Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Narco States Work

Episode Date: February 10, 2018

In this episode of Stuff You Should Know, Josh and Chuck discuss Narco States, places where illegal drugs are traded openly with government support -- or without government interference. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hey everybody, this is Chuck. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know Selects. Hope you had your morning cartoons, and now you're ready to listen to Narco States. How Narco States works from December 15th, 2009.

I have no idea why we saw fit to release this so close to Christmas, way back in 2009. But it's kinda funny that we did, but I just remember this is a really good episode. Narco States is a very dense topic, and it's kinda a thing where, if you kinda throw some of this information around at a dinner party,

everyone is gonna think you are super cool. So, please do enjoy how Narco States works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark with me, as always, is Charles W. Zonkers Bryant. Zonkers, yeah.

I'm always, I just sit here wondering what you're gonna call me. How's it going? Great, sir, you? Pretty good. You look good. You're as good as you were 10 minutes ago when you recorded that other podcast.

Chuck, have you ever been to Mexico? I have been to Mexico. Have you been to TJ? I haven't been to Mexico. I haven't been to Mexico. I've been to TJ. Have you been to Juarez? No, just TJ in the Baja area.

Okay, well, had you gone a little further east along the border to Juarez, you would have been in a Narco State. Yes, and you know what I'm ashamed to say, Josh, that I did not know what a Narco State was. Really? I've heard of it, but I didn't really know what it was. I can't remember if I pitched this one or if Chanel did,

but it's a good one. It's a good one. Well done, sir. Thank you very much. Thank you. Yeah, well, Chuck and I are talking about Narco States as you probably were tipped off by the title of this podcast.

Sure. And for those of you who don't know what a Narco State it is. Josh, I'm just gonna give my own definition, which is it is a country where they sort of allow drug trafficking and in some cases even participate in the drug trafficking. Yeah, and it's very, very rarely an entire country. Okay.

Most of the time it's like a region. A region of a country. A very small area, a city. Although there are cases where there have been Narco States like fully functioning countries that are run by drugs. Like their gross domestic product is almost fully funded by drugs. The government's in on it, military's in on it.

And right now, as far as I could tell, there's only one functioning Narco State in the world. Afghanistan? No, it's close though. Guinea-Bissau. Oh yeah, sure, in Africa. Yeah, West Africa. I can't wait to tell that story.

It's a good one. Yeah. Okay, so Narco State, as Chuck said, is basically any area where the government is either directly involved or turning a blind eye to drug trafficking. Yes, in Mexico, Central America, South America, always known as being rife with this kind of thing

because chances are if you're doing drugs in the US, chances are it did not come from inside the United States. No, unless it was meth or pot. Yeah, and even then, chances are it probably didn't, although there's a lot of domestic meth labs and pot farms and stuff like that. Yeah, but yeah, the chances are it came through Mexico, if not from Mexico.

Mexico didn't used to be nearly as violent. You know, Juarez, which we were talking about, had, I think, 300 murders in 2007. And then all of a sudden there was a drug war started that's still going on now. And in 2008, they had 1,500 murders. Yeah, that's a heck of a stat. Yeah, Detroit had less than 300 murders in 2007.

So Detroit's safer than someplace? It's safer than Juarez, believe it or not. Well, thank God for that. Yeah, I didn't get the stats on Tempe, though, so I can't say. Right. So one of the reasons why, and we'll see that American intervention one way or another

usually has an impact on the formation of a Narco State, one of the reasons why Juarez, and some of the other border towns along Mexico have turned into Narco States, is because the Coast Guard and the DEA effectively shut down the Caribbean in the 90s. Right. That was the main route from South America to the US

for Coke. Yeah. And Americans love Coke. A lot of the world does. And one thing that I learned from reading this article, and just by living as a human in the world, is that drugs will find a way to get into the country. They definitely will.

Like, for example, when the Caribbean was shut down, they started moving it through Central America and up through Mexico. Came another route. One way or another. And the reason why is, well, like I said, Americans love cocaine. We consume 40% of the global supply of it every year.

Yeah. Europe does a lot of cocaine, too. Europe loves the junk, too. Oh, no, Europe is the heroin. Yeah, they have 11% of the global population in Europe. Right. One third of the world's heroin addicts. Yeah.

