Guinea-Bissau’s highest court has overturned the convictions of two alleged drug kingpins, who had both been sentenced to 16 years in prison in 2020, in a ruling issued on 23 June 2022. The two men, Guinea-Bissau citizen Braima Seidi Ba, and Colombian national Ricardo Ariza Monje, had been arrested in September 2019 in connection to Guinea-Bissau’s largest-ever narcotics seizure.
Civil society groups attacked the ruling in a statement, saying that it “jeoprodiz[ed] efforts to combat transnational organized crime and discredits the country’s image and credibility” and that the ruling was evidence that the court was “hostage to organized crime”.
Guinea-Bissau, a country once described by the United Nations as the “narco-state” of West Africa in reference to senior military and political leaders’ involvement in the drug trade, is a poster-child for the extent to which drug-trafficking can destabilize a state and its neighbors, whether by its existence, or in attempts to root it out. According to Reuters, drug traffickers use West African countries like Guinea-Bissau, with their Atlantic coasts, as hubs to bypass the suspicion that planes flying directly from South America to Europe and the United States receive in those ports.
Further highlighting the tensions in Guinea-Bissau, an attack by armed gunmen on a government cabinet meeting in February was later described by Guinea-Bissau’s President, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, as a failed coup attempt with links to drug trafficking.
“When I committed to this fight against corruption and narco-trafficking, I think that I signed my death warrant,” Embaló said in a news conference held in response to the attack. Embaló’s statements and his overall stance against drug trafficking have been criticized however, with critics pointing to evidence that drug smuggling has continued under Embaló’s regime.
Speaking to Reuters in February, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime’s Regional Representative for West and Central Africa, Amado Philip de Andrés, told Reuters that “Guinea-Bissau is one of the rapidly rising West African countries used as a point of transit for drug trafficking on the route to Europe”. He went on to note that despite some positive developments, Guinea-Bissau still had a long way to go in terms of combating the drug trade, “particularly in terms of bringing perpetrators to justice”.
Drug-trafficking, and conflicts related to it, remain huge issues worldwide, with the ramifications of the American War on Drugs, and the subsequent Mexican War on Drugs, still playing out in the United States, Mexico, and much of Central and South America today, especially in the so-called ‘Northern Triangle’ states of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. For states in the Global South, such as Guinea-Bissau, the problem is often also entangled with other issues such as corruption and still-ongoing democratization. The half-hearted efforts of these states to combat drug-trafficking too often lead to the destabilization and delegitimization of their own governments. States like Guinea-Bissau must take a strong stance against drug-trafficking and government corruption by ensuring that criminals like those whose convictions were overturned earlier this month are fairly judged and sentenced for their crimes.
