It is scary when you are the top and have supporters who have no clue your source of wealth.

Guinea Bissau

The farm is on the outskirts of Mansoa, a town two hours inland from Bissau. It’s a cluster of modest houses made of adobe, where three men seem to be standing guard, sitting on plastic chairs. They have no firearms with them. Nor do we see the walls or barbed wire that would be reasonable to find in the refuge of a paramount drug lord.

The guards tell us that general Antonio Indjai is not here. The former Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces is on another farm. We have been looking for him for several days for an interview. The man who led the 2012 “cocaine coup” in Guinea-Bissau prefers to move frequently between his several properties, avoiding the capital whenever possible, despite having a home there. Perhaps this constant change of whereabouts is his way of protecting himself from unwelcome visitors. DEA is interested in him. After failing to capture Indjai in 2013, the US counter-narcotics agency announced last year a $5 million reward to anyone who could provide information leading to the general’s arrest and conviction.

However, it is not for the reward that we have come to Mansoa. It is only because of a portrait. A much-talked-about photograph among the Guinean elite sums up how the country’s current president, Umaro Sissoco Embaló, came to power.

The photograph was taken on February 29, 2020, two days after Sissoco proclaimed himself head of state with the support of the military and without waiting for the confirmation of the election results by the Supreme Court of Justice. The picture shows a small group of high-ranking officers on the steps of the presidential palace next to the new head of state and a new prime minister of his choice, Nuno Nabiam. Three of these officers have been indicted in the United States for drug trafficking and placed on European Union and United Nations sanctions lists. One of them, the only one in civilian clothes, is Indjai.

The two largest cocaine seizures ever in Guinea-Bissau happened within six months. And they opened a new clue about drug trafficking.

This appearance in the palace was a big surprise. When the general’s number two, Navy Chief Bubo Na Tchuto, was arrested in 2013 in international waters by undercover U.S. agents, Indjai decided at the last minute not to attend the DEA’s entrapment but was eventually exposed. Shortly after that, he was removed as Chief of Staff of the Armed Forces and announced that he would devote himself to farming. ​​Indjai would retire from public life and also from the trafficking scheme. At least, apparently. With his self-exile, there were no longer any major cocaine seizures in Guinea-Bissau, and the label of narco-state with which some experts had identified the country since 2007 seemed to have lost its raison d’être.

But was it like that? Months before that photograph on the palace steps, signs of the existence of a vast corridor for cocaine began to surface again, breaking a long period of invisibility. The two most significant cocaine seizures ever happened within six months, and with that, an unexpected light showed just how far this corridor goes.

The horse mackerel problem

In early March 2019, the French intelligence services noticed the strange behavior of a Nigerian businessman, Mohamed Sidi Ahmed, who had settled in Bissau a few days ago, renting a villa and establishing a tire import company in a warehouse. They saw Ahmed install in a five-star hotel a Senegalese driver of a refrigerator truck and a young man who just had arrived from Mali. Why was this businessman being so generous?

When two other individuals from Mali, Oumar Ould Mohamed and Mohamed Bem Ahmed Mahri, joined the group a couple of days later, this convinced the French agents that something serious might happen. Parliamentary elections were scheduled for the following week, March 10, and there would be rallies happening all over the country.

The French warned the Judiciary Police and the Guinean government. “I thought it was a terrorist activity, an attack on European expatriates, on a hotel, as had happened for example in Burkina Faso,” recalls then Prime Minister Aristides Gomes. Several other hypotheses were raised. “We are in a refuge area for terrorists pursued in the Sahel region.”

The day before the elections, the driver went with the refrigerator truck to a fish store in the historic center of Bissau and loaded 500 boxes of horse mackerel, which is known in Portuguese as carapau. “They were going to transport the fish having Mali as their destination,” recalls Filomena Mendes Lopes, then director of the Judicial Police. “But after we set close surveillance, we were able to find out that it wasn’t about buying and selling horse mackerel. They were traffickers.”

Hours later, just outside Bissau, Judicial Police inspectors intercepted the truck. Four suspects were arrested, including the Nigerien tire entrepreneur. But Oumar Ould Mohamed and Mohamed Bem Ahmed Mahri, the two Malians who most intrigued the French agents, managed to escape.

