Column
By Paul Fauvet
When, on 1 June, US President Barack Obama named Mozambican businessman Mohamed Bachir Suleman as a drugs baron, the overwhelming reaction in the Mozambican media was surprise, shock - and even condemnation of the Americans for ruining a supposedly innocent entrepreneur.
Yet the American move against an alleged Mozambican drugs "kingpin" should have come as no surprise. Since the mid-1990s, Mozambique has been used as a corridor by drugs traffickers, but to date no key figure in the trafficking has ever been convicted.
Large scale drug seizures have been made. Thus in 1995, the police seized 40 tonnes of hashish being carried across Maputo in two trucks. The investigations petered out, and the only person ever jailed in connection with this haul was a driver, Samssudine Satar.
Also in 1995, a laboratory producing the drug mandrax was discovered in the Trevo neighbourhood in the southern city of Matola. The people working there set it on fire, but this attempt to destroy the evidence was botched, and the police concluded that the equipment there was for the mass production of mandrax, a drug for which a sizeable market exists in South Africa.
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