West Africa's Cocaine Empire: Guinea Bissau's True Narco State Status
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Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th Mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I mean, honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15 a month. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry.

I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com slash save whenever you're ready. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details. It's the early hours of March 2nd, 2009 in Bissau, the tumble down port capital of Guinea-Bissau on the West African coast. President Jao Bernardo Vieira, better known as Nino, is holed up at his private residence.

All around him are troops and gunfire. It's been hours since a foreign-made bomb tore through the home of Nino's arch-emmy, Army Chief of Staff Batista Tagme Naue, blowing him to bits. Now the military's out for blood. Angolan diplomats have persuaded Nino's wife Isabel to flee the city.

her husband won't budge. He's ruled this tiny maritime nation on and off for almost 23 years and he survived so many attempts on his leadership that his enemies believe he has supernatural powers. Nino describes himself as God's gift and a soldier of peace to the Bisalginian people. No way some scruffy kids in Khaki are about to chisel him off the throne.

Nino's bulletproof Humvee, his only way out, is a smoking wreck in the driveway. Police escort cars sit scrapped behind it. Then, a huge blast. A soldier tosses a bomb through Nino's window, injuring the round-faced 69-year-old. A bazooka rocket then whooshes into the building's walls, bringing its roof crashing down onto the old man. Still, Nino lives, and he pulls himself from the rubble.

Another gunshot only wings it. Then, troops drag Nino down the street to his mother-in-law's home, where they chop him up with machetes. Not even God's gift can survive in two dozen pieces. The dispute in their scene is the blood-soaked culmination of a feud that's held a tiny nation of two million people in its grip, ever since it crawled from civil war at the end of the last millennium. Statesmen and observers call it a vendetta between two men. But it's far more than that.

Three days before Nino's slaying, an unregistered jet had landed at Bissau's international airport. Insiders say that among its cargo was a tire-made bomb. The jet refuels and promptly leaves. At the precise time, 200 kilos of South American cocaine disappears from a Navy compound in the capital. This is cartel violence.

Welcome to the Underworld Podcast.

Hey guys and welcome to the show that teaches you how to fight crime without police or prisons. I'm your host, Sean Williams, and joining me from his Brooklyn bunker is journalist, television presenter, and documentary filmmaker, Danny Gold. It's a nice intro, eh, mate? That might be your best work so far on the show. I mean, I just, I feel honored and humbled. Yeah.

So, yeah, guys, welcome to the show. As usual, we've been putting up tons of Patreon episodes. I think I just got one done with a guy who infiltrated the Hells Angels. Crazy story for the ATF. That guy is really amazing. Bonus episode. Send us questions for the Q&A. We've got that coming up. I'll be vetoing any requests on my gambling debts, but otherwise it's all on the table. Ask us anything. Yeah.

I mean, patreon.com, Sussing the World podcast, again, for like the price of a cup of coffee. We have bonus episodes up there. And yeah, I've been getting a little too deep into like the degen crypto stuff. So I might actually need this money or I'm gonna have to pawn my laptop. But either way. Yeah.

Yeah, Danny's in trouble, guys. So this episode has honestly been one of the most fascinating and enjoyable ones I've researched for the show. And it's really made me want to get out to West Africa and do some reporting on the crazy drug trade there because, as we just heard, it's really, really mad. And further into this episode, we'll have civil wars, drug nightclubs, DEA busts, and one of Africa's biggest drug campaigns.

Yeah, I mean, I've done a bunch of reporting in West Africa, but never on the narco war side. And I've always really been fascinated with everything I've heard about it. You know, these like urban legends of Colombian cartel guys driving around in souped up Humvees and like these tiny African villages. Just really, really wild stuff. It's really brazen. But first, I'm going to forgive anybody for not knowing what or where Guinea-Bissau is. I mean, I didn't know much beyond a few footballers before doing this show.

So Danny, you can channel the listener here because I'm going to do a quick pop quiz. And as I'm sure you know, there are four nations called Guinea in the world. That's Guinea-Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Papua New Guinea, and yeah, good old plain Guinea. So I've actually worked in plain old Guinea. I covered Ebola there for a while. It's a rough place, tough place to work.

I was not aware of any narco stuff there, but I'm sure I'm going to learn right now. Oh, yeah, there's plenty of that going. So here goes the quiz. You ready? Question one. Which Guinea is home to 851 languages? No idea. All right. That is Papua New Guinea. Question number two. Which Guinea's leader is the longest serving president of all time? No idea. Yeah.

That is Teodoro Obiang at Couture Guinea. I think he's been going for like 41 years. And if we're on the subject of not Instagramming your crime, by the way, check out his son Teddy and Guaymer's IG profile. Like, just do it. Oh, I think I know about him, right? He's got that crazy house in LA for like $30 million. Was that him? Yeah, like some leaders kids try and hide it, but this guy doesn't give a single shit. Question number three, is the beloved guinea pig actually from Guinea?