There was a more pressing concern for the police. The inspectors took the truck to a warehouse in the fishing port of Alto Bandim, on the northern edge of the city, and had to face a dilemma. If they took out all the boxes of horse mackerel and the cocaine was not hidden in the refrigerator, the fish might thaw, and they would have no money to compensate the suspects for this loss. So they decided to stay overnight at the warehouse and wait for a solution to pack the horse mackerel in coolers.

Rouggy, who is behind the cocaine seized in Operation Horse Mackerel, is the uncle of “El Chapo du Sahel,” the biggest trafficker in this African region.

The Ministry of the Sea was willing to refrigerate the fish, but that took time, and the long waiting meant they had to address other risks. The Judiciary Police had set up Operation Carapau without ever informing the Public Ministry because they had indications that some prosecutors were involved with the drug trafficking network. The news, however, spread quickly, and a prosecutor appeared on the scene accompanied by a defense attorney. They wanted to release the truck.

The pressure was high. According to sources who took part in the operation, an aide to the back-then President José Mário Vaz called an inspector to inform him that the truck contained boxes with filled ballots. Aristides Gomes admits the President himself called him to unblock the situation and let the car continue its journey. The former Prime Minister doesn’t want to say more. “That’s for historians to tell one day.”

The police officers eventually unloaded the 500 boxes of fish at the Alto Bandim fishing port, within the city limits. The structure of the refrigerated truck had been modified. They took hundreds of small packages from a concealed compartment. The packages had a mark inscribed on them. “TBE – The Best Ever.” In all, they found 789 kilograms of cocaine hidden.

Sidi Ahmed, the businessman who had lodged the driver and his Malian helper in the Ledger Hotel, had a diplomatic passport, and a card identified him as special advisor to Niger’s national assembly president. It was not the only surprising fact to come to light. A report by the Lusa news agency, based on an unidentified police source, said that the truck owner was linked to Al-Qaeda in the Maghreb, AQIM. But there would be no further references to this terrorist group.

At the end of the Operation Carapau trial in November 2019, Sidi Ahmed was sentenced to 15 years in prison, while the truck driver and his helper coming from Mali took 14-year sentences. The judgment did not explore the possible relationship of the case to the president of Niger’s parliament. More intriguing than that: the two other Malian suspects followed by the French secret services were left out of the criminal case. Who were these characters? And what connection could they have with Al-Qaeda?

The answer to that is no longer in Guinea-Bissau.

Silence by the riverside

Bamako is a sprawling city, crossed by a river, the Niger, and dominated by heavy motorcycle traffic. With almost three million inhabitants, where squares and a place that could be called the center are lacking, life is invariably spent under the trees. Their wide canopies shade open-air restaurants. At night, darkness spreads through the city’s southern neighborhoods, interrupted only by lightning.

White people are rarely seen walking around. There has been a recent coup d’état led by a military junta, and the political scene is unstable and unpredictable. It is the second coup in less than a year. Travel to the country has been advised against by the United States and the European Union. Although the situation is especially dangerous outside the capital, the terrorist threat is also high in Bamako, “in public places frequented by westerners,” where there is a risk of kidnapping, according to the Portuguese consular services.

David Dembele, a local reporter, sets us up with Amadou Bamba Niang, who is in charge of the Network of Investigative Journalists against Drugs and Organized Crime, RJIDC. Amadou welcomes us in the courtyard of a small building that is the headquarters of several newspapers. In a crowded office and documents, Amadou shows us the map of the country and points to northern Mali in the Sahel. “This is a no man’s land, where the state has virtually no control.”

“In the drug dossier and other dossiers related to organized crime, that is the region where the problems exist,” Amadou explains. The desert makes everything harder. “The criminals have a strong connection with the rebel groups. They are often linked to the MNLA [National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad], or to the AAD [Ansar al-Din], a movement very close to Al-Qaeda.”

Before traveling to Mali, we gathered some information from police sources about the two suspects who disappeared from Bissau during Operation Carapau, including their places and dates of birth. Oumar Ould Mohamed was born in 1977 in Gao, and Mohamed Bem Ahmed Mahri, better known as Rouggy, was born in 1979 in Tabankort.

