Wracked by internal strife that has left them poor, crime-ridden and institutionally weak, several West African nations in recent years have become crucial transit hubs for Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian cocaine headed to Europe.

In an interview last week, Colombian National Police Cmdr. Gen. Oscar Naranjo said he will soon station 10 anti-narcotics police in nine West African countries, with a headquarters in Sierra Leone.

“We want to establish a common front with these countries, to help identify the Colombian traffickers who come and go,” Naranjo said during a police graduation ceremony in El Espinal.

In Washington, Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Garrison Courtney said Wednesday his agency is also beefing up its presence in West Africa, although he did not specify how many agents would be added or where.

“The drug traffic is now going both ways. Cocaine is moving through Africa and on to Europe, while precursor chemicals from China and India for making methamphetamines are now transiting through on the way to Central America and Mexico,” Courtney said.

Three years ago, before the tide of Andean cocaine began to hit West African shores, the DEA had only one agent in the region, in Lagos, Nigeria. But the agency and other U.S. law enforcement organizations are now focusing on the area, partly due to fears that drug sales could be used to finance terrorism.

Brazil, which has become a major channel for Andean cocaine shipped to Europe, is also sending about a half-dozen narcotics agents to West Africa, said one foreign narcotics agent who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to speak for publication.

As much as half of all Andean cocaine is consumed in Spain, Britain and elsewhere in Europe, experts say. While U.S. cocaine consumption has leveled off this decade, users in Europe have more than doubled in the last four years, according to a U.N. report.

Traffickers are rushing to take advantage of the boom in Europe, where the wholesale price of a kilogram (2.2 pounds) of pure cocaine fetches upwards of $45,000. That’s twice the wholesale price in Miami, officials have said.

To access that market, traffickers now send one-quarter or more of Europe-bound cocaine through West African way stations they view as hospitable.

In Guinea-Bissau, one of the world’s 10 poorest nations, there is no prison and the few dozen police are notoriously malleable. The country has a two-ship navy to patrol its 220-mile coastline.

Colombian traffickers, who are thought to control between 60 percent and 80 percent of Andean cocaine, have made the biggest splash in the region, with several taking up residence in Guinea-Bissau and establishing “front” businesses, narcotics officials here say.

Two suspected members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia were arrested — and mysteriously released — in Guinea-Bissau in 2007 while on a drug trafficking mission, the foreign narcotics official said.

Until last summer, when a tougher law was passed, Guinea-Bissau’s maximum penalty for drug traffickers, even if they were caught with several tons of cocaine, was a $1,000 fine. Justice Minister Carmelita Pires held a news conference last summer to denounce several death threats she had received.

Law enforcement is coming around to the challenge. Cocaine seizures in West Africa or offshore totaled 14.6 tons in 2006, up from less than one ton in 2001, according to the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime.

In 2007, four tons of cocaine were seized in Mauritania and Senegal alone.

Last year’s major busts included a half ton of cocaine aboard an airplane that crash-landed at Sierra Leone’s international airport, and 2.5 tons found in January 2008 on a Liberian freighter off Sierra Leone’s capital, Monrovia.

Estimates of annual Colombian cocaine production range from about 600 tons (UNODC) to 750 tons (White House Office of National Drug Control Policy).

One-third of all Colombian cocaine now moves through Venezuela and then on to U.S. and European markets, according to U.S. officials.

In September, the State Department classified Venezuela as “uncooperative” in the war on drugs, citing alleged corruption among high-level police and national guard officers.

The alleged high level of corruption among Venezuelan authorities has made cocaine trafficking to Europe via West Africa easier, the State Department report said. Venezuelan officials deny the corruption charges.