Big deal. Yeah, it's weird how it's localized like that. It is. But think about it. Think about how much closer Europe is to the heroin-producing countries of South Asia. Yeah, yeah. And think about how close we are to the cocaine-producing

countries of South America. Yeah, which affects the price, of course. It definitely does. You want to give them that stat? Josh, a kilogram of uncut cocaine, as you hear on the cop shows, goes for $22,000. That same kilo fetches about $120,000 in Moscow. That's a big markup.

Oh, it's a huge markup. Is that street value, as they call it? And I'm sure those are way off. I'm sure you could get a kilo for a lot less or pay a lot more, whatever. But one of the things the feds like to do is pump up their numbers so that they can get more funding. Yeah, makes sense.

You can definitely get a kilo of cocaine in America a lot cheaper than you can in Russia. In Russia. Yeah. So Chuck, all of those kilos add up pretty quickly. And the drug trade, the global drug trade, makes an estimated $300 billion a year. Yeah, that's nuts.

That is a lot of cash. You could bail out two AIGs for that. So Chuck, we talked about the narco state being an area where governments either look in the other way or selling drugs directly. Right, or helping them out, maybe, just aiding them. There's a big problem with this. I would say so.

But, well, I mean, you just think about it. You're like, oh, the government's not supposed to do that. Just stop and think why. Why the government's not supposed to do that? Yeah, well, because they're supposed to protect their citizens. Yeah, there's something that Thomas Hobbs called the social contract.

And basically, it said in exchange for certain freedoms, like we can't just do anything we want to, that we give to the government, we're going to give that power to the government. And one of those things is the state monopoly on violence. Right. Where the government can put you in jail. The government can kill you, execute you.

But the government's supposed to be the only one who does it. So if somebody shoots your kid, you don't go shoot them in the head. You get the government to go after this guy and incarcerate or kill him. Yeah, right? Yeah, and in the civilized world, the social contract is kind of how we developed

as nations of the world. And it works pretty well, for the most part. We'll say, I mean, that's a whole other podcast right there. But in narco states, it's a little different, because that's a little bit of a sham. They kind of have that contract as long as it doesn't interfere with the drug trade. Right.

The government's given its power to drug traffickers at the expense of the people they're supposed to be protecting and representing. So that's number one. Yeah. Right? Sure. So how does this happen, right?

Well, one reason why that might happen, there's a bunch of different ways that could happen. But one reason is if, let's say you're in Colombia and all of a sudden, you've heard the term Colombian necktie? I have. All of a sudden, your judges and your council people and your politicians are getting knifed and executed in back alleys.

By the dozens, all of a sudden, the government might say, wait a minute, we might want to not go after these drug traffickers. Right, because if the state doesn't have a monopoly on violence any longer, if paramilitary groups affiliated with drug traffickers do, then apparently in Colombia, they came at the justice building with tanks. Yeah.

This wasn't the military. This was a rebel faction. Yeah. I think it was FARC that did it. Right, Josh. FARC, that is F-A-R-C. That stands for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia translated into English.

Right. And they're actually a communist guerrilla group. They're an army. They are. And they actually got into drug trafficking in the 80s, I think. Indeed. So OK, so you have a huge armed guerrilla army

attacking your justice department in the country's capital. That's a good way to get a narco state started, right? Yeah, sometimes you're bribed into it. That's another one, too. All of a sudden, if your coffers are being filled, a lot of politicians are willing to look the other way. And also, if your intelligence services become compromised by drug traffickers, you're in big trouble.

Yeah, if those are corrupted, you're finished. Yeah, because the intelligence services are usually toward the top of the military hierarchy. And if they're corrupted, they can turn the entire military against the government, which there is a division. And after that happens, again, you're in big trouble and a narco state can form. Yeah, plus they know a lot about smuggling the intelligence

community. And if all of a sudden they're on your side, then all of a sudden you know a lot about smuggling. Right. Yeah, you have to know how to get people or arms or something in and out of countries without being detected. So you know where all the airfields are. You have access to planes and boats and stuff.

You just start throwing kilos of coke in there, and all of a sudden you're a drug smuggler. Yep, boom, done. Yeah, and it's kind of tough for us to think about this in the United States, because we've had a pretty stable government for the last couple hundred years. But in areas and countries where there's

been high government turnover and lots of internal conflict, let's say infrastructure, like roads, bridges, water, electricity, these things have been cut throughout these civil wars. And the government's too poor to fix them, all of a sudden the government's delegitimized. And another like a rebel faction can step in and say, hey, we're taking over.

