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Guinea-Bissau: West Africa's New Achilles' Heel

West Africa, a region that has barely begun to heal from a decade of civil wars, is once again under attack. The new threat grows silently, like a cancer, and the international community appears powerless to respond.

An international network led by Latin American drug cartels and the Lebanese Islamist group Hezbollah has chosen West Africa, among the poorest and more corrupted corners of the world, as the nexus for illegal trade in cocaine, oil, counterfeit medicines, pirated music and human trafficking. International law enforcement officials say the profits fuel terrorist activities worldwide.

The past three years has seen a staggering increase in drug trafficking in particular, making West Africa — and especially the countries of Guinea-Bissau, Nigeria, Ghana and Guinea — the premier narcotics region of Africa. The consequences are most visible in Guinea-Bissau, which saw the double assassination of its president and army chief on the same day in early March and more recently the murder of two leading politicians in the struggle for succession.

The consequences stretch as well to the slums of Bissau, where crack-fueled prostitution is driving a new AIDS epidemic in a region where even basic health care is beyond the reach of many — and where young people turning to the drug trade become the unwitting soldiers of organized crime.

What’s happening in Guinea-Bissau, Africa’s first narco-state, is a red flag of warning for the region — and for the world.

This project is part of the Pulitzer Gateway Fragile States, an interactive educational portal that helps tell the stories of the dangers weak states around the world pose -- and also the international interventions that appear to be making a difference. Fragile States also includes reporting from Pulitzer projects in East Timor, Bosnia, Haiti, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia. Join the conversation by sharing your story about fragile states. Learn more about the Pulitzer Center's Global Gateway.

Marco Vernaschi

Marco Vernaschi was born in Turin, Italy, 1973. He began his long-term project to document the major illegal activities behind terrorism with his project “West Africa’s New Achilles' Heel”, on cocaine trafficking, with the overall goal of showing how unaware consumers in the West support international terrorism.

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