PRAIA, Oct 27 (Reuters) - West and Central Africa, already battling the threat of Colombian cocaine cartels, also risk becoming a link in methamphetamine trafficking to the United States run by Mexican gangs, a narcotics expert said on Monday.
Stephen Brown of international police organisation Interpol said that even as governments moved to tackle Colombian cocaine shipments to Europe through Africa's Atlantic coast, there was some evidence of the region also being used by Mexican drug cartels supplying methamphetamine to the U.S. market.
Experts say methamphetamine, a highly addictive stimulant that is usually smoked, can have devastating health effects.
Violent Mexican drug syndicates with worldwide networks run its trafficking into the United States, using precursor chemicals brought mostly from Asia.
A seizure in Democratic Republic of Congo last year of several tonnes of pseudoephedrine, an ingredient of methamphetamine, indicated the Mexican drugs cartels could be using Africa's Atlantic seaboard for trans-shipment or storage purposes in their international operations, Brown said.
There had also been smaller seizures of pseudoephedrine being delivered from Belgium through Congo to Mexico.
"As the U.S. pulls out of the clutches of cocaine, it's moving into the clutches of methamphetamine ... This is going to be the new battle," Brown, a team leader of Interpol's Drugs Intelligence Unit (DIU), told Reuters.
Speaking ahead of a regional anti-drugs conference in Cape Verde, he said West African governments also needed to confront the risk of Colombian cartels setting up cocaine processing laboratories in their region, where poverty and weak law enforcement capability made states vulnerable to serious crime.
A recent seizure by Colombia of fertilizer containing 40 percent cocaine base destined for the tiny state of Benin raised the possibility that cocaine traffickers were looking to undertake processing operations in West Africa, Brown said.
"There had to be more of it: either it was going to be shipped on to processing labs in, say, Spain or Greece, or it was going to be processed locally, and that would require local facilitation," he said.
"BULLET AND GUN"
"You can mix cocaine base with anything -- wine, molasses, paint -- you name it," Brown said. Cartels would fly in drugs trade "chemists" to separate cocaine into a saleable product.
Brown said that while West African police were increasingly focusing on cocaine trafficking, they had little experience in identifying precursor chemicals like pseudoephedrine, which can take the form of powder or tablets and is also used as medicine.
International security agencies could help by providing this training to shut off illicit flows of precursor chemicals, which were as important as the finished drugs themselves.
"It's like the bullet and the gun, there's not much point having a gun, if you don't have the bullet," Brown said.
Using flotillas of small planes and fast boats, powerful Colombian drugs cartels have been shipping cocaine consignments from Latin America to Europe through West African states.
Major cocaine seizures have been reported in Guinea-Bissau, Senegal, Mauritania and Sierra Leone and experts are also increasingly focusing on Guinea as a suspected transit hub.
Brown said that as agencies tackle the cocaine trade, governments need to be wary of the traffickers turning to new and ever more ingenious methods of shipping their merchandise.
Colombian cartels have used small submarines, able to carry 6 or more tonnes of cocaine, to ship drugs up to the south California coast avoiding U.S. radar surveillance, and Brown said submarines could also ply the transatlantic route.
"It's not too far-fetched," he said. (Editing by Alistair Thomson and Tim Pearce)
