(Bloomberg) — The West African bloc has urged soldiers in Guinea-Bissau to return to their barracks in a bid to prevent what could become the fourth armed coup in one of its member-nations in less than a year.
The Economic Community of West African States “condemns this attempted coup d’etat and holds soldiers responsible for the physical integrity of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo and the members of his government,” the 15-nation bloc said in a statement.
Automatic gunfire erupted in the capital, Bissau, Tuesday as Embalo met with his cabinet, Radio France Internationale reported. The shooting interrupted the meeting and led to a stampede, the broadcaster said on its website. Armed cordons have been placed around some official buildings and schools have been closed, it said.
Embalo, 49, has been in power in the lusophone West African nation since winning a disputed presidential election in December 2019. He succeeded President Jose Mario Vaz, who was the country’s first head of state in two decades to complete his term. The nation has succumbed to several putsches since independence in 1974.
The unrest comes a week after the military overthrew the government of Burkina Faso, West Africa’s third coup in less than a year.
Coups in Mali and Burkina Faso were all carried out by U.S.-trained officers in response to intensifying insecurity in the Sahel region, where governments have failed to contain a decade-long Islamist insurgency. A coup in Guinea was blamed on bad governance in a country that remains poor despite being the world’s top exporter of bauxite, a reddish ore transformed to make aluminum, which is in cars and drinking cans.
The military takeovers have spurred the regional economic bloc, known as Ecowas, to impose sanctions that have curbed trade flows and led Western nations to suspend development aid and security support.
“It looks increasingly hard to argue against the idea of coup contagion – that coups in one place inspire them in another – following the chain of events in the past year,” Eric Humphery-Smith, Africa Analyst at U.K.-based Verisk Maplecroft, said in an emailed note.
READ: Burkina Faso Coup Fallout to Reverberate Across West Africa
Guinea-Bissau has been a transit hub since the mid-2000s for drugs bound for Europe, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. Cargo ships make the 3,000-kilometer (1,864-mile) Atlantic crossing from Latin America to a smattering of uninhabited islands off the coast. Smugglers then transfer the drugs into small boats before moving it further north through Mali and Niger infiltrated by militants taking advantage of the lack of state control.
About $1 billion worth of cocaine transited through West Africa on its way to Europe in 2016, according to an estimate from the UNODC.
(Adds Ecowas statement from first paragraph)
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