And by the way, we love drug trafficking. Right. Yeah. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude. Bring you back to the days of slipdresses and children necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point. but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in, as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to, Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place,

because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Oh, just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen, so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. I got a couple of stats for you along those lines. Guatemala endured a 36-year-long civil war. El Salvador in a 12-year-long civil war.

And Nicaragua had one that lasted 19 years. And so what this means is it's a very unstable region easily swayed by whoever has the power, drug traffickers, or the government. And it also means there's a lot of guns. Yeah, and a lot of former veterans that are out of work, but know how to use those guns, and can serve as a guerrilla army.

Yeah, and a lot of times, these are poor countries, too. In fact, I would say almost every time it's a poor country. And you don't have to be a genius to figure out. You've got guns, you've got these former military guys, you've got really poor people, and you have loads of drugs. It's worth a lot of money. It's really not too hard to devolve into a narco state. No, it's not.

And of course, the root of all narco states is money, either like Chuck said, bribes, that kind of thing, or the GDP, Afghanistan. Apparently, their GDP is like $6 billion annually, which the United States, I think, has $14 trillion GDP. Yeah, something like that. So it's kind of like, holy cow, how do you live like that? They've been doing pretty good, but half of that

has been through heroin. Right, poppies. So Hamid Karzai, who was, I'm going to make air quotes, elected president of Afghanistan twice. I made air quotes again on the right place. You just reelected, right? Yeah, reelected. He is well known for turning a blind eye while saying,

we need to get rid of these poppies. And the US is like, OK, well, let us spray. And he's like, don't know, we have to do it all by hand. And apparently, the American forces over there have to, well, the DEA is over there as well. But the American commanders of the armed forces in Afghanistan don't let the DEA in at all. And they're frustrated pulling their hair out

because they're not getting any support whatsoever. And it's kind of one of those things like everybody knows that Afghanistan produces poppies. As a matter of fact, in 2006, they produced the highest poppy harvest in recorded human history. Yeah, just a couple of years ago. It was double what it had been the year before. So clearly, they're not pulling enough by hand.

No, because Karzai won't let them spray overhead. Yeah, which is, I should explain, that's a common method to, like you crop dust fields to put chemicals on them. You do the same thing if you want to eradicate and kill them. Right, and it is very effective. It's working in Colombia.

Colombia finally has a president, I shouldn't say finally, but Colombia as a president is very sympathetic and friendly to the US, and these are the DEA in there. And they have eradicated a lot of cocoa fields using that method. So it does work, but Karzai's like, no. And apparently, there's been more and more and more reports of the people who are involved in the central government

are all drug lords, or most of them are drug lords too. So Afghanistan is teetering right on the edge of being a narcosite if it's not already. So contributing to half your GDP, that's another reason for a narcosite to develop. Yeah, and well, since we're on money, another thing that money brings is bribes and corruption,

like we were talking about. And I have to mention this, because you uncovered this great fact from Guatemala, the federal judge, that's just hard to believe. Federal judge was accused of accepting thousands of dollars in bribes to dismiss a drug trafficking case. And at the end of the, see, dismiss the case at the end of this trial, this judge

was seen driving the defendant from court. Yeah. So it goes pretty deep. Yeah, and Guatemala is a de facto narco state right now. Yeah, big time. And in Central America itself, which is, like we said, since the Caribbean's been shut down, Central America started to play a really key role

as a supply line between South America and North America. Yeah, yeah. And actually, because of all those conflicts that you mentioned earlier, there's now a ratio of five to one illegal unregistered guns to guns held by legitimate police and armed forces. Not good. No.

So let's keep an eye on Central America. Yeah, that means trouble is coming. OK, so Central America, again, we talked about how it's been destabilized by conflict. There's tons of guns. There's terrible infrastructure. There's plenty of drugs and narco states. And you know what else, dude?

In Guatemala, corrupt government officials there have drafted legislation that prevents extradition. And as we know, extradition is a really valuable tool for us when we're trying to prosecute these drug lords. And they said, you can't do it. So that kind of says right there, let us make our money. Yeah. US, stay out of our hair.

