Latin America's feared drug cartels have established a new pipeline for their lucrative trade and Guinea Bissau is caught in the middle.

It is no secret that, for years now, Latin America's cocaine barons have been covertly moving huge amounts of their lucrative white powder around the world. But what happens when those same cartels decide to use a tiny impoverished African nation as a stop-over en route to their gullible markets in Europe?

Guinea-Bissau has become a key transit point for cocaine moving between Latin America and Europe as drug traffickers take advantage of scant surveillance, government instability, and poverty to ply their trade. There have been more than 50 known seizures of drugs in the past two years, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. "And that's just the tip of the iceberg," said Antonio Mazzitelli, the United Nation's drug agency representative for West and Central Africa. Few local residents are believed to be consuming the drugs. But traffickers co-opt them into providing surveillance, transporting the contraband, and otherwise providing support. About 6 grams of cocaine is roughly equal in value to an average salary for one year in Guinea-Bissau. The country ranks fifth to the last on the United Nation's human development index as it struggles to recover from a brief civil war that ended six years ago. With observers agreeing that political tensions could again spark violence, donors are reluctant to provide assistance, and thus the government remains under-funded and ineffectual. "As the state is unable to control its own territory, traffickers can operate undetected," Mazzitelli said. "In other African coastal countries traffickers may be confronted by police controls but in Guinea-Bissau the risks are extremely low." The situation is so serious that government stability is threatened as drug traffickers extend roots into ministries, the army, and the police, according to various sources familiar with the trade who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The largest reported seizure in Guinea-Bissau occurred on Sept. 26, 2006, following a shootout in Bissau. "Police arrested two men with Venezuelan passports and confiscated laptops, firearms, radios, plus 674 kilograms of cocaine," Mazzitelli said. Police deposited the roughly $39 million worth of drugs in a safe at the national treasury and then it disappeared, according to a treasury official who asked not to be named. "Some soldiers came demanding that they be able to count the drugs and we never saw it again," he said. Army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Arsénio Baldé said that soldiers were not the ones who took the cocaine. "Maybe some people wearing army uniforms came but they were not real soldiers," he said. Justice Minister Namuano Gomes said he believed that police destroyed the cocaine but he did not see it happen personally. "The chain of evidence was broken," Mazzitelli said. "No tests were carried out on what, if anything, was destroyed. They might have destroyed 674 kilograms of white cement for all we know."