You know, the people who complain that our intros are too long, I think are not going to enjoy this episode. Yeah, well, they can skip on. They've got buttons on their phone. No, the guinea pig is not from Guinea. And bonus, it's not actually a pig either. And finally, question four, Danny, which Guinea was labeled a narco state in 2007 when it still had barely any cops or prisons or forensics or judiciary and is the subject of this week's pod?

I'm going to say Guinea-Bissau. Correct. One out of four. That's not too bad. Yeah, that's right. It's Guinea-Bissau. So Guinea-Bissau, fun facts. Guinea-Bissau is a tiny state on the western edge of Africa. It's sandwiched between Senegal and Guinea. It's much larger namesake, Guinea. It was actually a French colony, but Guinea-Bissau was Portuguese. And after conquistadors washed up on its shores in the 1440s, they promptly kicked off the slave trade, pairing Guinea-Bissau with nearby Cape Verde.

In the 1950s, Guinea-Bissau teams up with the Verdeans and boots the Portuguese out in 1974 after Africa's longest war of independence, with a big help from Fidel Castro's Cubans, the Soviets and China. And it's a big, big Cold War proxy war.

the result in marxist leninist rule crumbles not long after and the country descends into a series of power struggles and violence between civil society and the army and in 1980 a bisal coup gives cape verde the chance to break away and it wins its own nationhood in 1981 the unrest in guinea bisal continues however and it results in a brutal civil war from 98 to 99 during which capital bisal is besieged for nine months and a vibrant weapons trade booms

This is just a rough couple of centuries right here. You know, it just doesn't sound great. It's not hard to see where the drugs are going to come from, right? So not a huge amount changes immediately after the war. And actually to date, no elected Bissau-Guinean president has seen out a full electoral term, which is nuts. It's around the mid-2000s that the country gets balls deep into the global cocaine trafficking industry. And that has a lot to do with its geography and demographics.

So Guinea-Bissau is about the same size as Switzerland or like the New York metro area. And it's shaped like a sort of lobster or salt-based hand with the sprinkled salt being these 88 Biagos Islands that act like the perfect ocean screen for drugs. Coke works its way to the twin islands of Yatta or Jatta and Peshiche. I'm going to screw up these names so bad, which kind of look like pinball flippers in front of the heavily forested Bissau mainland. And then the Coke just disappears and heads off in all kinds of directions.

There's billions of dollars in Guinea-Bissau because of this, but it's 2 million people are mostly dirt poor. 80% of them work in agriculture and 90% of those halved as cashew nuts on the coast. It's folks are young, many of them are out of work and the GDP per capita is under 800 bucks a year. I mean, does that not sound like the most perfect melting pot for organized crime?

Oh yeah, and according to the Global Organized Crime Index, Guinea-Bissau has the 177th best resilience against crime in the world of 193 countries. And honestly, I don't know why it's not 193rd as we're going to learn later. According to the index, quote,

The country's been linked to the regional small arm trafficking for decades as militant groups from Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone and Senegal have engaged in the illegal arms trade as conflicts fare up in West Africa. And there aren't any shortage of those. A lack of a comprehensive civilian disarmament process has left the country at the threat of future instability. I mean, future is doing a lot of work there. And there are tons and tons of attacks on activists and journalists, which is always a great sign.

Anyway, because of this, maybe Guinea-Bissau is one of only nine countries on Earth without a U.S. embassy. Six of them are island states in the Caribbean. Do you know what the other two are? I'm going to say Iran and North Korea or possibly Venezuela. First two got into Iran, North Korea. Yeah. So anyway, all of this is to say Guinea-Bissau is in very esteemed company.

From 2003, 99% of all drugs seized in Africa are seized in West Africa. That includes notorious smuggling posts like the Gambia, Sierra Leone, Liberia, but the South American cartels have fingers in pies all over the region.

I know that Lebanese organized crime, too, including Hezbollah. They're also heavily set up around West Africa. You know, they have great connections and they have also members in South America and the Caribbean, too, that I think are heavily involved in the trafficking that goes on in West Africa. Yeah, Hezbollah are going to pop up briefly further down this episode as well. It's nuts how they're everywhere.

In 2006, the UN points out that Guinea-Bissau's gross domestic product of $304 million equals the wholesale value of six tonnes of cocaine in Europe.

Well, by 2008, at least 50 tons of cocaine is coming from Colombia and Venezuela into West Africa and off again into Europe with Guinea-Bissau at the heart of the trade. And that's around 2 billion on the wholesale market. Now, I want to make a little diversion here because I'm increasingly of the mind these days that the term narco state is misused by just about everyone in the world, including me on this show.