Gao and Tabankort are cities in northern Mali. They are beyond Timbuktu, on the way to Algeria, in the middle of the Sahel desert. “Everyone knows that trafficking exists in the region, but no one can say that they have investigated it and have been able to track it accurately,” admits Amadou. “If you travel there, it’s clear that you won’t be able to come back. The proof is that we have two recent cases. One of our journalist colleagues was kidnapped on the edge of the Mopti area, and recently another French journalist working with an organization in Mali was kidnapped because he wanted to go to gather information in Gao.”

But some information has been produced, despite the enormous difficulties on the ground. In 2020, more than a year after the seizure of cocaine hidden behind boxes of horse mackerel in Bissau, a report on Mali by a UN Security Council panel of experts identified Rouggy as being linked to that and other cases.

The Guinea-Bissau police sent an arrest warrant for Rouggy and Oumar to Mali, but it was later cancelled.

According to that report, the trafficker was linked not only to the cocaine found in Bissau, but also to other drug seizures in West Africa, including 2.5 tons of cannabis seized in Niger’s capital, Niamei, in June 2018, and another 12-ton shipment intercepted in Morocco in April 2019. The hashish cargo seized in Morocco was found inside a truck and was bound for a company in Bamako, Sanfo Commerce et Service (SCS), with the same name as the company established in Bissau by Sidi Ahmed, the man arrested by the Judiciary Police with a Niger diplomatic passport during Operation Carapau.

Rouggy was identified as being behind several front companies in Mali and some countries in the region, including Morocco, Niger, and Algeria. These include Tilemsi Distribution, which is based in Gao and is also present in Niger under that name and in Algeria under a slightly different name, Tilamsi.

Since July 2019, Rouggy has been on the United Nations sanctions list, not only because of drug trafficking, but also for human trafficking and arms trafficking. According to his file on the sanctions website, the businessman uses the money from drug trafficking to finance Al-Mourabitoun, a movement described as being linked to terrorism by “participating in the financing, planning, facilitation, preparation or perpetration of acts or activities, in conjunction with, on behalf of, on account of, or in support of” Al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI).

The Security Council’s panel of experts also found that Rouggy has very powerful allies in the state of Mali. In the August 2020 report, the then head of the all-powerful Directorate General of State Security, the DGSE, General Moussa Diawara, and his number two, Colonel Ibrahima Sanogo, responsible, ironically, for counter-terrorism, were named as having received bribes to put pressure on the government of Niger to secure the release of Rouggy’s network members arrested in that country, as well as Islamist fighters, suspected of terrorism. Diawara was fired when the report came out, and was eventually arrested a year later, a few days before we arrived in Mali, albeit for other reasons.

This web of close relations with the state explains, in part, why no one seems very enthusiastic in Bamako about the prospect of coming forward on anything that might be linked to drug trafficking schemes. After months of preliminary contacts made with the help of Dembele, who is my colleague at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, the ICIJ, and although appointments were made and we even spent one day at the public prosecutor’s office and another at the national police headquarters waiting for interviews, they did not materialize.

After a few days, however, our stay turns out to be productive. Some information comes to us off the record, helping us to understand the true scope of Operation Carapau in Mali.

According to one of the sources we met, Rouggy is the uncle of Sherif Ould Tahar, an individual with dual Algerian and Malian nationality, known in some circles as El chapo du Sahel, and considered the biggest trafficker in the entire West African region.

The proximity to El chapo du Sahel is, moreover, recognized by the Security Council’s panel of experts. Both Rouggy and Tahar are part of the Lemhars tribe in the Tilemsi valley.

The Lemhars created the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO) in 2011, which was once part of al-Qaeda. MUJAO’s spokesman, Adnan Abu Walid al-Sahrawi, later became head of the al-Mourabitoun movement – which Rouggy is currently associated with, according to his sanctions file. In 2015, al-Sahrawi left this group to found the Islamic State in the Greater Sahara, and was killed in a drone strike by French special forces in August last year.

When we did a stopover in Dakar to meet the director for the Sahel of the International Crisis Group, Jean-Hervé Jezequel, we were warned not to be too quick to catalog the chaotic situation in which northern Mali and its characters find themselves. “The Sahel is a space in crisis. It is an area where there are many political-military groups, including jihadist groups,” Jezequel admits, stressing that competition among them to capture resources is great. “The competition introduced by drugs may not be the main reason why there is an epidemic of violence in the Sahel, but it is part of those reasons and there are links between the traffickers and the armed groups.”

