Each capsule contains 5 to 10 grams of cocaine. If even one of them breaks during the flight, the mule will die an atrocious death from an overdose. But if it makes it to its destination that cocaine, bought for about €3,000 a kilo in the Antilles, in Europe will go for €40,000 to €60,000 a kilo, depending on which country it’s sold in. On the street it can go for as much as €130 a gram. Which is why the couriers have to follow very strict rules: Before they ingest the capsules they take medicine such as antiemetics, anticholinergics, and antidiarrhetics. The in-flight menu is rigorous too: milk, juice, rice. From the moment he swallows the capsules, the mule has thirty-six hours max before expelling them and, finally, as the Colombians say, coronar—mission accomplished, in other words. The word coronar comes from the game of checkers, when a pawn reaches his opponent’s baseline and is “crowned.”
Europe needs cocaine, lots of it. There’s never enough. The Old Continent has become the narcos’ new frontier: 20 percent to 30 percent of cocaine production worldwide ends up here. Cocaine has attracted a new clientele. If until 2000 it was used almost exclusively by the privileged strata of society, now it’s more democratic. Adolescents, who never used to get near this sort of product, are today the most attractive slice of the market. It was enough for the narcos simply to diversify the offer and flood the European market with cocaine, lowering the price. Today a gram of cocaine costs around €60 on the streets of Paris, compared to €100 about fifteen years ago. According to the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction, about 13 million Europeans have sniffed cocaine at least once in their lives; 7.5 million of them are between the ages of fifteen and thirty-four. The number of cocaine users in the UK has quadrupled in ten years. The Central Office for the Suppression of Illicit Drugs Trafficking in France estimates that the number of consumers doubled between 2002 and 2006. By now the market has stabilized; it has its consumers and its habits. The soul of commerce is not publicity but habit. It is the creation of needs, which become so instilled in the user’s consciousness that they are no longer considered a need. In Europe, together with the cocaine habit, a silent army has been born, one that marches in close rank, heedless and resigned, with an addiction that has become a custom, practically a tradition. Europe wants cocaine, and so the narcos find ways to get it there.
• • •
I’m sitting with Mamadu, a young African man with a sweet but determined face. He tells me he was supposed to be named Hope, but then his parents discovered that in other parts of the world it was a girl’s name. He was born at the time that his country, Guinea-Bissau, was experimenting for the first time with multiparty elections. On the horizon loomed an uncertain future but one full of expectation after all the wounds of civil war and repeated coups. His family was originally from the town of Bissorã, but they moved to the capital, Bissau. History repeats itself. People sacrifice their roots for the hope of progress; the city becomes the Eden everyone dreams of. But the hope with which Mamadu’s parents wanted to bless the birth of their son is betrayed once again: civil war, coups, and endemic poverty bog the country down in a deadly immobility. Mamadu learns the art of getting by—the profession that, since the beginning of time, employs the most people—and starts to develop the characteristic that many international bureaucrats associate with people from his country: resignation.
But something has changed recently. His continent has become white. It has become an important landing base for narco-traffickers.
“Your country’s the center of the world now,” I say to him.
Mamadu laughs and shakes his head with symmetrical slowness.
“I’m serious,” I insist. “Your country deals in one of the most sought after products there is.”
“Why are you making fun of me, my friend?” Mamadu says, serious now. “What resources? Cashews, maybe? Locusts?”
The truth is, Guinea-Bissau, like the countries that border it, is exactly what the narco-traffickers are looking for. Africa is fragile. Africa is the absence of rules. The narcos work their way into these enormous vacuums by taking advantage of tottering institutions and ineffective border controls. It’s easy to give birth to a parallel economy, to transform a poor country into an immense warehouse. A warehouse for a Europe increasingly dependent on white powder. If you add the fact that the citizens of Guinea-Bissau, by virtue of their colonial past, are allowed to enter Portuguese territory without a visa, then Mamadu’s country really is the center of the world.
