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from Global News Journal:
Drugs fuel turmoil in West Africa
“Nino” Vieira’s past as an old soldier was never far from the surface. It can have surprised few in Guinea-Bissau that the old coup maker’s death came at the hands of troops who turned against him in a country perpetually on the edge of failure because of military squabbles driven by centuries-old ethnic rivalries and the newer influence of drug smuggling cartels.
Covering the campaign for Guinea-Bissau’s first multiparty election in 1994, I found President Joao Bernardo Vieira far from being the most talkative of politicians. Sometimes actions said more. After one campaign stop, and in view of attendant dignitaries, Nino grabbed a military aide by the ear after he had caused offence and twisted it until he squealed in pain.
President Vieira emerged in the 1960s and 70s as one of the leaders of the fight to drive Portuguese colonialists from Guinea-Bissau, a country of swampy inlets, a scattering of islands and a scrubby interior that sent little to the outside world but cashew nuts - before the coming of drug traffickers in recent years made cocaine a more lucrative export for the few involved.
Vieira seized power in a bloodless coup in 1980, took Guinea-Bissau away from a Marxist path and was elected in 1994 when donors started demanding democratic reforms across Africa. Trouble came when he fell out with an army chief in the late 1990s, prompting a rebellion that forced him from power.
from Global News Journal:
Drugs and guns in Guinea-Bissau
Members of Guinea-Bissau's unruly armed forces have blotted the military's record again with another attack against the country's political institutions. Early on Sunday, Nov. 23, renegade soldiers, their faces hooded, sprayed the Bissau residence of President Joao Bernardo "Nino" Vieira with machine-gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire. The president survived unhurt this latest apparent attempt to topple him.
But The attack underlined the fragility of the small, cashew nut-exporting West African nation, one of the poorest in the world and a former Portuguese colony which has suffered a history of bloody coups, mutinies and uprisings since it won independence in 1974 after a bush war led by Amilcar Cabral. The assault followed parliamentary elections on Nov. 16 which donors were hoping would restore stability and put in place a new government capable of resisting the serious threat posed by powerful Latin American cocaine-trafficking cartels who use Guinea-Bissau as a staging post to smuggle drugs to Europe.