We've definitely done like four episodes at least where we called something a narco state, I think. Wait, North Korea, Syria, Captagon, Mexico at one point maybe, definitely Afghanistan with the opium and the heroin episodes. Yeah, I mean, I mentioned that the Netherlands was a narco state in our show about the Macro Mafia a couple of months ago. And like, actually looking back, it's not. Drugs don't run the economy. Drug crime is getting worse there, sure, but Amsterdam is a safe city by any metric going. There's tons of drug crime in the Netherlands, of course, but

But Narco State, nah.

However, of all the countries we've covered on this show, I honestly do not think any qualify as much for the title of Narco State as tiny little Guinea Bissell. Cocaine actually does run the show. I mean, the trade's at least eight times the place's GDP. That's like, that is insane. There's a great 2008 Guardian report by Ed Valamey, rockstar reporter, where he kicks off describing having a beer at the Notorious X Club in Bissell. I'll let him take it from here.

The music is thumping Europop. A beer costs more than twice the daily income of a dollar a day. Many of the clubbers, though, are knocking back the imported whiskey, which costs up to 80 bucks a bottle. One of the regulars points out the people who represent the various stages of the cocaine supply chain from South America, via Guinea-Bissau and West Africa, to the UK and the rest of Europe.

And then this is Ed's drinking pal pointing around the bar, quote, he's a pretty big drug dealer. And that's one of his security guys. That guy there thinks he's big news, but he is just small time. That woman's a mule. She's been to Europe a couple of times. It's just crazy scene. And then Ed goes to this little restaurant whose owner tells him, quote, the only visitors we get are the Colombians. This country is being destroyed by drugs. They're everywhere.

A few weeks ago, the guy who used to be my gardener knocked at the door and he offered to sell me seven kilos of cocaine. Jeez, what a great story. You know, this is how you tell a story in journalism right here. Yeah, you just sit in the like seediest bar and get drunk and you find the best stories. I mean, that always worked for me. Yeah, yeah, it does me. It's done me all right for 10 years. That's pretty narco state stuff, right? The reason for the massive leap in cocaine shipments around that time was twofold.

On one hand, you've got traditional smuggling routes in the Caribbean and Central America getting busted way more forcefully. And on the other, there's this tiny poor nation on the Atlantic coast where the officials need any penny they can get to cling on to control. And the people are so piss poor, they'll be complicit in your trade for a tiny fraction of the total cost of a shipment.

Yeah, it's the thing with cocaine and other drugs too, right? They always find a way. It's like whack-a-mole, right? Even in a place with such security as the US-Mexico land border, if it gets too strict there, you go up through the Caribbean, vice versa. It just kind of, it's always going to find a way. I mean, how nuts is it if you do a big sting in Panama and then someone pops up in like Sierra Leone doing it next week?

It's pretty crazy, crazy trade. Here's a veteran DEA agent talking to Ed Valamey. Quote, a place like Guinea-Bissau is a failed state anyway. So it's like moving into an empty house. You walk in, buy the services you need from the government, army and people and take over.

And one of the maddest things about this country is there's no prisons. During the Civil War era, Guinea-Bissau has four prisons. But by 2008, there's nothing apart from an old, small, colonial Bissau house called First Squadron, where prisoners come and go as they please. There's no electricity, no running water, no beds, there's no guards, no admin staff. Just like sounds like the kind of hostels I stayed in when I was backpacking around Eastern Europe, like...

15 years ago. Jesus, getting old. Yeah, am I even going to get into how long ago it was that I backpacked?

And there's more, right? A BBC reporter interviews this one guy running First Squadron that year, and he just plods home every night. If I am not here, he says, people will leave. There is no security. I mean, there is no security, mate. Just go home. And it gets even madder. In 2008, just one rusty boat patrols the country's 217 mile coastline. One boat. There's nothing governing airspace at all.

The police only has a few cars, no radios, no handcuffs, no phones, and that's on the mainland. Remember those 88 islands where all the drugs come in? They have no judiciary police, no communications, no surveillance equipment, and of course, not a single prison. In 2008, the country has no forensic science, almost no courts at all, and just a handful of judges, and you can guess they're being paid off.

There's a reason for all this, and I'll leave it in the words of a local official speaking as part of a recent Interpol report. Quote, in other African countries, government officials are part of the problem. In Guinea-Bissau, it's the government itself that is the problem. I'm not going to lie to you, that kind of sounds like the same thing to me. I think it's the bad apples versus, I guess, all the apples are shit. I can't think of a better way of saying it. Yeah.

The Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime calls Guinea-Bissau the, quote, center state of what it calls West Africa's, quote, coastal ecosystem of drugs. This begins in 2007 when two things happen. Firstly, Latin American drugs first sniff out the region as a major trafficking point, and actually local consumption of crack cocaine, known as Kisa, balloons that same year.

