in Abuja on 19 December 2008.
The Praia Declarations reflect a strong political commitment and establish the basis for a detailed cooperation framework to combat drug trafficking and organised crime in West Africa. The UNODC was entrusted with leading the process of translating the Political Declaration and Regional Action Plan into concrete programmes to be carried out by ECOWAS member states in partnership with UNOWA, the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO), the INTERPOL and the European Union.
UNODC’s response to the call for support from ECOWAS was to design a crosscutting and comprehensive strategy based on the principle of shared responsibility.
The agency uses its comparative advantage to ensure a cross-border and integrated approach in the fight against illicit drug trafficking and organised crime, including the global threat posed by the transatlantic trafficking route. But, recognising the difficulty of managing vast African blue and green borders, the UNODC has set the objective to promote proactive policing by developing an intelligence-based approach to law enforcement and to improve inter-agency coordination with a view to disrupting the activities of organised crime groups behind drug trafficking.
On December 27, 2019, INTERPOL, as part of its collaboration with the UNODC , assisted Guinea Bissau to obtain a triple prison conviction with the largest cocaine seizures in the country resulting in the sentencing of three drug kingpins arrested during a police operation supported by INTERPOL. An INTERPOL Incident Response Team (IRT) deployed to Guinea Bissau helped local authorities to investigate a record 790 kilogrammes of cocaine seizure where four suspects from Nigeria, Guinea Bissau and Senegal were arrested.
Therefore, military and security analysts have called on ECOWAs countries to firm up the frameworks and implement them to the letter to tackle organised criminals and cartels making an incursion into the region.
The need for strong local, national security architecture
However, Ejime said ECOWAs countries battling drug traffickers must show individual local and national seriousness to fight those involved through local and national architecture. He called for the arrest and prosecution of the suspects before a strong and committed judiciary.
“A country like Guinea Bissau should show a strong commitment to carry the fights to drug lords by arresting them, confiscating the drugs and prosecuting them before the judiciary,” Ejime submitted.
The argument for adequate legal framework
According to the UNODC, one of the fundamental stumbling blocks has been the inadequacy of the legal framework. Many countries in the region are yet to fully domesticate the relevant provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Legal assessments carried out by UNODC in 12 countries of Central and West Africa between 2014 and 2019 indicated that only a few national frameworks fully met the requirements of UNCLOS in terms of criminalising offences and establishing universal jurisdiction. Thus, successful investigations leading to effective prosecutions remain rare, making maritime crimes low-risk and high reward criminal activities.
To counter this threat and improve criminal justice responses to maritime crime, the UNODC Nigeria Country Office said legal frameworks need to follow the quick evolution of criminal offences committed at sea by creating new regulations, improving the quality of existing legal instruments, as well as updating key definitions in line with the UNCLOS.
Ejime also urged ECOWAS leaders to ratify outstanding protocols they were yet to sign to enhance the fight against criminals and protect the region’s political stability.
Ensuring global collaboration on military patrols
However, in an interview with The Nation on the matter, a security chief, who pleaded anonymity, attributed spiralling cases of organised crimes in the area to the weak territorial protection of the Gulf of Guinea by member states. He added that the weak security situation has allowed foreign and local organised criminals to perpetuate their activities in the area. The expert noted that the most active naval force in the area is the Nigerian Navy, lamenting that there is little that other naval forces from the Republic of Benin, Ghana, Togo and others could do.
Former Director-General of the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) Dr. Dakuku Peterside said there was an urgent need for international collaboration to tackle the menace. He said: “Dealing with the issues of maritime crimes requires inter-agency collaboration as well as regional collaboration between sister agencies in the participating countries.”
The Nigerian Navy (NN) has acquired more patrol crafts to combat maritime crimes in the country’s territorial waters. The Navy said it also arrested hundreds of vessels and barges as well as hundreds of suspects for various maritime offences in the last four years.
Military experts, however, said navies in the Gulf of Guinea need to come together with the support of European countries to tackle the menace.
