Mali mainly, 2012 coup, drugs & more

[ganulv]

I don't doubt you know what a multimillion dollar drug transit point looks like, but I do doubt that in your brief stay you stumbled across the king pins by conversing in French with the locals.

I actually don’t. Almost all of my first hand with the drug trade is at the street level. My French is ####e even if that is something anyone would talk about with a stranger. I just mean I didn’t observe any tell-tale signs in Bobo. Ave. Nkrumah in Ouaga had a different feel, though I didn’t develop any real sense of the place.

Trafficking on this level will spread its tentacles into the power structures of a nation.

That stands to reason but I just didn’t see it in Bobo. Might have had something to do with the tension in Côte d'Ivoire cutting off a corridor?

As far as the incident with the gendarme goes, all he probably wanted from you was 5 bucks and you would have been well on your way.

Nah, though I originally assumed I was going to come out of the whole ordeal a digital camera (that was never going to make it to an evidence locker) shorter I changed hands far too many times and too many folks laid eyes on me. The gendarme who ended up clearing me was incredibly easy to deal with and actually and amazingly cut his boss short a couple of times on my behalf.