For two decades, Guinea Bissau has been used as a gateway by South American traffickers. The significant resumption of cocaine trafficking in West Africa since 2019 has been marked by several record seizures in Guinea Bissau

The West African Drug Commission (WACD) claims, in a study published in 2014, that Colombian drug traffickers funded the re-election campaign of former Guinea-Bissau President Joao Bernardo Vieira in 2005. “Drug trafficking has become the main economic activity of the country's military elite,” the WACD report continues. In September 2006, a shipment of nearly 700 kilos of cocaine was seized by the Guinea-Bissau police monitored by Interpol. The drugs were transported in an army vehicle. Alerted, the military hierarchy had the cocaine recovered from police offices before securing it in a Ministry of Finance safe. Subsequently, the drugs disappeared and two Colombians arrested were released by the courts. “Guinea-Bissau has lost control of its territory”, Antonio Maria Costa, the former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), said already in 2007

Two new cases seem to show that Guinea Bissau, after a drop in foreclosures between 2014 and 2018, is back in business. In March 2019, nearly 800 kilos of cocaine were seized in Safim, 1.8 tons of cocaine hidden in bags of rice. Mali, which is in the grip of a political crisis with two military coup d'état in nine months, has seen part of its territory escape its control due to the activity of jihadist groups. Drug traffickers are, of course, taking advantage of this void. According to the 2020 report of the United Nations Group of Experts on Mali, the “most regular flow of drugs through Mali” remains that of Moroccan hashish, which passes through Mauritania and Mali and then takes the route to Libya across Niger