Highway 10. How West-Africa pays for Europe's cocaine addiction

2019-12-04

ABIDJAN - In this story, investigative journalists Daan Bauwens and Nicholas Ibekwe focus on Highway 10, the transatlantic route that for centuries brought millions of captured African slaves to South-America via the tenth parallel.

Now the parallel is in use again as one of the preferred routes for South-American drug cartels for cocaine, with West-Africa as a stockpiling stopover along the way to the growing European market.

Grand-Bassam beach — The beach of Grand-Bassam, half an hour's drive from Abidjan and close to the border with Ghana. Every month the authorities remove fishing boats from the water with cannabis or illegal pills on board.

In the fourteen years since the route has been fully functional, West-Africa has suffered the spillover effects of the drug trade. After the seizure of first eight tonnes of cocaine and then 1.2 tonnes of cocaine in South-America, with the port city of Abidjan as destination, this story focuses on the little known effects of the drug trade in Ivory Coast, a country that has suffered a great deal of civil unrest in the last decades.

Besides the obvious detrimental effects on health and the social fabric in the country, does the drug trade also have the potential of bringing about political violence and military adventurism as it has done in other West-African nations before?

Team members