Cocaine barons target Africa

2007-11-07 19:10

Marrakesh - West Africa has begun to rival the Caribbean as a favoured route for cocaine traffickers supplying a growing number of European clients, a senior Interpol official said on Wednesday.

As a crackdown on Caribbean networks begins to bite, police from Guinea-Bissau and Mauritania to Senegal and Benin have seized unprecedented quantities of cocaine this year.

Senior officers said they were fighting an uphill battle given Africa's porous borders, patchy maritime controls and widespread poverty which make it easy to corrupt officials and recruit drug mules.

"We noticed at the end of 2005 that we were starting to have more and more big seizures (in Africa)," said Emmanuel Leclaire, Interpol assistant-director for criminal organisations and drugs.

The hauls continued growing this year, with police seizing 635kg of cocaine in Guinea Bissau in April, 629kg in Mauritania in May and 761kg in Mauritania in August.

"We're seeing traffickers taking small planes and adding extra fuel tanks to give them enough range to cross the Atlantic," Leclaire told reporters on the sidelines of Interpol's general assembly in Marrakesh.

While the number of heroin users has remained stable in recent years at around 11 million, cocaine demand has grown as it shifts from being the recreational drug of the rich and into the mainstream.

Last year there were an estimated 14 million cocaine users, a million more than a year earlier, Leclaire said.

Once cocaine produced in Colombia, Venezuela and Bolivia reaches Africa it is sent on in smaller quantities to Europe.

New initiatives

Since Morocco installed new drug scanners at its Casablanca airport hub, a steady stream of sub-Saharan drug mules have been caught heading for Madrid and other European destinations.

"Morocco has given us very precise information and helped us make arrests in Spain this year," Leclaire said.

There was also now evidence that chemicals used to process cocaine were also being shipped to Africa, although it was unclear if processing factories had opened on the continent.

Interpol has a new initiative called COCAF to improve coordination on African cocaine smuggling.

This year it set up another, PROTEUS, focusing on smuggling from South America to southern Africa.

To back up under-resourced African police forces, it has set up operational support teams equipped with testing laboratories that are dispatched on site.

"These places are increasingly at the intersection between big European traffickers and major South American producers and we often get many elements allowing us to work upstream and downstream," Leclaire said.

- Reuters