“Our top priority is to have zero tolerance for drug trafficking and corruption,” said Guinea-Bissau’s Interim President General Horta Inta-A when he took office. The new junta seems to want to stop drug trafficking now that the coup leaders have suspended the constitutional order in Guinea-Bissau. But it’s still dangerous to talk about drug crime, and when DW tried to tell this story, they ran into a wall of silence. People who were willing to talk—often anonymously—painted a picture where governmental and military groups are almost the same as the criminal groups they say they are fighting.
Invisible donors will pay for campaigns in the 2025 elections.
People have thought for a long time that Guinea-Bissau is one of the biggest places where cocaine moves from South America to Europe. But the problem has gotten worse in the last few years.
It was clear even before the coup that the contenders for the parliamentary and presidential elections on November 23 were spending a lot of money on their campaigns. In the capital Bissau, political groups drove convoys of luxurious SUVs, professionally made videos played on LED screens, and rallies were held with expensive sound and light equipment, even though most candidates said they didn’t have much money.
Lucia Bird, head of the West Africa Observatory at the Geneva-based NGO Global Initiative Against Transnational Crime (GI-TOC), says, “Cocaine money has long been invested in Guinea-Bissau’s elections, including the recent one.” In August 2025, the organization published a report on “Cocaine Politics in Guinea-Bissau.”
She goes on to say, “International drug traffickers have given money to a number of candidates.” Local drug traffickers from Guinea-Bissau frequently make payments, but representatives of foreign gangs do not do so very often.
Bird says that politicians “offer traffickers protection in exchange for campaign support.”
The perfect country for transit and a big business
Guinea-Bissau has a lengthy Atlantic coastline, airspace that isn’t well controlled, and the Bijagos Archipelago, which is made up of 88 offshore islands. These things make it easy for South American cocaine to be shipped without anyone knowing.
GI-TOC says that every month, two to three tons of cocaine move through Guinea-Bissau on their route to Europe. These amounts are worth a lot: Prices per kilogram are inexpensive in West Africa, but they can be as high as €70,000 per kilo in cities like Berlin, Paris, or London. The medicines that go via Guinea-Bissau are worth €210 million a month on the European market, which is more than the country’s whole yearly budget.
A tight network of politicians, cartels, the military, and security services work together to make huge profits. Lucia Bird argues that in the months running up to the elections, the government took less action against international drug trafficking. “Instead, there have been some signs that local middlemen in Guinea-Bissau needed money,” she says DW.
West Africa is a stop on the way for cocaine from South America to Europe. Guinea-Bissau is one of the most important transit countries.
Cocaine from South America is brought illegally through West Africa to Europe. Guinea-Bissau is one of the most important transit countries.
New arrests, same old trends
Since the beginning of 2025, there have been reports of further arrests of opposition politicians and civil actors who were suspected of leaking information that could harm the state. Some of these people had publicly spoken out against supposed drug ties in the security apparatus.
Armando Lona still has the guts to talk about how the drug mafia can be connected to former president Umaro Sissoco Embalo and the new leadership under General Horta Inta-A.
“Embalo’s government helped organized crime get stronger. “During his presidency, we seized two large amounts of drugs in Guinea-Bissau,” Lona, who runs the civil society human rights group Frente Popular, told DW.
“The most recent one happened in 2024 at Guinea-Bissau’s international airport in broad daylight. A plane carrying over three tons of cocaine was stopped. The United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) made this feasible. The Embalo government is not a good example of how to tackle narcotics. And the new military leaders are just as bad.”
Some observers say to be careful when judging the junta’s ability to fight the drug trade, but multiple sources, including an experienced investigator, told DW that the scenario is a return to “old patterns” where power conflicts and drug flows are closely linked. They stress, nonetheless, that people who freely talk about the backgrounds of cocaine routes are putting themselves in danger.
One of the few people who will talk about Guinea-Bissau’s role as a narco-state is Armando Lona, who is in charge of the NGO Frente Popular.
Armando Lona, who runs the NGO Frente Popular, is one of the few people who will talk about Guinea-Bissau’s role as a narco-state in public.
© Frente Popular
How Guinea-Bissau turned into a drug state
The “Bacaizinho case” from 2019 demonstrated how intimately top politicians were involved in the drug trafficking. Malam Bacai Sanha Jr. is the son of former Guinea-Bissau President Malam Bacai Sanha. He was an advisor to his father while he was president and is now serving an 80-month term in the US for narcotics trafficking.
The dramatic arrest of former Guinea-Bissau Navy chief Bubo Na Tchuto by US authorities in 2013, when he was caught by US agents and Cape Verdean police in international waters off the coast of Cape Verde, is still one of the most obvious signs of how deeply cartels had gotten into Guinea-Bissau’s military. There have been many signs that sections of his network kept working after that.
Can Bissau get rid of the “narco-state” label?
The new junta says it will free Guinea-Bissau from cartel control, but there are still doubts about whether they can do so because the cartels are so deeply entrenched. People are still not sure if this change is really in the junta’s best interest.
Armando Lona from Frente Popular said to DW, “The military junta’s claim that they are fighting drug cartels is just a way to trick the rest of the world.” Luckily, international drug enforcement authorities know exactly who is actually combating the drug trade and who isn’t.
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