Yeah, once you have the Congress and the judiciary in your pocket, that's even more valuable in the military. Although the military is a really good first step. Yeah, that's true. All right, so Chuck, one of the reasons why you might notice that Central and South America keep popping up, one of the reasons why is because Central America specifically was a Cold War battleground

where the US and the USSR fought one another in proxy wars. Throughout the Cold War, basically both countries just completely used nations in Central and South America to fight one another, try to bleed one another out. You know what that means? What? That means that these people that live there are being trained by either Russian or American military.

They're being supplied with guns and ammunition and all the things that you need once you stop and say, Cold War is over, all those guns and trained dudes are still there. Right. And they're like, well, what should we do with all this stuff? Yeah, let's run drugs. And not only that, we are not getting funding from the Soviets

or the Americans anymore. Oh, exactly. But we still, the war didn't end for them. The conflict didn't end for them. The power struggle didn't end for them just because the Americans and the Soviets suddenly lost interest. It's still going on.

And they are funding it through drugs, right? Yeah. And also, the US backed right wing paramilitary groups or right wing dictatorships. And the Soviets, of course, backed left wing groups like FARC. Right. And FARC has a reputation for being extremely brutal.

They use child soldiers. They engage in kidnappings, bombings. Kill their own people. Sure. At one point, they offered $1,000 to anybody who killed the government official. Wow. So they were outsourcing their terrorism.

And they're communists, and they were supported by the Soviets. So of course, they're horrible. The US supported equally brutal regimes and groups. Yeah. Like Locco Frida. You know about them? They're Guatemala.

Yes, they were very much supported by the US. And they helped kill as many as 200,000 of their own people during that Civil War. Yep. Josh, Locco Frida wasn't the only one. Right. Remember the 1980s when President Reagan launched the war on drugs?

Mm-hmm. You know what was going on at the same time? What? We were providing funding and weapons for the same anti-communist paramilitary groups that were producing and distributing this cocaine. Yeah. Right at the same time.

Yeah. Yet we were fighting a war on drugs. Yeah. Doesn't add up, does it? Not only that, you remember Manuel Noriega? We went down to Panama in 1989. Uh-huh. Delta Force was there.

Special Forces was there. Yeah. And we captured him and then put him in prison in Miami for a couple decades. Yeah. He was a CIA asset for eight years. Yeah, he was operating in Narco State under our supervision. Yeah.

You could say. Yeah. And then once news leaked out to the general public that he was a drug dealer, we went down and moved him from power. Right. And gave, I believe, he's still in prison, right? No, he just got out.

Oh, really? Yeah. OK. Like a year ago or something like that. No, good for him. And again, this is the same thing that's going on right now in Afghanistan. We're well aware that Karzai is totally

cool with the heroin production in that nation. Right. Which, by the way, is far and away the largest producer of heroin or opium poppies in the world. So it's still going on. Yeah. Although we donated a lot or donated. I guess that's not the right word.

But we gave them close to $800 million for counter-narcotics operations and measures. I'm sure. Every penny went to that. Sure. So it's still going on. But the reason why it's really disturbing that this is still going on is because we haven't learned

a very clear lesson from this. And that's when we support groups that engage in drug trafficking, it invariably comes back to bite us in the ass. Yeah. Like I mentioned La Cofrida in Guatemala. The two guys who are running that show, running Guatemala as an Arco state, were both trained by the United States

at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, I think. Yeah, right here in Georgia. Yeah. It's where they train foreign people. No, specifically Latin America. Oh, Latin Americans? Yeah, specifically to train them. Yeah, pretty controversial.

Yeah, because they train them in assassination, in assembling guerrilla armies and destabilizing central governments, that kind of stuff. So we're training these guys to go fight the Soviets. But then again, after the Cold War, these guys are still around. The Mexican Gulf Cartel, which has become hugely violent and kind of big, is run by a couple of guys

who were also trained at the School of the Americas. So basically the world's biggest drug dealers were trained by the United States in the art of smuggling and all sorts of other stuff. They were trained in their craft. Yeah, and I think the Russians used Escobar, right? Yeah. To help guard their poppy fields, is that right, or the cocoa?

Yeah, FARC actually started out guarding Escobar's cocoa fields in Colombia for the Medellin Cartel, right? Yeah, Medellin. And then apparently they're like, wow, this guy's making a bunch of money. We're going to go out on our own, and they became rivals. And then again, Delta Force goes down there and oversees the assassination of Escobar.

