by Marco Vernaschi, for the Pulitzer Center

(Editor's note: This is the sixth of eight dispatches, recounting events surrounding the double assassinations of Guinea Bissau's president and army chief of staff last March and the country's emergence as a 'narco state.')

In Bissau I met a former journalist who had been a correspondent for a Portuguese magazine, I ask him to show me where the local drug lords live. We meet at night, in front of my hotel and we go for

Al Qaeda and Hezbollah's long arms extend from West Africa to Latin America.

When Marco Vernaschi, an Italian photojournalist, decided to head to the West African nation of Guinea Bissau, he knew that cocaine traffickers had already destabilized the tiny former Portuguese colony. But when he arrived on the scene shortly after the country's president and army chief were brutally assassinated last March, Vernaschi saw a place spiraling into a gangster's paradise. He has documented the chilling impact of the drug trade in places like Bolivia, and spent months in Guinea Bissau getting to know drug gangs from the inside.

Marco Vernaschi, for the Pulitzer Center

(Editor's note: This is the third of eight dispatches, recounting events surrounding the double assassinations of Guinea Bissau's president and army chief of staff last March and the country's emergence as a 'narco state.')

(Editor's note: This is the second of eight dispatches, recounting events surrounding the double assassinations of Guinea Bissau's president and army chief of staff last March and the country's emergence as a 'narco state.')