The analyst noted that despite the performance of the Nigerian Navy in patrolling the Gulf of Guinea, it still required advanced naval platforms to bring sanity to the area. The expert added that the cost of lifting platforms and patrolling the area would only be borne by the Nigerian Navy, since the other member countries, who jointly owned the economic zone, are financially not capable. The security expert said the Gulf of Guinea leaders can also reach out to European navies and other foreign powers to assist in patrolling the area.
To Ejime, ECOWAS leaders should collaborate to tackle the weak links through sharing of military and police intelligence to embark on the joint arrest of suspects through regional collaboration to nip in the bud the festering attack on the region’s political stability.
To Ameripol, ECOWAS countries should “start to harmonise laws on certain crimes, particularly drug trafficking as a first step and related crimes as a second step, so as to fight in coordination, executing common policies and effective actions against the power of organised crime in the region”.
Strengthening civil society, democracy and good governance
Former African Union (AU) Commissioner for Peace and Security and top UN diplomat in West Africa Said Djinnit said ECOWAS needs to address the root causes of the recent coups. Supporting his assertion, analysts also stressed the need to focus more support on strengthening civil society, democracy and good governance in each country between elections, rather than focusing too narrowly just on elections themselves. They stressed that the youths, who were being lured into the drug trade, need to be engaged in productive ventures.
“Too often, verbal condemnations of coups or autocracy have not been reinforced with concrete actions to address the insecurity that creates fertile ground for coups,” an analyst and Vice President, Africa Centre, Dr. Joseph Sany, said.
The Drug War Moves East As Cartels’ Influence In Africa Grows
Footnote
5 September 2012
Africa’s Emerging Drug Problem
In early November 2009, a Boeing 727 crashed on takeoff near the town of Tarkint in northern Mali, or so the initial reports indicated. Closer scrutiny of the crash revealed a web of connections that typify the ever-metastasizing menace of drug trafficking in Africa, both as a destination point and a transit route to Europe and North America.
The Boeing 727 found in northern Mali was registered in Guinea-Bissau but was operating with Nigerian crew under a leasing agreement in Venezuela. The same aircraft also operated regular flights between Colombia and Mali, with drugs as cargo. According to leaked U.S. embassy cables, high-ranking Malian authorities were involved in the episode and initially attempted to cover up the so-called “drug plane” incident.
The Tarkint affair brought to the fore the problem of drug trafficking in Africa, a phenomenon that if left unchecked poses serious challenges to state institutions in the region. The brazen nature in which the drug traffickers disposed of the plane is just as shocking as the fact that a section of the Malian security apparatus was implicated in the operation. Similar cases of state officials’ involvement in drug trafficking have been reported in Kenya, Guinea-Bissau, and South Africa, among other African states. In Kenya, very senior members of the police force, a number of sitting members of parliament, and prominent business people have been implicated in the narcotics trade, with some of the suspected traffickers being blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury. The former commissioner of the South African Police Service, Jackie Selebi, was convicted of taking bribes from a drug smuggler. The list of African “narco-states” is getting longer, with potential for disastrous consequences.
To highlight the rapid rise of drug trafficking in the region, consider the fact that between 1998 and 2002, the amount of drugs seized across Africa averaged less than 1 metric ton annually. By 2006 this figure had shot up to about 16 metric tons per year. The saturation of the North American cocaine market in the wake of the failed “war on drugs” has prompted Latin American traffickers to set their sights on the European market. To this end, West African states have proved to be useful transit points for moving their illicit cargo to Europe. Corruption, state incapacity, and outright state capture by drug cartels have all created safe passages, linking the European streets with the coca producing regions in Latin America. Nearly 60% of the cocaine consumed in Western Europe – with a street value of almost U.S. $18 billion – transits through West Africa. West African states implicated in the drug trade include Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria and Senegal.