Mamadu tells me about the day in 2009 when he happened to pass by the residence of the president of the republic, João Bernardo Vieira. At first he mistook the shots for firecrackers, which he’d always been afraid of, and he turned in the direction of the noise in order to look the little dynamiters in the face. But there was only a throng of people that drew aside in a disorderly fashion as two cars, tires squealing, slalomed their way through the terrified passersby. On the ground the crumpled body of some man he didn’t recognize. It wasn’t until the next day that Mamadu, glancing at the headlines, learned that it was the president of the republic. Many people saw his execution as a form of revenge at the hands of the military for the killing the day before of the army chief of staff, Batista Tagme Na Waie. Others read the assassination as retaliation on the part of Colombian drug traffickers in Guinea-Bissau for the dismissal of Rear Admiral Bubo Na Tchuto, chief of staff of the navy, on suspicion of conspiring with the drug cartels (a charge to which he would plead guilty in a U.S. court in May 2014). For Mamadu it was simply another wound.
In 2007 Time magazine defined Guinea-Bissau as a paradise for traffickers, a state that welcomes drug traffickers and distributes their goods. It helps if you have an archipelago off your coast, eighty-eight islands where small aircraft laden with drugs can land. An open zone for the cartels’ personal use. An earthly Eden, practically uninhabited and covered in lush vegetation, bordered by pure white beaches and sliced through by improvised landing strips. It is on one of these strips that the Cessna that changed Mamadu’s life landed. Cessnas are perfect for this sort of job: They’re nimble and fly at a maximum altitude of sixty-five hundred feet, thus avoiding being picked up by radar. The drugs are crammed inside, in fruit crates stacked one atop another and stashed between the metal panels of the plane. The goods are unloaded and taken to the mainland, and from there they take off for Europe, following three major routes: land, which passes through the Atlantic coast of Mauritania and through Morocco, or over tracks in the Sahara before heading up through Turkey and arriving in the Balkans; sea, the most popular route, where commercial fleets of private container ships carry huge amounts of cocaine; and finally air, where couriers or mules usually ingest capsules filled with cocaine.
“A mule?” Mamadu had asked Johnny.
“A mule, Mamadu. You’ll take a little trip to Lisbon and then you’ll come back. Aren’t you happy?’
The person talking, Mamadu recalls, is a buff Nigerian who has shuttled between Abuja, Nigeria, and Bissau for twenty-five years. He goes by the name of Johnny and is an old friend of Mamadu’s father. He says he can give him a hand. Mamadu’s parents have gone back to their village: If you have to die of hunger, you might as well do it close to your own family, in the place where you were born. Johnny stands there in his fake Alexander McQueen suit, and as he talks he keeps touching Mamadu on his shoulder, arm, chest. He’s a salesman, and he knows that to place his goods, it’s not enough to be convincing; he has to establish a contact. Mamadu is hypnotized.
“Lisbon?”
“Lisbon, Mamadu. A few hours’ flight, then you take a walk around the old city, pick up a tourist or two, and catch the plane home.”
Getting drugs to Europe is easier than you’d think. All you need is a commercial flight, a passenger, and an indefinite amount of cocaine safely stored in special wrapping in the bottom of his stomach. Sure, it’s happened that the wrapping breaks during the flight and the mule spends hours in exc
ruciating pain before landing in Lisbon as a cadaver. But most shipments are successful, in part because modern wrapping materials are resistant to gastric acid, to the point that you need to cut them with a knife to open them after they’ve been expelled,. They used to use condoms, but that’s prehistory.
“I have to fly?”
“How else are you going to get to Europe, Mamadu? Swim?”
