Abstract
This chapter examines the unhappy story of Guinea-Bissau, a “permissive space” within the cocaine-trafficking processional ranging from the Andes to West Africa and Europe, A sense of its texture is reveaíed in two prominent cases. One became public in April 2013. “The armed forces chief of the small West African nation of Guinea-Bissau,” the Associated Press reported, “has been charged in New York in a conspiracy to distribute cocaine and aid a foreign terrorist organization,”1 General Antonio Indjai stands accused of involvement in a “proposal to ship FARC cocaine to Guinea-Bissau for later distribution in the United States and to procure weapons for FARC, including surface-to-air missiles.”2 General Indjai, who was among the leaders of the 2012 coup, joins a list of senior military officials accused of drug trafficking, including ibraima Papa Camara, the former Chief of Staff of the Air Force and the former Chief of Staff of the Navy, Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo N Tchuto, who was arrested by American authorities at sea in April 2013.3 “As head of Guinea-Bissau’s armed forces,” Michele M. Leonhart, Chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration asserted, “Mr. Indjai had insider access to instruments of national power in West Africa’s dangerous drug trade.”4 It is this specter of systemic narcotics-driven corruption within the military, the country’s dominant institution, which has given currency to the view that Guinea-Bissau has become Africa’s first “narco-state.”5
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Notes
See Jorg Raab and H. Brinton Milward, “Dark Networks as Problems,” Journal of Public Administration Research 13, no. 4 (October 2003): 413–439.
See, for example, Matt McDonald, “Securitization and the Construction of Security,” European Journal of International Relations 14, no. 4 (2008): 563–587.
See Samuel P. Huntington, “Political Development and Political Decay,” World Politics 17, no. 3 (April 1965): 386–430.
For a discussion of the relationship between sociology as a “discipline” arid cri mi nology as a “field of study “ see Ronald L. Akcrs, “Linking Sociology and lis Specialties: The Case of Criminology,” Social Forces 71, no. 10 (September 1992): 4.
See Emmanuel Akyeampong, “Diaspora and Drug Trafficking in West Africa: A Case Study of Ghana,” African Affairs 104, no. 416 (2005): 430.
Stephen Ellis, “West Africa’s international Drug Trade,” African Affairs 108, no. 431 (2009): 172.
Lorenzo I. Bordonaro, “Guinea-Bissau: The irrelevance of the State and the Permanence of Change,” African Studies Review 52, no. 2 (September 2009): 43.
Quoted in Henrik Vigh, “Crisis and Chronicity: Anthropological Perspectives on Continuous Conflict and Decline,” Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology 73, no. 1 (. 2008): 6.
Steven F. Messner and Richard Roseníeld, “Institutionalizing Criminological Theory,” in Richard Roscníled, ed., Crime and Social Institutions (London: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006), 4.
Lonnie Athens, “Dominance, Ghettos, and Violent Crime,” The Sociological Quarterly 39, no. 4 (1998): 676.
Ionnie Athens, Violait Criminal Acts and Actors Revisited (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1997), 148.
See Antonye. Puddenphatt, “Language and Mind in the Thought of G. H. Mead: Challenges from Chomsky’s Linguistics,” in Norman K. Denzin, Blue Ribbon Papers: interactionism: The Emerging Landscape (Bingley, UK: Emerald Group Publishing Limited, 2011), 89.
See Lonnie Athens, “The Self as a Soliloquy,” The Sociological Quarterly 35, no. 3 (August 1994): 524.
See the foundational treatment in Peter M. Haas, “Introduction: Epistemic Communities and International Policy Coordination,” International Organization 6, no. 1 (Winter 1992): 1–35.
See Lonnie Athens, “Park’s Theory of Conflict and His Fall from Grace in Sociology,” Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies 13, no. 2 (2013): 84.
See Lonnie Athens, “Mead’s Analysis of Social Conflict: A Radical Interactson-ist Critique”, American Sociologist 43 (2012): 436.
See, for example, Eougiass C. North, institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3.
Joshua B. Forrest’s remark is emphasized in Joye Bowman, “The Power of Praetorian Social Memory,” The journal of African History 46, no. 2 (2005): 366–367.
On the PAIGC structure, see Lars Rudebeck, “Political Mobilization for Development in Guinea-Bissau,” The journal of Modern African Studies 10, no. 1 (May 1972): 1–18.
Amicar Cabrai, “A Report to Our Friends,” Africa Today 20, no. 1 (Winter 1973), 7.
Quoted in Ronald H. Chilcoie, “The Theory and Practice of Amilcar Cabrai: Revolutionary Implications for the Third World,” Latin American Perspectives 11, no. 2 (Spring 1984): 9.
See Joshua B. Forrest, “Guinea-Bissau Since Independence: A Decade of Domestic Power Struggles,” The journal of Modern African Studies 25, no. 1 (Mardi 1987): 96.
Patrick Chabal, “Party, Stale, and Socialism in Guinea-Bissau,” Canadian journal of African Studies 17, no. 2 (1983): 1–91.
See Henrik E. Vigh, Navigating Terrains of War: Youth and Soldiering in Guinea-Bissau (New York: Berghahn Books, 2006), 159.
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© 2015 Bradford R. McGuinn
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McGuinn, B.R. (2015). Understated Yet Turbulent: Narcotics Trafficking and the Criminalization of Guinea-Bissau. In: Brienen, M.W., Rosen, J.D. (eds) New Approaches to Drug Policies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450999_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137450999_5
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