Marco Vernaschi describes the “political violence” in Guinea-Bissau, Africa’s Cocaine Coast:
A frantic voice came over the radio: a blast had just destroyed Guinea-Bissau’s military headquarters. I drove toward the compound and, when I arrived, everyone was still shouting and running through the smoking ruins of the building. Bissau’s only ambulance was shuttling back and forth from the hospital, ferrying the bodies of victims. All that four heavily armed soldiers would tell me was that General Batista Tagme Na Wai, head of the army, had just been assassinated.
At six o’clock the next morning, my friend and informant, Vladimir, a reliable security man who worked at my hotel, came to tell me that President Joao Bernardo Vieira had just been killed, too. I asked how he knew, but he simply shook his head. When I pulled up at the president’s house, soldiers were shooting in the air and swinging machetes to keep a crowd of people away. The president’s armored Hummer was still parked out front, the tires flat and its bulletproof windows shattered. The police cars from his escort were destroyed. A rocket shot from a bazooka had penetrated four walls of his house, ending up in the living room. After ruling Guinea-Bissau for nearly a quarter of a century, Vieira, known to his people simply as Nino, was dead.
In just nine hours Guinea-Bissau had lost both its president and the head of its army. Why such violence? Was this double assassination the result of an old rivalry between Vieira and Tagme, or was it something more? The army’s spokesman, Zamora Induta, declared that the president had been killed by a group of renegade soldiers and that assailants had used a bomb to assassinate General Tagme. He said there was no connection between the two deaths. Of course, nobody believed this. Since 2007, Guinea-Bissau, a former Portuguese colony and one of the poorest nations in the world, has become the new hub for cocaine trafficking. The drug is shipped from Venezuela, Colombia, and Brazil to West Africa en route to Europe. Everyone suspected that these assassinations were somehow linked to drug trafficking.
I headed back to the military headquarters. After taking some pictures of the destroyed building, I sneaked out of the generals’ view and made my way to a backyard where some soldiers were resting, sipping tea under a big tree. I offered cigarettes and was given tea in return. Paul—the chief of a special commando unit from the region of Mansoa — told me they had had a hell of night. I thought he was referring to the general situation, but then he told me that he and his men had been sent to the president’s house the night before. It had been their job to kill him. Paul wore a denim cowboy hat and two cartridge belts across his body, in perfect Rambo style. It was noon, the sun higher than ever, but a chill ran through me.
“We went to the house, to question Nino about the bomb that killed Tagme Na Wai,” Paul told me in French. “When we arrived he was trying to flee with his wife, so we forced them to stay. When we asked if he issued the order to kill Tagme, he first denied his responsibility but then confessed. He said he bought the bomb during his last trip to France and ordered that it be placed under the staircase, by Tagme’s office. He didn’t want to give the names of those who brought the bomb here, or the name of the person who placed it.”
Something about the quality of the details, the casual authority of Paul’s voice, convinced me he was telling the truth.
“You know, Nino was a brave man but this time he really did something wrong. So we had to kill him. After all, he killed Tagme and made our life impossible… We have not received our salary since six months ago.”
“So, what happened after you questioned him?” I asked.
“Well, after that we shot him and then we took his powers away.”
I asked what he meant.
“Nino had some special powers,” Paul explained. “We needed to make sure he won’t come back for revenge. So we hacked his body with a machete — the hands, the arms, the legs, his belly, and his head. Now he’s really dead.”
Paul erupted in a smoky chuckle, joined by his men. I scanned the laughing soldiers and saw that three had blood spattered on their boots and pants.