Solving transportation problems is the narco-trafficker’s most pressing business challenge. To get the cocaine to the west coast of Africa they invested several million dollars constructing a veritable highway, the A10, so called because the ocean route travels right along the 10th parallel. Traffic is always heavy on the A10—there’s a constant coming and going—but only the tip of the iceberg is visible, thanks to the most spectacular seizures. Like the one on the South Sea, a cargo ship intercepted by the Spanish navy with 7.5 tons of cocaine onboard. Or the Master Endeavour, the huge merchant ship intercepted by the French navy with 1.8 tons of cocaine: The traffickers had drained the well deck in the stern of the ship normally used for drinking water so as to hide the precious cargo. Sometimes the big cargo or fishing ships moor off the African coast and wait for smaller craft—sailboats, dugouts, or coasting vessels—to shuttle the cocaine ashore. Commercial routes are busy day and night but the increased maritime surveillance and the numerous record confiscations have thrown them into crisis, to the point of forcing the narco-traffickers to aim higher, to opt for those agile airplanes. The most extraordinary example is that of the Boeing 727-200 that landed on a makeshift runway smack in the middle of the Mali desert and was burned on-site so as not to leave any trace. Investigations following the discovery of the fuselage gave rise to the hypothesis that the traffickers were transporting cocaine and arms and that Islamic radicals had let them use their secret runways to reach Algeria, Morocco, and Egypt, as well as provided them with jeeps and trucks. From there the drugs were supposed to make their way up to Greece and the Balkans, eventually arriving at the heart of Europe. This hypothesis was bolstered by discoveries made a few months later: The Boeing 727-200 was registered in Guinea-Bissau, had taken off from Tocumen International Airport in Panama, and was supposed to stop for refueling in Mali. It did not have authorization to fly, and its crew members were carrying fake documents, possibly from Saudi Arabia. Faced with a burning plane carcass, all the investigators were thinking the same thing: If the narcos can afford to get rid of a vehicle estimated to be worth between $500,000 and $1 million, how much cocaine did they manage to get in? A plane of that size can carry up to 10 tons of cocaine.
It takes preparation and mental strength to become a mule. You have to respect the rules and put your body through harsh training. Mamadu learns the secrets of the profession one suffocating afternoon, inside an abandoned shed on the outskirts of Bissau. Johnny told him to show up with an empty suitcase. “Why empty?” Mamadu had asked, but didn’t get an answer. In the middle of the shed is a long, low table on which is a row of capsules only slightly bigger than aspirin. Johnny, like a chef showing off his creations, gestures to Mamadu to come closer. He tells him to sit in the plastic chair in front of him, with the suitcase on his knees.
“Open it. Tell me what’s inside.”
Mamadu looks at him wide-eyed, he doesn’t know what to say.
“Don’t be afraid. Open it and tell me what’s inside,” he insists.
“It’s empty, sir.”
Johnny shakes his head.
“No,” he says. “It’s full. You are a tourist, you have some clothes with you, bathing suits. If someone like me wants to know what’s inside your suitcase, that’s how you have to answer. That’s the first lesson, the most important one.
Rules. In order to become a mule, above all you have to be a good actor. A tourist is perfect. But not too overweight. Too many capsules make your belly swell, and the customs officers have a sharp eye: The first ones they stop are fat men traveling alone with just a carry-on. Then there’s the payment. On delivery only. Too many mules in the past decided to live the good life in Europe for a few days with the narcos’ money and their drugs. And finally there’s the physical training.
“I like you, Mamadu. For you, only top of the line products. We care about our employees’ health,” Johnny says to him.
Mamadu is naïve but he’s not stupid. He sighs with relief when he discovers that his mouth is the only orifice of his body he has to open.
“I like you, Mamadu,” Johnny repeats. “Let’s go just with the main entrance this time.”
The training is very simple: You start with one capsule, fighting the instinct to spit it up. The operation is repeated a number of times, until the mule is able to swallow several dozen of them and then walk around like a young African tourist dazzled by Old Europe. Mamadu is ready.
Africa is to Mexico like a giant supermarket is to a food wholesaler. Cocaine is like one of the epidemics that have spread with alarming speed all over the African continent.
Africa is white. The dark continent is buried under a blanket of white snow.
Senegal is white, and so is the Léopold Sédar Senghor airport in Dakar. From a strategic point of view, it’s perfect: not far from Europe; not far from the world, thanks to connecting flights to capitals around the globe. Coke has to move quickly, and here, in white Senegal, it finds the energy to do so. Spanish, Portuguese, South African: only three of the nationalities of the most recent mules arrested aboard planes either arriving at or departing from Senghor airport. When the load is much larger, boats are needed. The Opnor, for example, which carried in its iron belly almost 4,000 kilos of cocaine destined for European markets before it was intercepted by the authorities in 2007 off the coast of Senegal. Senegal is a turntable, capable of taking in tons of coca to be treated, stockpiled, and then sent on.