Eastern Africa has not been spared from the menace of drug trafficking. A recent report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) indicates that the region has emerged as a key transit point for drugs from Southwest Asia and South Asia – with India, Iran, Myanmar, Pakistan, and Thailand being the major sources of heroin bound for European markets . A quick survey of the U.S. Treasury’s list of foreign nationals suspected to be drug traffickers reveals several Kenyan passport holders with links to the Middle East and South Asia, an indicator of the growing importance of South and West Asia as sources of drugs. Latin American drug cartels have also tried to infiltrate the Eastern African transit route. Details of such operations were recently aired in the media when the new Venezuelan ambassador to Kenya was found strangled in Nairobi; some speculated it was because she questioned the use of diplomatic pouches (which are not subject to inspection at airports) to smuggle drugs from Venezuela.
Threats to State Capacity and International Security
The problem of drug trafficking in Africa is not merely a law enforcement concern. Firstly, it is a threat to the development and consolidation of important state institutions, especially the region’s judiciaries and security agencies. In many of the African states that have been cited as important transit destinations for drugs from Latin America and Asia, drug traffickers have managed to infiltrate vital state institutions. Important politicians, members of the judiciary, and key members of the security apparatus – both police and the military – have been their primary targets. As a result, the very institutions that have been charged with policing such illicit activities have been the ones that actively promoted and/or provided protection for drug traffickers. Ineluctably, the large amounts of drug money up for grabs have caused splits among ruling elites, sometimes resulting in bloody conflict, as has been the case in Guinea-Bissau since early 2009.
Secondly, drug trafficking is emerging as a threat to international security. Drug runners both in Western and Eastern Africa have been linked to terrorist groups operating in the Sahel and in the Horn. Drugs smuggling routes through the Sahara desert are an important revenue source for Islamist groups like Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM). Following the Mali “drug plane” incident, UNODC Executive Director Antonio Maria Coasta linked the drug trade to, “’terrorists and anti-government forces,” in the Sahel, saying that the groups use drug money to fund their operations. In Eastern Africa, drug lords have been linked to similar groups in Somalia. Many of those blacklisted by the U.S. Treasury on suspicion of being drug traffickers have also been adversely mentioned as key financiers of East African terrorist groups like the Al-Shabaab in Somalia.
Over the last two and a half decades, state collapse in Africa was often associated with civil wars. Somalia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo all imploded in the wake of peripheral insurgencies that overwhelmed already fragile nations lacking in state capacity. In the last decade, however, drug trafficking has emerged as an equally formidable threat to state institutions in the region. Of concern is the fact that these threats are not limited to the poster children of civil unrest and state collapse, like Guinea-Bissau, Somalia, or Liberia. Drug traffickers have infiltrated key institutions even in comparatively strong and stable states like Kenya and South Africa. As is the case in Latin America, violence and organized crime have often accompanied the flow of drugs. If “conflict resources” defined the African civil wars of the 1990s, “conflict drugs” might yet emerge as a new source of intra-elite squabbles and conflict.
Guinea-Bissau is an illustrative case. On March 1, 2009 both the army chief, General Batista Tagme Na Waie, and President Joao Bernardo Vieira were killed as a result of what many suspected to be a drug-related feud. General Na Waie died in an explosion at the army headquarters while the president was shot hours later as he tried to flee the presidential palace. In the previous year’s general elections, opposition leader Kumba Yala had publicly called President Vieira the country’s, “biggest drug dealer.” Guinea-Bissau has not seen stability since. A string of coups, the last one in April of 2012, motivated by both political rivalry and competition for rents from the drug trade have defined Bissauan politics since. Drug traffickers have captured large segments of the Bissauan state security apparatus. Uninhabited islands off the coast of the country are routinely used as landing grounds for drugs from Latin America before shipment to Europe either by sea or through the Sahara desert.
Will Africa Become the Next Central America?