That's an interesting story, right? These cartel guys who have to go out and scout new places like this, new options, whether it's, you know, like the Caribbean or Central America or even like going around West Africa, probably like up and down the coastline, trying to find somewhere where they can bring in shipments. It'd be amazing if there's some old fat American guy who got dumped out of Hollywood as a location scout and he's like sitting in the X Club now scouting out Coke shipment places.

Political connections between Guinea-Bissau's Nino, that's the guy who was killed at the top of the show, and longtime Guinean dictator Lansana Conte, that's Guinea, French Guinea, are critical in the growth of the market. That allows free movement of drugs across each other's borders. That's Guinea-Bissau and Guinea, guys. There's too many Guineas. But, and this is the second point,

In 2007, the Bissau-Guinean military reportedly starts stealing drugs from the Latin American cartels who shift their operations through neighboring states like Guinea. Ripping off the cartels even in your own country just doesn't seem like I would generally not advise doing that. Yeah, the Bissau-Guineans give not a single shit about pretty much anything as I've researched the last week or so.

This sparks deadly power struggles within the Bissau-Guinean military and political structures, as you'd imagine, like the events of 2009, the crescendo to Tagme and Nino's deaths. But before we get back to that gruesome episode and the many shadowy elements surrounding it, I want to explain how this whole trafficking web actually works.

First, the product comes either on massive cargo ships from Colombia or Venezuela with refueling stops on the Brazil coast. That helps Bisalguinians thanks to their shared language with the Brazilians. Then the ships spend four or five days crossing the Atlantic at night only and they throw blue tarp over the hull by day to avoid airborne detection.

Not sure if it's the Ghanaian or Ghanaian, whatever it is, pipeline. But I know, you know, from the reporting I've done in Trinidad and the Dominican Republic, there are ships that kind of stop there as a way station. I mean, they're mostly directing it to the U.S., but they also will head across into West Africa. So I'm not sure if it stops there or another stop along the pipeline. Yeah, and I think some of it stops in Jamaica as well. But I think that's one of the routes that the U.S. has kind of cleaned up a bit in recent years. Then speedboats...

In Guinea-Bissau, they come and pick up the gear off the coast of the Biagos Islands, and then they ferry them to those pinball flipper islands I mentioned before, Yatta and Peshikche. Then small boats cross over to the mainland, where drivers spirit out of Guinea-Bissau altogether, often to the eastern Senegalese city of Tambacounda.

These guys are using the so-called rip-on, rip-off method, whereby drugs are attached to legal goods at the point of export, in this case, food and drink coming from Colombia. I mean, guys, I guess just search anything coming from Colombia to Bicel. I mean, there can't be that many locals drinking Hechichera rum, and I'm sure they've got their own perfectly good bananas.

Anyway, other consignments make the 1600 mile journey by twin engine plane and they land on rural airstrips run by the Guinea-Bissau military. They're buried deep in the jungle. Whichever way the coke arrives, a lot heads via land to Islamist redoubts in southwestern Mali, which is a crazy volatile region, or Mauritania, before going up through the Sahara and across the Med.

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Al-Qaeda and the Islamic Maghreb is particularly active in the trade, which it swaps for black market weapons and protects shipments through the perilous Sahel. That's the belt across Africa where the Sahara meets forestry in the south. Basically, one of the hairiest parts of the entire world, home to most of its poorest countries. Even Colombia's FARC have been known to pitch up in Guinea-Bissau looking for drugs, cash and guns. And remember that, guys, because it's going to come back soon.

That route up from Western Africa through North Africa, it's just fascinating. It's like insane anarchic pirate times, lawlessness, rebels, militias, Al-Qaeda, just complete insanity. And also it's kind of – there's that line Misha Glennie has that we've talked about, I think from the Yugoslavian wars, where it was like all the –

ethnic militia leaders who were preaching hatred against everyone else, they were doing business with each other. And it kind of sounds like that in North Africa and this route. You have Al-Qaeda trafficking cocaine with FARC. I'm sure Hezbollah is sometimes paying Al-Qaeda to escort cocaine shipments up into North Africa. These groups that should be at odds with each other

uh all work together to traffic cocaine and make a lot of money yeah it's all about the cash i mean if you look at some of the countries in that region as well like mali it's capital bamako is like buried right up away from most of the country and the rest of it's just run by gangs tuareg separatists i mean it's just like not really a country as you or i would would think about in the west same goes for nigeria

chad i mean these are just like lines drawn in the sand of the sahara they're not really countries to most most uh extents anyway some cocaine also stops at the port of ghana in togo or benin before it goes north through nigeria algeria with the help of armed gangs including nigeria's black axe episode three or episode four we did black axe yeah one of the early episodes one of those yeah yeah

It can also be shipped across Morocco's old cannabis trail or by air using so-called mules. One single flight into Amsterdam in December 2006 was carrying 32 mules carrying cocaine from Guinea-Bissau. I know that, you know, you did the Black Axe episode. You were in Nigeria and you were looking at the human trafficking routes. Did you look into cocaine trafficking as well? Was that something that was present there? I mean, I kind of like got wind of...

