Guinea-Bissau: West Africa's New Achilles' Heel
A frantic voice came over the radio: a blast had just destroyed Guinea-Bissau's military headquarters.
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West Africa, a region that has barely begun to heal from a decade of civil wars, is once again under attack.
Marco Vernaschi's photography, "West Africa's New Achilles' Heel" showcased in Newsweek Japan.
Since 2007, Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony and one of the poorest nations in the world, has become the new hub for cocaine trafficking in Africa.
Cocaine trafficking has turned Guinea Bissau into Africa's first narco-state, and a lucrative source of cash for Hezbollah and al Qaida as well as South American drug cartels.
The West African country of Guinea-Bissau is one of the poorest nations in the world, is a base for narcotics heading to Europe and has a big crack cocaine problem.
A quarter of all cocaine that comes into Europe is smuggled through Africa. In the past year, Guinea-Bissau has been especially touched by the grip of the Colombian mafia and Al-Qaeda.
Drug traffickers use Guinea Bissau as a base to smuggle drugs to Europe.
Marco Vernaschi, for the Pulitzer Center
Story written by Peter Burghardt
Updated Feb.11, 2011
From the introduction on the Süddeutsche Zeitung site (translated from German):
Crack addiction was an unknown plague until 2007, when traffickers started to target the country. Since then, hundreds of people living in Bissau's slums have become addicts.
by Marco Vernaschi, for the Pulitzer Center
In Bissau I met a former journalist who had been a correspondent for a Portuguese magazine, I ask him to show me where the local drug lords live. We meet at night, in front of my hotel and we go for
Al Qaeda and Hezbollah's long arms extend from West Africa to Latin America.
When Marco Vernaschi, an Italian photojournalist, decided to head to the West African nation of Guinea Bissau, he knew that cocaine traffickers had already destabilized the tiny former Portuguese
Marco Vernaschi, for the Pulitzer Center
(Editor's note: This is the second of eight dispatches, recounting events surrounding the double assassinations of Guinea Bissau's president and army chief of staff last March and the country's
I was drinking a coffee at Baiana when the Afropop music played by the local radio suddenly stopped.
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Marco Vernaschi was born in Turin, Italy, in 1973, and he's currently based in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He's currently working on a large, long-term project about the phenomenon of child witches,...