For two decades, Guinea Bissau has been used as a gateway by South American traffickers. The significant recovery in cocaine trafficking in West Africa since 2019 has been marked by several record seizures in Guinea Bissau.

The West African Drug Commission (WACD) claims, in a study published in 2014, that Colombian drug traffickers financed the re-election campaign of former Guinea-Bissau President Joao Bernardo Vieira in 2005.  eacute;conomique of the country 's military elite," the WACD report continues. In September 2006, a shipment of nearly 700 kilograms of cocaine was seized by the Guinea-Bissau police, who were piped by Interpol. The drugs were being transported in an army vehicle. Alerted, the military hierarchy had the cocaine recovered from the police premises before putting it safely in a safe of the Ministry of Finance. Subsequently, the drugs disappeared and two Colombians arrested were released by the courts. " Guinea-Bissau has lost control of its territory ," said Antonio Maria Costa, former director of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in 2007.

Two new cases seem to show that Guinea Bissau, after a drop in seizures between 2014 and 2018, is back in business. In March 2019, nearly 800 kilos of cocaine were seized in Safim, 1.8 tons of cocaine hidden in bags of rice. Mali, in the grip of a political crisis with two military coups in nine months, sees part of its territory escape its control due to the activity of jihadist groups. Drug traffickers, of course, take advantage of this vacuum. According to the 2020 report of the United Nations Group of Experts on Mali, the "most regular flow of narcotics through Mali" remains that of Moroccan hashish that transits through Mauritania and Mali and then takes the road to Libya through Niger.