Liberia is white. And Fumbah Sirleaf, son of the Liberian president, dirtied his hands white. It is he who works for the DEA, and who contributes to the fall of an organization whose ranks include African bosses and Colombian narcos. In 2010, thanks to a DEA operation, a network of South American, East European, and African drug traffickers was arrested. The associates had been in contact with this Liberian big shot, Sirleaf, for a long time, but they didn’t know that in fact he was a DEA informer. Sirleaf discovered that the network could count on high Liberian state officials for their traffic and gave precious information and tape recordings to the DEA.
Cape Verde, a turntable per excellence, is white. The ten islands that make up the archipelago hold out their hands to Latin America while remaining firmly anchored off the coast of Senegal. A drug traffickers’ paradise.
Mali is white. And white are the projects of Mohamed Ould Awainatt, a businessman arrested in 2011, the head of an organization that treated the desert as a highway heading north. Jeeps and cocaine.
Guinea is white. White are the affairs of Ousmane Conté, son of the president who governed Guinea for twenty-four years, arrested in 2009 for international drug trafficking. In an interview on national TV, Conté admits between the lines to being implicated in drug trafficking but denies being the head of Guinean narco-trafficking. His brother Moussa is arrested as well, and two years later a huge trial begins, involving dozens of big shots. But nearly all the accused, including Ousmane Conté, will be exonerated. Corruption and precarious institutions: the holes the traffickers slip through.
Sierra Leone is white. Fragile, poor, wounded by civil war right up until the advent of democracy in 2002. And white is the Cessna that in 2008 was supposed to be carrying medical supplies and instead concealed more than half a ton of cocaine.
South Africa is white, and white are her coasts, white her ports, where ships from Latin America arrive. White are the customs of this country. As its wealth has increased, so has its consumption of cocaine.
Mauritania is white. White are the dusty runways where small planes land, jammed full of cocaine. It is
the zipper between the Atlantic Ocean and the Maghreb.
Angola is white, because its ties with Brazil are white. Former Portuguese colonies that become brothers through transoceanic coke shipments. Here, as in southern Africa, a good part of the cocaine market is run by Nigerians, who boast of their important criminal history and one of the most organized structures in the world.
Africa is white.
• • •
I look at Mamadu and think about how individual stories can reflect the destiny of an entire continent. The hardest part was learning to deal with the stress, he says. To invent another self, as similar as possible to the few tourists he’s seen in his short life. Awareness has to be crystallized into habit, routine gestures must supplant instinct’s automatic response when faced with danger. Johnny tells him to meet him in front of the Bissau police station. He doesn’t tell him to bring a suitcase, because this time Johnny arrives with an elegant overnight bag. When Mamadu is a few steps away he hands it to him and tells him there’s five thousand dollars inside.
“You could be anybody. You’re a young man with a shiny overnight bag loaded with cash. Go into the police station, chat a bit with the police officers, and then come back out, as if it were nothing.”
“I was sure he was joking,” Mamadu tells me. “If the police officers caught me with a suitcase full of money, how would I explain?”
But Johnny’s not joking in the least. He’s deadly serious; even that conciliatory smile he usually wears is hidden between tightly closed lips.
“I plucked up my courage,” Mamadu tells me. “I prayed that this was the last test I had to face before starting my new job. Then I went into the police station.”
Johnny is the perfect exponent of the most effective and reliable criminal organization on the African continent: the Nigerian underworld.
The Nigerian underworld is an international force that has grown out from its roots to the four corners of the earth. They are small- to medium-size groups with a familial, tribal basis, and the branches of their interests extend to many important open-air drug markets. It’s a mix of tradition and modernity, which has allowed the Nigerians to get a foot in all the African capitals north to south, and to spread beyond the continent, thanks in part to the experience they gained selling heroin in the 1980s—international flights loaded with mules, and when those weren’t enough, Nigerian traffickers recruited the flight crew. Then cocaine arrives, and the Nigerians throw themselves into the new business. Europe’s needs have to be met, and the Africans are ready. So ready that they start obtaining coke directly from the producing countries. Today their presence in Europe is huge, and they’re in great demand by the Colombian and Mexican narcos, as well as by the Italian mafias. One of the progenitors is Peter Christopher Onwumere. Before he was arrested in Brazil in 1997, Onwumere proved he was a real international narco. He negotiated, bought, organized transports, and raked in the cash. The Nigerians are phenomenal subcontractors, and they know where to find cannon fodder, like Mamadu.
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