not necessarily cocaine but all kinds of drugs making their way up through northern nigeria like into the boko karam areas and then they kind of get spirited out across the niger border same route as the human traffickers but um yeah i didn't really look into it didn't get the chance to look into it that much but honestly researching this episode just makes me want to get out there so bad so interesting

Anyway, once you've got your coke into Europe, then you've made your millions. And if anyone wants more detail about all these mad snaking drug routes, check out that GI report. I've thrown it up on the reading list. And guess what? The drug trade funds local election runs too, because of course it does. Although given the success rate of Guinea-Bissau presidents, you wonder why anyone really bothers. Or perhaps that's the point.

So now we're up to the time of the story in this show's intro. This is from a fantastic 2010 Virginia Quarterly Review long read called The Cocaine Coast by Marco Venasci. And it starts when the author hears the boom of a bomb from his Bissau hotel room. Quote, when I pulled up at the president's house, soldiers were shooting at the air and swinging machetes to keep a crowd of people away. The president's armored Hummer was still parked out front. The tires flat and its bulletproof windows shattered.

The police cars from his escort were destroyed. A rocket shot from a bazooka penetrated four walls of his house, ending up in the living room. After ruling Guinea-Bissau for nearly a quarter of a century, Vieira, known to his people simply as Nino, was dead. Damn, I mean, talk about being in the right place at the right time for a journalist. I know. The story is fantastic. Like, seriously, guys, read it on the reading list. It's brilliant. Here's a conversation between the writer and a special commando involved in the coup.

He asked, what happened after you questioned him? Well, after that we shot him and we took his powers away. He asked what you meant. Well, Nino had some special powers, this guy explains. We needed to make sure he won't come back for revenge. So we hacked his body with a machete, the hands, the arms, the legs, his belly and his head. Now he's really dead. Remember that mysterious jet that lands in Bissau with a bomb and it leaves with 200 keys of cocaine? Well, it's not alone.

In July 2008, nine months before the murders, a Gulfstream jet lands from Venezuela carrying 500 kilos of cocaine. Bisalginian cops surround the plane and arrest its pilot, the South American drug lord Carmelo Vasquez Guerra.

Wait, so do they actually crack down? Like there are efforts made at cracking down at times? They get close. Then I'm going to take it back to Vanashi. Quote, Five days after Carmelo's arrest in Bissau, however, the drugs vanished. Interpol, in cooperation with the DEA and the FBI, inspected the plane with a drug-sniffing dog and confirmed that cocaine had been transported on the jet, but the cargo was now nowhere to be found. Antonio Maria Costa said,

Executive Director of the UN Office of Drugs and Crime later conceded that hundreds of boxes have been taken out from this jet. And he opened an investigation into the case in cooperation with the FBI, Interpol and the DEA. So this is starting to stink already. And Venashi continues, in November 2008, just before the spiral of violence started, Interpol and the judicial police seized a similar plane, also originating from Venezuela.

Again, the police seized a payload of cocaine and again it mysteriously vanished. The pilot fled to Malawi, but the co-pilot was arrested. Interpol was also able to recover seven satellite phones that were then decrypted, providing important information about a network of drug dealers.

Wait, so who is stealing it? Are the locals, like the Bissau-Guinean stealing it or the Venezuelan, Colombians, whatever it is, stealing it back? Like how does it, who do we think is taking it? So the strong implication is that the army of Guinea-Bissau are going in after these seizures and just going in and stealing all the drugs and taking them back out. They're like, nah, that ain't happening, son.

So the police are kind of stopping it and seizing it and the army is just basically taking it anyway? Yeah, pretty much. So the judicial police in Guinea-Bissau are considered the only vaguely non-corrupt outfit. And I think there's only like a hundred of them. But the army, they're absolutely up to their necks in it.

But of course, nobody's face is justice in Guinea-Bissau. And that is not one of their tourism logos. There's no fucking cops at all, says the director of the judicial police to Venashi. And yeah, like I said, that's considered the country's least corrupt institution. Quote, I'm fighting a war alone against someone that I will never defeat. Look at our offices. We have nothing here.

The international community keeps promising aid, but we're working with just one car and most of our agents have had no salary for four months. Of course they're corrupt. They need to feed their families. How can we possibly compete with drug traffickers? Those tourism slogans right there. I mean, you could actually get a crowd, you know, nobody's facing justice in Guinea-Bissau and there's no fucking cops. Come visit. I mean, that does sound pretty enticing to be honest. Right? We might go on holiday. We could do an underworld trip out there.

I know some folks that would definitely be buying a ticket right now. I mean, Vanashe, during his reporting trip, he's even threatened by these Hezbollah guys, like I said, while he's in Bissau.