The intersection and overlaps between rebels, terrorists, traffickers, middlemen, and government members make it impossible to draw rigid boundaries.

In Bamako, they finally decide to welcome us to the OCS, the central counter-trafficking agency. The building is on a muddy street. It has the appearance of a neighborhood police station. In an inner courtyard, there are motorcycles parked and a few policemen walk around the corridors in plain clothes. One of the deputy directors, Tiantio Diarra, gives us a formal interview, assuring that “the fight against drugs is a major concern of the authorities” and that this fight is “fierce”.

Oga please if you can make your billions from Narcotics trafficking, please by all means do.

Later on, you can use the money obtained from the trafficking and run for a political post, you will be fine. The constitution of Nigeria supports it.

Stop discouraging future "would be" traffickers of Nigeria.

A decade after the Sinaloa cartel emerged in association with an airline pilot arrested in Bissau, Operation Navarra exposed a Mexican drug trafficker.

That statement doesn’t seem to match the lack of results that Diarra has to present. The police occasionally intercept passengers with small amounts of drugs at the airport – known as mules – but there are usually no large seizures of cocaine carried by land.

The OCS deputy director, on the other hand, is unaware of the connection to Guinea-Bissau and does not seem very interested in talking about Rouggy, although his entire history with trafficking is no secret. At the end of the interview, however, there is a note of hope: we are allowed to talk to the head of the OCS intelligence department.

Contrary to what we might expect from someone in his position at the head of an intelligence department, Colonel Ag Dahmane agrees to answer our questions openly, with the tape recorder on. According to him, the Guinean authorities issued arrest warrants against Rouggy and Oumar right after the cocaine seizure in Operation Carapau. “We looked for them, but they were not here. What we found out is that Rouggy was in Mauritania at the time,” says the colonel.

The case was being followed by DEA from Dakar. “But what happened was that after two weeks at the most, Interpol sent a new information from Guinea-Bissau cancelling those previous warrants,” Ag Dahmane says. “From that point on, there wasn’t much we could do. Our investigation here was dependent on the criminal case in Bissau, and without that, we were no longer able to continue. We knew that they traveled from Bamako to Dakar and from Dakar to Bissau at the time of the events, but we had no concrete evidence that they were part of the trafficking scheme.” We also learned that Oumar, the man who traveled to Bissau with Rouggy, is a sort of guide. “He speaks Portuguese and other languages. He is a polyglot. From what I understand he bridges the gap between people from different places.”

The colonel also clarifies that Rouggy has never been in prison in Mali and that officially he is just a businessman. “He has a cargo and passenger transport company,” Telemsi Transport, which is well known in the country. In addition, he is an important point of contact between the government in Bamako and Al-Qaeda or other movements, whenever hostages need to be released. “They turn to him when it is needed. Not only the Malian government, but even European governments, when they want to negotiate the release of people.”

Rouggy’s tribe has been smuggling for many years and controls an ancient route between Mali and Algeria. “Before the drug trade existed, they already had all the logistics set up for business with tobacco, fuel and supplies,” the colonel frames. Cocaine came to bring just one more source of income, although much more lucrative than the previous ones.

The OCS intelligence chief says that the drugs end up arriving quietly and unchallenged in Mali because the “borders are porous.” They use two routes. Either it comes from Guinea-Bissau through Guinea-Conakry and from there goes on to Mali, or else it comes via Senegal, as in the case of Operation Carapau, passing through Tambacounda, an inland city. “We have knowledge that there are many Nigeriens settled in Mali bringing cocaine from Guinea-Bissau by land, although in relatively small quantities, 100, 200 kilos.”

At the end of the conversation we had in his office, the colonel makes one last revelation to us. The information he has, albeit informal, is that the route is controlled by the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico. “What we know is that they are behind the logistics of transporting large quantities.” Ag Dahmane admits, however, that there is no cooperation with the Mexican authorities to clear up these suspicions.

Sinaloa is, for now, just a name on the table.