Yeah, so much money. Which I don't mean to sound paranoid. I really researched this article, and all this is fact. Everything that isn't fact, I've made verbal air quotes with. Like this is documented stuff. And it's documented in legitimate publications. It's all about the greenbacks. Yes, so much money at stake.

So let's talk about Africa, man. That's the place to be these days. Well. If you're into narco states. Exactly. Yeah, Africa has really risen since the mid-80s. That was the first sign of a drug presence in Africa in Zambia, although it was marijuana in Zambia at the time.

That's how it started out at least. The gateway drug, even when you're talking narco states. Sure, yeah. It's funny. So Zambia goes, exposes a narco state. Apparently the government wasn't aware of this one, but a group of prominent citizens were operating like a sub-state, a sub-narco state,

just under the noses of the functioning government. And again, very poor people, which is key. Yeah, if people don't have any money, and all of a sudden people come and give them gobs of money, they'll say, oh, OK. You want to be a drug mule? We'll give you this much money. No problem.

Sure. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god.

Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael, and a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life,

step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio App, Apple Podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. So Zambia was the first to start it in Africa. And then the 90s, the reason why it picked up speed in the 90s was because it was the end of colonialism. It just ended within the last decade or so. And this European influence and influx of money and exploitation left the vacuum economically, financially, and oftentimes

with central governments. There's just a vacuum and nobody's doing anything. There's no way to make any money or anything. So narco states are setting up. Senegal was another one in the 90s. I believe heroin and cocaine really were on the rise. And here's a stat that you dug up. It was pretty good.

In 2008, the Telegraph newspaper in England reported that the cost of a bribe to look the other way at the airport when you're flying in into car with drugs, 9 grand per kilo of cocaine. Right. And Chuck just mentioned a little funny little word, and it was cocaine.

You know, associate Africa with cocaine normally. Well, yeah, that's true. You do now, though. Yeah, big time. And one of the reasons why it's popped up in Africa is because West Africa is a perfect stop for cocaine en route to Europe. Right.

Remember, we talked about Europe having a huge problem with heroin? One of the reasons they didn't have a big problem with cocaine is because the Colombians and other South Americans hadn't figured out how to get it to them. Now all of a sudden, West Africa is devolving into narco states because they finally figured out we need a port and West Africa is it.

Right, specifically Guinea-Bissau? This is, like we said earlier, the one true functioning narco state right now. Yeah, $150 million worth of cocaine passes through the borders of Guinea-Bissau each month, and that was in 2007. And what is $150 million times two to them? They're gross domestic product. It's half of their gross domestic product.

So the entire nation, all of the goods and services produced in Guinea-Bissau above the boards, equals $300 million a year. Right. And they have half of that coming through their country in cocaine a month. Yeah, tell the story of how this started there. This is so interesting.

It is. What year was it? 2005. 2005, yeah. They're a group of Guinea-Bissau and fishermen who were out in their boats, and there was a big old package floating, or maybe several smaller packages, is floating there.

So they hauled them in with their nets, and they took them back to land. They opened them up, and there was this white powder inside. They'd never seen before. Right. They didn't know what to do with it. So they actually used it as fertilizer on their crops, which killed their crops very quickly.

Did they really? Yeah. I didn't know that. And then finally one day, well, they're still puzzling over this stuff. God knows what else they did with it. Yeah. A man, a South American man, shows up and says, hey.

I believe you have something that belongs to us. Yeah, and that's cocaine. That's our cocaine. It'll give you $1 million for it, which is 1,300th of the entire gross domestic product. Remember of Guinea-Bissau? And so they say, OK. And by the way, can we do this again?

Yeah. And that was the birth of the Guinea-Bissau and narcos. Yeah, it completely happened by accident. It did. I mean, can you imagine that? And Guinea-Bissau is a perfect narcos state. The cops literally, in the capital, Bissau, it's the capital city of the country,

the cops have five cop cars, and they almost never have gasoline to fuel them. And they have $150 million worth of cocaine going through the borders with five cop cars. Right, it was a former Portuguese colony. The Portuguese left. And Guinea-Bissau, there's not an airplane associated with that country, but they have airfields out on barrier

islands that are just totally unused, unpatrolled. And what's more, the military is completely in the pockets of the, I think they're mostly Colombians that took the place over, built stucco mansions. They have direct TV antennas on their roofs, in this incredibly poverty-stricken country. They stick out like sore thumbs. They don't care.