Yeah, I figured the Lebanese connection was definitely going to play a role at some point. It just sounds really bloody scary, this whole report trip this guy goes on. He just gets held at gunpoint about half a dozen times. It's total mayhem. And now, guys, entering stage right, we've got the real villain of this whole show. And that is Mr. Antonio Injay, a mastermind of this entire ecosystem and quite possibly the most feared man in Guinea-Bissau.

Antonio Injay is born in 1955 and he gets a fierce rep as a fighter, becoming a key player in the 98-99 civil war. He then climbs the ladder smashing Senegalese separatists who flood across the Bissau border during the 2006 unrest and he becomes the head of the Guinea-Bissau Armed Forces.

Having sat back during the 2009 violence in which Nino gets killed, NJ stages an attempted coup himself the following year. Having soldiers place President Carlos Gomez Jr. under house arrest and threatening to kill him if civilian protests in the capital city don't end. It's the coup of the coupers. Man, it's just like, it's like Uno over here. There's just so many coups going on top of each other. Anyway, this move, it does not succeed. But in 2012, NJ finally gets his man.

During elections, he surrounds Gomez's house and chucks grenades into it. I mean, reading this is just insane. Soldiers occupy the streets and they throw radio stations off the air. Again, international players say this is just a vendetta between power brokers, but it is all about the coke. Experts now call 2012 the quote, cocaine coup d'etat, which is like an oddly beautiful phrase. Iambic pentameter, if I recall anything from my degree, besides just getting fucked up and missing lectures.

Anyway, in the six months after the coup, planes believed to be loaded with drugs, they land in Guinea-Bissau at least 20 times. Wait, so Antonio Njai, he's now in charge? He's in charge. And now the drug stuff is going to get way, way bigger.

And in 2012, this growing nexus of illicit drugs, it's caught the idea of America's DEA enough that it quarterbacks a pretty spectacular sting operation against InJai. Actually, it's almost exactly the same sting they've done years before to grab Victor Boot, who we profiled in one of our earliest episodes, and also the same sting that caught fellow arms trafficker Monzo Alcacer.

And it all goes a little like this. In the summer of 2012, two unidentified co-conspirators of InJai, they're gophers basically, they agreed to meet undercover DEA agents posing as Colombian FARC rebels. And they offered to buy their Colombian powder for 14 grand, that's euros per kilo, which is about $17,500 today.

which is above the nine grand listed as the Guinea-Bissau price per kilo by the UNODC. So these guys are trying to rip off the FARC, which is also a bold move. I feel like it's always Fed's or Interpol pretending to be the FARC with this move. You know, like, is there some patented international law enforcement con game that they always, like the FARC shuffle or something like that? Is there just one guy called Jose from Spain who like pulls off a FARC accent enough? Yeah, they just send him out every single time. Yeah, it's like, Jesus Christ.

Then in July 2012, the confidential sources meet with InJai at military facility where one conspirator says he wants InJai's okay to use military uniforms to master shipment. He also says that InJai can help ship weapons as part of the deal, which InJai agrees to. It's through me that you could do that, he tells them. It's through the government and I am only an intermediary. And by the way, journalists do stories where they're like court proceeding for like minutes because these are great.

So here's the deal. Half the weapons ordered by the Guinea-Bissau government is going to go to the FARC, and the other half to its own troops. This is because unlike Guinea-Bissau, the FARC just can't buy weapons on the regular market. The supposed FARC guy, that's our friend Jose, even asked for exactly the same surface-to-air rocket launcher they asked Victor Boot for, because it's explicitly for downing US drug-destroying helicopters, so the Americans can ring him up on a terror app.

Once the cocaine gets to the Guinea-Bissau, the fake fart guy says a front company can ship it all over the world, including the States. See what he's done there, guys?

Yeah, I mean, if you're doing a big international crime deal and one of the guys keeps going like, we're going to send this to the States, right? Or like, we're going to attack the States with this. Like, I mean, that's probably a red flag. Yeah, I mean, my respect for NJ goes down at this point, but it kind of shoots back up in a second. NJ agrees to this drugs bit, and then he says he's going to talk to the president about the missiles.

Later that day, there's another meeting. Injoy wants 20 grand as a proof these guys are serious. His underling gives the agent telephone numbers for an associate in Rotterdam. It's always Rotterdam. Who received the funds and send them on to Injoy.

And this kind of cat and mouse thing goes on until November, by which time InJoy is playing along gamely, singing the praises of his tiny nation as a narco state, and he's getting ready to ship a proposed 4,000 kilos of coke from Colombia into Guinea-Bissau and back across the Atlantic into the US. Man, why did he fall for that? Seems like the fake Farkas have finally bagged their man. Yeah, it's just bad logistics right there too. Yeah, just...

