US arrests Guinea-Bissau ‘drug kingpin’ Na Tchuto

Radiotelevisao Caboverdiana reported late on Thursday that Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto and four other Guinea-Bissau nationals were apprehended aboard a yacht in international waters in the eastern Atlantic Ocean.

It said the five were taken to nearby Cape Verde from where Na Tchuto was flown to the United States.

Multiple western sources have suggested that Na Tchuto was the key facilitator for South American drug cartels shipping cocaine to Europe, with Guinea Bissau a convenient stopping-off point.

As a military man I am not surprised at being accused of drug trafficking – Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, 2008

The US Treasury Department designated Na Tchuto as a drug kingpin in 2010 for his alleged role in the cocaine trade in Guinea-Bissau, freezing any assets he might have had in the United States. One of the “narcotics trafficking activities” the US has linked him to the flying a multi-hundred kilogram shipment of cocaine from Venezuela to Guinea-Bissau in July 2008.

Telephone calls to the Cape Verdean government and police rang unanswered Friday. Kristine Marsh, a spokeswoman at the United States embassy in Dakar, which oversees diplomatic relations with Guinea-Bissau, declined to comment, referring reporters to the US Justice Department.

When Channel 4 News met with Na Tchuto six years ago, he denied he was involved in drugs trafficking, as Channel 4 News Editor Ben de Pear writes:

“In 2007 Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Miller, Cameraman Ray Queally and I went to Guinea-Bissau to investigate reports that South American drugs cartels had effectively taken over the country and turned it into Africa’s first narco state, and the main transit point for cocaine onto Western Europe.

Guinea-Bisseau is a former Portuguese colony which has had multiple coups since independence, but that combination of instability and its geographic location as the closest African country to South America had apparently made it the destination of choice for South American cocaine barons and their erstwhile traffickers.

After years of misrule and economic collapse, there were rumours of Colombian gangs driving around the streets in unmarked Humvees, of ministers bribed into silence, and of a military asssiting the whole process, running roughshod over the country’s laws and citizens in the process.

One brave man

Everybody knew what was going on but it took a brave man, one Mario Sa Gomez, a leading human rights advocate, to expose it to the world. He went on national radio and said that drug trafficking was threatening the dignity of the the people of Guinea-Bisseau and its territorial integrity.

We were told by sources within the world’s major drug enforcement agencies that one man, the head of the Guinea-Bisseau navy, Rear Admiral Jose Americo Bubo Na Tchuto, was effectively the main facilitator for billions of dollars worth of cocaine being trafficked into Europe, and we wanted to meet him.

We arrived in Guinea-Bissau. There were unmarked Humvees, BMWs, Mercedes and a whole assortment of expensive cars driven around by men who looked like the baddies in Miami Vice.

Houses painted with cocaine

Teenagers – in one of the world’s poorest countries – could be seen smoking crack cocaine in houses visible from the street. So much cocaine was washing up on the beaches of the outlying islands that fisherman had painted their houses with it.

The large UN detachment were hunkered down in a compund on the edge of town, and the military were everywhere. Mario Sa Gomez was in hiding – and tracking him down took a few days. We spoke to him on the run in a barn in the dark, and he said he was frightened for his life.

After making his statement on the radio against the traffickers and military, the head of the Guinea Bisseau navy, or Bubu as he was better known, had threatened to kill him.

Meeting Bubu

After days of trying, we finally met with Bubu and convinced him to do an interview with us on the navy’s only functioning boat. We put it to him that he was, as we had been told, west Africa’s biggest narco-trafficker. He wasn’t happy – as you can in the film above, and after the camera stopped rolling he took our local fixer aside, and started screaming and threatening him.

We made it clear we did not take kindly to this, and would make efforts to protect him but after we left the fixer was hounded by the army, navy and police and we helped him leave the country until things had died down.

In the intervening years Bubu took over the whole country in a coup, but was then imprisoned, and released.

Last night, according to reports, he was picked up on a boat in international waters near the Cape Verde Islands. US officials supported by Cape Verde police arrested Bubu, and he is now en route to face prosecution in the US.”