The globalization of terrorism over the last decade has created a situation in which the number one threat to international security is no longer strong, conquering states, but failing ones that provide safe havens for terrorist organizations. Drug trafficking in Africa reflects the heart of this concern. The illicit trade is both contributing to the deterioration of state institutions – which could result in state collapse – and financing terrorist groups like AQIM and Al-Shabaab. So far the international community has not treated the matter with the urgency it deserves. The consequences of inaction will be dire, as has already been seen in Central America. The region’s misfortune of being an important transit route between South American cocaine production centers and North American consumers has resulted in the highest murder rates in the world, fueled by transnational organized crime and drug trafficking. The statistics are astonishing: Among 20-year old men in some Central American countries, 1 in 50 will be murdered before they are 32. Africa, a region already replete with weak states, might be next if drug trafficking on the continent continues to grow.
DEA: Mexican Drug Cartels Reach Further Across Africa
June 15, 2012
VOA
NAIROBI – Officials at the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration say Mexican drug cartels are playing an increasing role in trafficking illicit drugs in Africa. DEA officials say the cartels increasingly use Africa as a conduit for illegal drugs.
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officials say their investigations indicate a growing number of chemicals used to produce illegal drugs for cartels in Mexico have been coming from African traffickers.
They say Mexican drug cartels now have documented links to criminal groups in Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ghana, and Nigeria.
Jeff Breeden, the chief of DEA Headquarters’ Africa section, says he has witnessed the growing trend himself.
“We haven’t identified specific cartel activity in Africa. We’ve identified Mexicans in Africa, and we know they are affiliated with cartels – we just haven’t put it together,” Breeden said.
In the past, Mexican and South American drug operations extended as far across the Atlantic as West Africa, which served as a staging point for drugs smuggled north to Europe. But a growing number of joint DEA and local police operations in recent years have shown drug trafficking operations reaching farther east across sub-Saharan Africa.
In a DEA report presented to the U.S. Senate in May, officials in Pretoria, South Africa, say police intercepted a shipment of chemicals used to make illegal drugs destined for a group of Mexican nationals operating out of Maputo, Mozambique.
Further investigation led to the arrest of three Mexicans and one Nigerian operating out of a Mozambique residence.
DEA officials believe nine of the largest drug trafficking organizations in South America and Mexico have operations in Africa. Breeden says the concern among drug enforcement agents is that Africa may grow into a central transit point for the cartels.
“There were several large seizures. One in Kenya, and one in the DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo), where a Mexican was identified at the time. The pseudoephedrine was transiting and being repackaged in Africa, and then forwarded to Mexico or Central America for processing into methamphetamine, and ended up on the streets in the U.S,” Breeden said.
The growing number of illegal drug operations in Africa forced the DEA to increase its efforts, opening multiple offices across sub-Saharan Africa. In January the agency opened an office in Nairobi, with plans to open one in Senegal and a few other locations within several years.
Breeden says the DEA is reacting to a threat in Africa that is coming from all over the world.
“We’ve seen in the past several years heroin coming from Afghanistan, transiting both East Africa, South Africa, and West Africa, and a lot of that is destined to the United States,” Breeden said.
Breeden says Africa’s porous borders, under-trained law enforcement and corruption problem create prime ground for illegal organizations to operate freely.
Latin American drug cartels find home in West Africa
2009
CNN
(CNN) — Colombian and Mexican drug cartels have jumped the Atlantic Ocean and expanded into West Africa, working closely with local criminal gangs to carve out a staging area for an assault on the lucrative European market.
The situation has gotten so out of hand that tiny Guinea-Bissau, the fifth-poorest nation in the world, is being called Africa’s first narco-state. Others talk about how Africa’s Gold Coast has become the Coke Coast. In all, officials say, at least nine top-tier Latin American drug cartels have established bases in 11 West African nations.
“The same organizations that we investigate in Central and South America that are involved in drug activity toward the United States are engaged in this trafficking in Western Africa,” said Russell Benson, the Drug Enforcement Agency regional director for Europe and Africa. “There’s not one country that hasn’t been touched to some extent.”
The calculus is simple: bigger profits in Europe than in the United States, less law enforcement in West Africa than in Europe.
