Second Of Two Parts — As a senior police official, Edmundo Mendes' job is to arrest the South American cocaine traffickers who use his troubled West African country, with its starry array of remote islands, as a transit point for drug shipments bound for Europe. It hasn't been easy.
To demonstrate, Mendes walked a few steps from his office into the gritty mix of smoke and car exhaust in downtown Bissau. He fished a ring of keys from his pocket and made quick work of a rusty padlock. The metal door groaned open to a small courtyard. Across the way was a room, about 10 by 15 feet, where four men looked out drowsily from behind a barred, glass-less window.
This holding cell is the only jail in a country of nearly 2 million.
"We live in paradise and hell at the same time," said Mendes, a baby-faced 35-year-old with master's and doctoral degrees from France and Portugal. "In paradise, there are no prisons. In hell, there are no prisons. Without a prison, all the work we do is for nothing. At the moment, this is a paradise for criminals."
That's just one reason Guinea- Bissau has been an easy mark for the world's drug cartels.
The country's navy has a single aging ship to search for smugglers, and the head of the navy fled the country amid accusations that he was involved in the drug trade. When a Gulfstream jet from Venezuela landed last year at the Bissau international airport, its $250-million cargo of cocaine was whisked away in army trucks before police arrived. A judge freed the three Venezuelan pilots, including one wanted on an arrest warrant from Mexico.
Then, in one 12-hour period this year, the army chief of staff was killed by a bomb in his office and his soldiers retaliated by hacking the president to death in his kitchen. Three months later, soldiers killed a presidential candidate and two former government ministers whom they accused of plotting a coup.
Disputes over the drug trade are believed to have played a role in the mayhem. But the investigation has stalled because the soldiers refuse to be questioned.
$70-billion market
West Africa is among the world's poorest, least developed and most politically unstable regions. This patchwork of coastal nation-states has long been exploited by international profiteers, from the slave traders who fed off it for centuries to the European colonizers who later tried to sculpt tropical replicas of France, England and Portugal.
