On February 5th 2016, Vice are releasing Season 4 of their HBO series. To celebrate they gave their readers free access to the first 3 seasons in an article called ‘How the UK’s Cocaine Habit Funds Islamic Extremists’. You can watch their investigation into the links between South American drug traffickers and Islamic terrorist organisations in Africa. Their reporter Ben Anderson follows one of the routes from Venezuela to West Africa before making the journey up through the Sahara to the Mediterranean coast of North Africa.
The premise of the investigation is:
Cocaine use in Europe has increased dramatically over the past decade, necessitating the development of new routes to meet the demand.
Anderson gets some incredible access to traffickers and discovers some dramatic links between governments, traffickers and terrorists. Most revealing is the insight into the corruption and manipulation by drug traffickers of Africa’s ‘failed states’ as easy routes to the European market.
You can watch the full clip below.