Published August 10th, 2008 by Future Atlas
West Africa: drugs threaten stability
Writing recently in the Washington Post, UN drug official Antonio Maria Costas warned of another threat to African stability: a growing cocaine trade targeting Europe via West Africa.
The region is particularly vulnerable due to several factors:
- It is poor and without resources: no radar to spot smugglers’ planes, no navies to chase their boats, etc.
- Poverty and corruption means that it is easy to compromise the area’s governments.
- “Unemployed and desperate youths are vulnerable to being recruited as foot soldiers for criminal groups,” Costa writes.
Already tattered by years of warfare, West Africa is perhaps more likely than any other region to see the emergence of full narcostates, in which the state is totally compromised by drug cartels.