| July 3, 2007
Dakar -
Senegalese police are unravelling a
Latin American drug smuggling network
thought to be using the west African
nation as a hub for trafficking to
Europe and the United States after
seizing cocaine worth over
$200-million.
Police have discovered 2 454kg of
cocaine and arrested three South
American men since a deserted sailing
ship, apparently broken down, drifted
into a popular coastal resort last
Wednesday with 50 sacks of the drug on
board.
The arrests at the weekend of the men
from Venezuela, Colombia and Ecuador -
who police said were caught in
possession of guns, satellite
navigation equipment and foreign and
local cash - led authorities to
discover a further drug stash in a
private house.
"The
South Americans created a fish farming
company as a front in the (coastal
town of) Ndangane where they invested
millions before declaring the company
bust and reinjecting the cash into the
circuit," Moussa Fall, head of
the investigation department of
Senegal's paramilitary police, told
Reuters.
"Guinea-Bissau was obviously the
entry point for the drugs. All the air
tickets we have found were from Rio de
Janeiro to Bissau. A minute part of
the drugs was destined for the local
market, the rest was bound for Europe
and the United States."
One of the South American men was
arrested at Saly, a coastal resort
south of Dakar popular with European
tourists, while the two others were
arrested in the Sine Saloum, a
sprawling river delta of lush mangrove
swamps and islets.
Three Senegalese accomplices have also
been arrested.
South American drug cartels have
increasingly been moving their
logistics bases to West Africa, lured
by lax policing in an unstable region
and by the presence of small,
underground criminal networks already
in place, security experts say.
Operating as flexible groups of
individuals, they can recruit couriers
among a cheap labour force in
countries like Senegal who are then
used to market illicit products to
diaspora populations in European and
U.S. drug markets.
But Antonio Mazzitelli, head of the
United Nations Office on Drugs and
Crime (UNODC) in West and Central
Africa, said the latest seizure was
probably the biggest ever in the
region and suggested a more
sophisticated trafficking operation.
"You cannot use west African
couriers to smuggle 2,4 tons, it is
too much," Mazzitelli said.
"There must be bigger players
using other means: ships,
planes."
Consignments of cocaine have long come
from Latin America through the Cape
Verde islands off the Atlantic coast,
or through Ghana, Nigeria and Togo,
from where they are re-exported to
markets including Spain, Portugal and
the United Kingdom.
Mazzitelli said the wholesale price
for a kilo of cocaine in Spain, the
main entry point to Europe, was around
$42 000 in 2005. With a retail
price twice that high, the Senegalese
haul had a street value in Europe of
more than $200-million.
More recently, UN officials have
warned that former Portuguese colony
Guinea-Bissau, just to the south of
Senegal, could become overrun by drug
cartels which its cash-strapped
security forces are ill-equipped to
tackle.
Few youths in sport-obsessed and
Muslim Senegal use hard drugs such as
cocaine but politicians worry that as
the country develops and a growing
sector of the population becomes
wealthy, that may change unless the
cartels are fought quickly.
"Young Senegalese users tend to
take tablets, amphetamines, they also
take Yamba (cannabis) in cigarettes
and sometimes alcohol,"
parliamentarian Abdou Latif Gueye told
local TV.
"We're busy constructing roads
and new buildings and that's all well
and good but we should be protecting
our children from this deadly
trade," he said.
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