The driving force is the booming European market for cocaine.
“The exponential rise in the number of consumers has made Europe the fastest-growing and most-profitable market in the world,” said Bruce Bagley, dean of the Graduate School of International Studies at the University of Miami.
While the European market has been expanding, use in the United States has declined from its peak in the 1980s, the U.N. Office of Drugs and Crime said in its 2009 annual report, issued in July.
“Cocaine use prevalence in the USA is 50 percent lower than it was two decades ago, while Spain, Italy, Portugal, France and the United Kingdom have all seen cocaine use double or triple in recent years,” the U.N. report said.
About 1,000 tons of pure cocaine are produced each year, nearly 60 percent of which evades law enforcement interception and makes it to market, the report said. That’s a wholesale global market of about $70 billion.
Criminals traffic about 250 tons to Europe each year, though not all of it makes it there, the U.N. said. The European market totals about $11 billion. About 27 percent of the cocaine that entered Europe in 2006 came from Africa, the United Nations said.
Huge profits make Europe particularly attractive. Two pounds of uncut cocaine can sell for $22,000 in the United States but for $45,000 in Europe, analyst Ashley-Louise Bybee wrote in a policy journal this year. The Justice Department said the price in Europe can be three times more than in the United States.
“It’s a significant market for them to exploit,” Benson said.
A strong euro and weaker dollar also make Europe attractive to traffickers because of favorable exchange rates. There’s also the fact that the European Union recently issued a 500 euro note, currently equivalent to about $700. The largest U.S. denomination in circulation is the $100 bill. Traffickers prefer the large euro notes because they are easier to carry in large quantities.
For example, Benson said that $1 million in $100 bills weighs 22 pounds, while $1 million in 500 euro notes weighs 3.5 pounds.
“It’s a huge difference,” he said.
Though Europe is highly attractive to traffickers, it can have tight, Western-style security. So the Colombian and Mexican cartels have discovered that it’s much easier to smuggle large loads into West Africa and then break that up into smaller shipments to the continent — mostly Spain, the United Kingdom and France.
West Africa is a smuggler’s dream, suffering from a combination of factors that make the area particularly vulnerable. It is among the poorest and least stable regions in the world. Governments are weak and ineffective and, as a top DEA chief testified to the U.S. Senate this summer, officials are often corrupt.
Law enforcement also is largely riddled with corruption. Criminal gangs are rampant. Foot soldiers can be recruited from a large pool of poor and desperate youth.
“It’s a point of least resistance,” Benson said.
West Africa refers to Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, Ivory Coast, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
“This area of the world is ripe,” Bagley said. “There has been very little attention paid to it. The United States is loath to give aid to these countries because they are corrupt.”
U.S. authorities find themselves at a great disadvantage fighting cartels that have much more money and guns. The DEA has four offices — in Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa — to cover a continent that spans 11.7 million square miles and has nearly 1 billion people.
“It’s a big place,” Benson acknowledges, noting that there are 54 countries on the continent.
Local police also are vastly outgunned. Guinea-Bissau offers an alarming example.
“The Judicial Police … have 60 agents, one vehicle and often no fuel,” analyst Bybee wrote in a journal called New Voices in Public Policy, published by the George Mason University School of Public Policy. “As a result, when culprits are apprehended, they are driven in a taxi to the police station. They just recently received six sets of handcuffs from the U.K., which were badly needed. In the military, one rusty ship patrols the 350-kilometer (217-mile) coastline and 88 islands.”
Even when criminals are caught, Bybee said, “the near absence of a judicial system allows traffickers to operate unimpeded.” For example, she said, “because the police are so impotent, the culprits are often held for just a few hours before senior military personnel suddenly attain extraordinary judicial powers to demand their release.”
The few officials who stand up to the traffickers receive death threats or are killed.
West Africa also is particularly attractive to traffickers because it is near “the soft underbelly of Europe,” said retired four-star Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who was drug policy director for President Clinton.