I don't know, pinging out of a tiny plane. Anyway, NJ's got a big trick up his sleeve coming, or maybe he just gets lucky because when it comes down to the big day of the handover, he sends the leader of his Navy, that's Jose Americo Bubo Nachuto, wow, I said that right, in a speedboat to seal the deal on a luxury yacht. Left with no choice, the agents bag Chuto instead and they send him off to face a New York court.

So they don't get their man. But the operation is nonetheless hugely embarrassing for Guinea-Bissau, whose drug crime Pierre Lepac, who's head of the regional United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime for Western Central Africa, breathe out, tells the New York Times that year is, quote, a major worry and an open sore.

And the country's attempts to heal that sore, or perhaps just stick a tiny band-aid on it as it festers, aren't to clamp down on the drug trafficking, but instead to censor and threaten media and civil society. In 2013, a Channel 4 reporter heads to Bissau to find a rights activist named Mario Sard Gomez, who's been critical of the government and drugs on public radio. But he's in hiding. He's receiving threats from the military.

Even when the reporter speaks to Gomez's family, a phalanx of cops rocks up at their home and demand to know what's going on. Then the reporter meets the head of the judicial police, who says he's just resigned because the army stole and seized drugs and handed him death threats for getting in the way.

A lot of reporters in this story with just impeccable timing. One guy's there for a coup. Another guy is here for this. I mean, you can't, you can't train, you can't buy that kind of luck, you know? I mean, do you reckon if we go out there, we're going to find anything as good as this? Cause I kind of want to find out. Kind of feel like you hang out there for two weeks and you'll get something as good as this, you know? Yeah. Pay for my flight, someone.

This is real dark cartel shit. I mean, even when this report asks the country's president what's happening with Gomez, he has no idea. And like, the guy genuinely has no idea. Basically, by this point, it just seems the whole government is just a front for the army's drug empire. In 2014, Guinea-Bissau appears to turn a new page. Spooked by the DEA arrests, drug laws divert their attentions to other West African states, in particular, neighbouring Guinea.

That year, José Mario Vaz, known as Jomaz, or Jomav even, he comes to power in peaceful elections that hint at a bright new Bissau-Guinean dawn. International donors are convinced of the tune of $1.5 billion in aid, and they dish it out at a fancy Brussels conference. Jomav dumps Injay out of the military. Injay then invests in an ice factory and he buys a rural hotel.

Ice Factory is just a great gig. You just need a bunch of freezers and some water and you're good to go. Yeah, I mean, especially in Guinea-Bissau, I'm guessing they don't have a huge amount of cold weather.

It seems like he's been put out of pasture, right? But more money, more problems. Months after the Brussels fundraiser, the Prime Minister, Domingos Simas Pereira, realized these are all different people, right? That just goes to show you how nuts politics is in Guinea-Bissau. He falls out with Jomav, who wants to spend a ton of the cash on private agricultural projects in his hometown.

And then Jomav sacks Pereira, but Pereira's party members rally around him rather than the president. This is a total shitshow. And this whole time, the state is sweeping up low-level drug players and throwing them in the country's single overcrowded jail. So, well done, they've got one prison by this point. The real kingpins, however, they never get jail terms. Remember Chuto, the naval leader Injoy sent off to get pumped by the undercover DA agents?

He gets sentenced for four years in New York in 2014, but he cooperates with the authorities and gets it reduced to time served. And by 2016, he's out. Look, we don't condone any of this, but two years for international cocaine trafficking seems kind of worth it, you know? I mean, two years in New York, just chilling out, waiting for your time served to run down.

By this point, there are tons of domestic squabbles in Guinea-Bissau. There's tons of cash and there's a looming political vacuum. And guess which big portly kingpin steps back into the fray? Yep, Antonio Njai.

Only this time, he does it from the wings, pulling strings and arranging shipments and splitting time between Bissau and a cashew farm on the coast. He loves speaking to the media, Khun Sa style, and he often makes crocodile pleas for International Aid to help prevent the scourge of drug crime. But inside his country, people know Njai as the, quote, canny old general.

In 2019, former military officer Umaro Sisoko Mbalo wins a fiercely contested presidential election. So it's actually an election that year. And poses for a victory photo in a Bissell Hotel reception hall alongside Njai, which many see as a gesture that the old man is protected. Quote, the soldiers will revolt, one armed forces official tells a Washington Post reporter.

Injai has men all over the units. The president risks pain with his life, just like the rest of his government. A local-based European researcher puts it even more bluntly, quote, the president is Injai's hostage.

In 2019, authorities get an idea just how out of control the Guinea-Bissau drug trade has become when they make two massive cocaine seizures that March and September as part of an interpol operation called Navarra. The two shipments total 789 and 1,869 kilos. That whole probably represents like 5% of the country's GDP. Yeah, I mean, but this is the stuff that's getting caught. I doubt much is not getting through.

