The African distribution center for FARC dope

Washington Post:

Filipe Dju sat grim-faced on the tangled roots of a mangrove tree, a padlocked chain around his ankle tethering him to four other recovering cocaine addicts.

Three months ago, Dju's family brought him to this tiny, swampy West African country's first drug rehabilitation center because he had turned violent using a drug barely seen here until 2005.

"My mother said my head was not working well," said Dju, 40, whose life and country have been crippled by Colombian drug cartels shifting their focus from Americans paying in ever-weaker dollars to Europeans paying in increasingly valuable euros.

Guinea-Bissau, one of the world's poorest nations, has become a major transshipment hub and the epicenter in Africa for the cocaine trade, according to U.S., European and U.N. officials. The shift demonstrates how the flow of drugs adapts not only to law enforcement pressure but also to the forces of global economics.

Officials said some of the world's richest criminal gangs are exploiting barely functioning countries such as Guinea-Bissau, which has 63 federal police officers, no prison and a population that still lives largely in thatched-roof homes on dirt roads with no electricity or running water.

"West Africa is under attack," said Antonio Maria Costa, executive director of the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, who recently visited Guinea-Bissau and concluded that it is so overrun by the cocaine trade that it could become Africa's first "narco-state."

The Colombian cartels are responding to the pressure for cocaine in nations such as Britain, Spain and Italy, where demand is soaring as the U.S. market has leveled off, officials said.

Costa described the strong currencies in Europe, where cocaine sells for twice as much as in the United States, as "a magnet" for the cartels. Police raids in Colombia are increasingly turning up suitcases full of euros instead of the traditional dollars.

While mysterious foreigners tool around Guinea-Bissau's crumbling roads in expensive Porsche and BMW sport-utility vehicles, the country's 1.5 million people are suffering because of global currency fluctuations and because European "bankers and models want to snort," Costa said.

...

There have been reports that much of this dope is transported through Venezuela and Haiti before reaching Guinea-Bissau. The destruction being wrought in Guinea-Bissau is another reason that it is important to help Colombia fight these dealers and producers. It is another reason why congress is making a huge mistake by not approving the Colombia Free Trade Agreement. By sucking up to the union bosses in the US, the Democrats are helping to destroy a society in Guinea-Bissau.

This is just a brief excerpt of a long story.