Geography plays another role because West Africa is fairly close to the three South American nations that produce nearly all of the world’s cocaine — Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. Many of the shipments depart from Venezuela, which shares a 1,273-mile (2,050-kilometer) porous border with Colombia and is even closer to Africa.
“They go right dead-ass across the shortest route,” McCaffrey said.
Most of the cocaine shipments cross the Atlantic in large “mother ships” and then are off-loaded to small vessels near the coastline, the United Nations said. Small planes modified for overseas flight that can carry a 1-ton cargo also have been used. Most of those come from Venezuela, the United Nations reported.
A report issued in July by the Government Accountability Office said traffickers use go-fast boats, fishing vessels and commercial shipping containers as the primary means of smuggling cocaine out of Venezuela. McCaffrey also noted the use of go-fast boats and special planes.
DEA Assistant Administrator Thomas Harrigan testified before the Senate in June that authorities in Sierra Leone seized a cocaine shipment last year from a twin-engine aircraft marked with a Red Cross insignia. The flight originated in Venezuela, he said.
The GAO report noted that “U.S. government officials have observed an increase in suspicious air traffic originating in Venezuela.” In 2004, the report said, authorities tracked 109 suspect flights out of Venezuela. In 2007, officials tracked 178 suspicious flights.
Then there’s the crime connection in West Africa.
“Colombian and Venezuelan traffickers are entrenched in West Africa and have cultivated long-standing relationships with African criminal networks to facilitate their activities in the region,” Harrigan told a Senate subcommittee on African affairs.
“These organizations don’t operate in a vacuum,” Benson said. “They have to align themselves with West African criminal groups.”
The cartels also have aligned themselves with terrorists, Harrigan said.
“The threat of narco-terrorism in Africa is a real concern, including the presence of international terrorist organizations operating or based in Africa, such as the regional threat presented by al Qaeda in the Lands of Maghreb,” he said, referring to al Qaeda activists in North Africa. “In addition, DEA investigations have identified elements of Colombia’s Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia [FARC] as being involved in cocaine trafficking in West Africa.”
Benson said the groups operating in Africa are “primarily narcotics organizations” but acknowledged that the Marxist FARC guerrillas in Colombia are a force to be dealt with. The rebels have waged war on the Colombian government for more than 40 years.
“The profit potential is such that the FARC is one of the largest cocaine-trafficking operations globally and is also a terrorist organization,” he said.
Bagley and McCaffrey see less evidence of terrorist connections with the traffickers in Africa, both using nearly identical language.
“I’d be really skeptical of those kinds of assertions,” McCaffrey said.
“I’m quite skeptical about linkages between cartels and terrorists,” Bagley said. “The criminal groups seek profits. They’re not interested in taking over governments.”
Still, Bagley said, traffickers and terrorists may use some of the same criminal networks.
Analysts note that the surge of cartel activity in West Africa is a fairly recent development. The U.N. report said it started around 2005. Bybee places it around 2006.
McCaffrey, who was in the Clinton White House in the 1990s, said he saw the problem coming a long time ago.
“I’ve been warning people in Europe and Latin America starting 10 years ago where this issue was going to move,” he said. “The Europeans absolutely blew me off.”
The U.N. report offers some hope, saying that cocaine seizures in Europe peaked in 2006 and topped out in West Africa in 2007. Overall seizures have declined since 2006, the report said.
“This trend appears to be continuing in 2009 and includes declines in the number and volume of seizures made in the region and in the number of air couriers coming from the region in Europe,” the report concluded.
For example, authorities seized 11 large shipments in Africa in 2007, four in 2008 and none so far this year.
The report does not specify whether there are fewer shipments or smarter criminals avoiding detection.
But if there is a decline, the DEA’s Benson said he has not seen it.
“In the last three or four years, it’s increased quite dramatically,” he said. “The Colombian organizations have been active there longer than that. In the last two years, we’ve also seen Mexican involvement in the area as well.”
The African Crime & Conflict Journal 