They're huge hauls, right? But they're not in the same ballpark as the biggest shipment in the world. And that happened this February in Germany and Belgium, where cops seized 23 metric tons coming from Paraguay. So that aside, that is an insane amount of drugs. Navarra also backs a quote, cinnamon colored Mercedes Benz. What the hell is a cinnamon painted car? Is this a thing? There's 3 million bucks stashed in bank accounts, 90 grand's worth of porridge and wine. And I mean, I'm hoping like 89 grand of that was the wine.

To be fair for a corrupt politician in a narco state, that's a lot lower than I would expect. What, the porridge? Well, the porridge and just three million stashed in a bank account. I mean, that's like we're talking there's billions of dollars stolen from like or hidden away, you know, Venezuela, El Salvador, Mexico. Three million is like, you know, pocket change in a lot of these situations. I bet there's plenty more stashed away in the Caymans and the bloody Swiss.

Anyway, courts dish out lengthy sentences for those caught in Navarra's net, including 14 and 16 years for the two ringleaders. That's a local man named Brahma Saidi-Barr and a Mexican-Colombian guy called Ricardo Aritha Monia.

A GI report says that the big sentences are, quote, cited by a range of international actors as evidence of a newfound political will by the authorities to finally tackle the drug trafficking markets that had long embroiled a tiny West African country. Guys, please use commas. What do you reckon? I mean, what do you reckon, guys? Do you think that the Navarra bus are actually going to hurt the Bissau-Guinean drug trade? Of course not.

In October 2020, judges watered down the prison sentences of the dozens of men caught in the raids. Incredibly, the two kingpins, Barr and Monia, haven't spent a single day behind bars. Barr's slipperiness, in particular, has shown the weakness of the Bissau state. He's a businessman who's been connected to drugs for years. As far back as 2007, a warehouse belonging to Barr was raided and several South American cartel guys were arrested.

Not suspicious enough for the Bissau court, that is, because his 16-year term is commuted to six. And he still hasn't served a day of that, like we said. And says the GI report, quote, Mbalo ushered in a new administration with a markedly more ambiguous stance to drug trafficking. This is in 2019.

Although Mbalo has not been directly linked to drug trafficking, his victory appears to embolden a number of well-known military figures who have previously been associated with the trade. A number of observers has highlighted the eerily similar parallels between the coup of 2012 and Mbalo's military back seizure of power in early 2020. That sounds wrong. I'm just going to say 2019 because it is 2019. They got it wrong. Yeah.

A number of observers have highlighted the eerily similar parallels between the coup of 2012 and Mbalo's military-backed seizure of power in early 2019. Says another official with Navarra's weakness, quote, I mean, yeah, we've just done like 45 minutes of it.

There have been more stinks and more shipment seizures since then, of course. But with the recent boom in demand from South American cocaine in the US and Europe, Guinea-Bissau has only grown as a narco state. According to Insight Crime, quote, "...alarming discrepancies have occurred between the quantities of drugs reportedly being seized by the government and the estimated volume moving through the country."

According to interviews carried out by the GI, no less than 30 tons of cocaine moves through Guinea-Bissau each year, partly bound for Islamic terrorist groups. You know, we should really look into doing something on the North African networks that move this stuff. I think that'd be fascinating. And the more we talk about it, the more I'm like, this would make for a great episode. Yeah, totally. And I can't imagine a more dangerous assignment than going out there and doing that.

This August, the US State Department decided to have a second pop Antonio Injay. It describes him as, quote, one of the most powerful destabilizing figures in Guinea-Bissau, saying something, and offers a $5 million reward for information leading to his capture. The general doesn't care about that, one of his relatives tells AFP. He works on his plantation and comes to see his family in Bissau every week. Basically, Injay has his hand on the big red well-worn button marked coup, and that scares anybody in power.

This September, current leader Mbalo vowed to never extradite N'Diaye. And that's not surprising given that Mbalo himself can seize control of the country last year after a corrupt vote in the army's occupation of key government buildings. The coup is on the rise in Africa, by the way. In the past 18 months, there have been three on the continent, two in Mali, one in Guinea.

Since 1950, there have been almost 500 coups around the world, and they've got about a one in two success rate. And Bolivia, by the way, is the most coup country on earth. Twenty three attempts, 11 wins. But Guinea-Bissau isn't too far away from the crown. And if the past decade is anything to go by, you can expect a ton more unrest in coming years. And it's going to be fueled all the way by cartel coke. I mean, we got to we got to get you over there, get you on a flight and have you hang out with this guy.

Yeah, can one of our Patreon guys pay for me to go to the X Club? Because I really want to have a drink there. That sounds like great fun. Yeah, and also bonus episodes, reading lists, all that, the scripts, we put them up on the Patreon. Patreon.com slash The Underworld Podcast. There's also always merch at underworldpod.com slash merch, M-E-R-C-H. And I think that takes care of it, yeah? Yeah, that's it. All right, next week. See ya.