One of the reasons why is, like I said, the military is on their side. How did we know that, Chuck? Josh, in September of 2006, cops there arrested two Colombian guys in a house with 700 kilos of cocaine. And the soldiers came, they showed up at the police station, surrounded it, and said, give me the cocaine and the men.

And they did so. And they got in their cars, loaded up the coke, and drove away. The cops watched the military load up the coke and just leave with the guys. To thank you for your time. Yeah, and that was it. That was the beginning of the end.

The military engaged in an all-out war with the government and ended up assassinating the president after laying siege to his mansion for several hours. Yeah, just this year, right? In March? Yeah, he was assassinated in March, yep. So there's no central government in Guinea-Bissau. The Colombians are there selling drugs, using it as,

actually, they're not selling it in Guinea-Bissau as far as I know. They're using Guinea-Bissau as mules who, even more perfect, because it was a Portuguese colony, they don't have to have visas to get in Europe. I mean, it's like Pablo Escobar went, God, I need you to do me a favor. I got some friends back there on Earth,

and they need a place in West Africa. They need a perfect narco state. Can you give us a perfect narco state? And God's like, Guinea-Bissau. Sure, and I think you said the average annual income there is like 500 bucks a year? For a civil servant's job. Yeah, so it's clear that if you start waiving just

small amounts of money under their nose, that they're going to be at your beck and call. So Guinea-Bissau won your watch. I mean, it's just insane right there. Sure, it's not a safe place to be. No. No, so that's narco states. I have a headache just from talking about it.

How about you, Chuck? I do. Kind of dance, isn't it? It is. It was a really good article, though. Thanks, man. If you want to read the article that I wrote and pour my blood, sweat, and tears into, you can type narco states.

That's two words in the handy search bar at howstuffworks.com. And that means it's time for a listener mail. Yeah, you know what's funny is this morning, Emily asked me while we were getting ready for our day what we're going to podcast on. I said, narco state. She said, what's a narco state?

No, I don't know. And here, like, eight hours later, my mind is mush. You know everything there is to know about narco states. Or at least enough to talk about it for 25 minutes. Yeah. Has it only been 25 minutes? 35 minutes. Jerry says 35.

Josh, I'm going to call this DNA database London email. Hello, Josh and Chuck. Love your show. Thought you may be interested in a little story in regards to the podcast about crime databases. I am from Yakima, Washington, but I've lived in the UK for the last decade. I'm a train driver, engineer.

Lisa is 30. She's an American train engineer living in England. Isn't that interesting? So a friend of mine who is also a conductor had a recent experience with the British transport police in regards to this. He was spat on by a member of the public who was abusive while carrying out ticket duties.

So the police were called. On the day and for weeks after, my friend was pretty much harassed by the police because they wanted a DNA sample from him for, quote, exclusion purposes. He steadfastly declined each request to the point where he put it in writing to the police that he would get a solicitor involved to ensure

he never had to submit a sample. The outcome is basically that the offender went unpunished because the police won't follow it up anymore because the guy who was attacked and spit upon won't surrender his DNA for exclusion purposes. So just thought you may want to know here in England, even victims of crime are being coerced into giving samples. Keep up the great work from Lisa, XXX from Lisa.

Wow. Not an XO, buddy. Triple X. That's from Lisa in Stoke Hammond Buckingham Shire. And I guess that's a place. You know, I've been spit on before and spit back. Did you get spit on? By who?

Cab driver and niece. Really? Oh, you're such a jerk. You tried to charge me 20 bucks for an eight block cab ride? Uh-huh. I was like, I'm not giving you that much. And he was like, yes you will. F-f-f-f-f.

And I've just, like, blinked and, like, put my hand in my face. And sure enough, there was a spit. And I just spit right back in his face. This is in France. I thought he was going to explode. Not even in a narco state. It was in niece.

Did you pay him? I paid him some. I didn't pay him 20 bucks. What a jerk. Spit on Josh. No doubt. Yeah, he's got a meeting with me scheduled. Thanks, buddy.

I'm going to go find this guy. Yeah, let's go to niece. All right. Well, if you have any stories about spitting on or being spit upon, you can send an email to stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. Want more howstuffworks?

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