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Central America and the International Trade in Drugs

As drug exports from South America initially gathered momentum in the late 1970s, criminal syndicates favored air and maritime routes through the Caribbean, including transshipment via the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. In the early 1980s, however, responding to bloody struggles among cocaine traffickers contesting market shares, U.S. government initiatives in south Florida aimed to curtail air and sea drug imports.1 At this time, various Caribbean governments, encouraged and pressured by the U.S. government and supported by the U.S. Coast Guard and the DEA, stepped up interdiction. U.S. officials also began to track air traffic headed toward Florida more thoroughly, using military planes equipped with the advanced Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).2 In this way, oversight improved of Florida’s air and waters—traditionally the chief target for drug smugglers—as well as of three Caribbean straits: the Mona Passage, Windward Passage, and Yucatán Channel.3

With the smooth flow of drugs to market jeopardized, by 1984 significant Colombian traffickers had started to import cocaine across the U.S.-Mexican border. This strategic shift empowered Mexican drug organizations, which brought the Colombians to search for the least risky and most cost-effective routes to transship drugs into Mexico.4 Here, the skies, territories, and offshore waters of Central American countries proved to have real competitive advantages. Most important, intercepting drugs entering or leaving islands is less difficult than doing so in larger countries with porous land borders and long coastal stretches. Central American transit thus began to eclipse Caribbean routes as the leading pathway for South American drugs, and more cocaine began to enter the southwestern United States than Florida.5 Cocaine imports to the United States via Mexico rose to one-third of the total in 1989, to more than half in 1992, and to 80 percent by century’s end.6

Map 1.1

By the early 1980s significant cocaine shipments—fifty to three hundred kilograms for that period—were regularly transiting Central America, and by the 1990s Caribbean routes had been relegated to a secondary, though still quite significant, role.7 Of course, the Central American versus Caribbean choice was not necessarily either/or. A number of routes have involved both regions, as when cocaine has been shipped from Panama to Haiti, flown from Costa Rica to the Bahamas, or sent aboard speedboats from Colombia’s resort island of San Andrés to Belize, Honduras, or Costa Rica. Furthermore, in the drug trade, predictability increases the risk of interception, while using a multiplicity of routes spreads bets across the board. Thus, drug routes through the Caribbean have by no means been abandoned, although over the last two decades they have not threatened the status of Central America as the leading transshipment zone.

The Stimulus for Central American Drug Trafficking

Geography must stand as the initial factor that has transformed Central America into perhaps the world’s preeminent bridge region. These states, squarely situated between South American producers and the immense market of North American consumers, have enjoyed relatively easy access to Mexico—that paramount gateway into the United States. In addition, the lack of sustained, broad-based economic development, coupled with pockets of extreme poverty, has helped to produce ready supplies of collaborators for foreign and domestic trafficking organizations.8 “For every one arrested,” one foreign law-enforcement official declared, “there are a hundred hungry souls eager to take his place.”9 In this way, personal economic travails have aligned with the objectives and operations of international drug-trafficking organizations.

Had those working in Central American drug trafficking confronted modern laws against transnational organized crime, vigilant law enforcement, able prosecution, and stiff penalties, including imprisonment in secure penitentiaries, the potential costs of involvement might have deterred some individuals. In fact, these bridge states have also attracted smuggling organizations because their criminal-justice systems, often antiquated and haphazardly constructed, have usually functioned poorly. Legal institutions have tended to be underfunded and prone to intimidation and corruption, offering wealthy traffickers multiple opportunities to escape conviction or at least lengthy imprisonment. While trying to contend with new and different varieties of crime in rapidly urbanizing societies that have expanded quickly with youthful populations, chiefs of police have often had to stretch their poorly compensated forces to cover their countries as best they could. Transnational criminal networks have thus been able to exploit the grave limitations of domestic law enforcement.

A catalog of cross-regional factors relevant to the drug trade must also include the nationalistic sensitivities, occasionally developing into animosities, that have long divided various Central American peoples. Historical tensions between certain of these countries and the United States have also sometimes resulted in difficult relations. Only infrequently have leading policy makers in neighboring states been simultaneously disposed to prioritize antidrug measures, especially those going beyond rhetoric to require significant outlays of resources.10 Other domestic and foreign-policy issues, some of which have involved conflicting priorities, have often distracted top officials from countering the drug trade. It is true that, from time to time, collaborative projects involving joint patrols, shared intelligence, and common border monitoring have occurred—sometimes stimulated by outside encouragement or pressure. But, on the whole, intraregional counternarcotics efforts have been slow to develop and have proven to be easily derailed. Few have been especially inspired or creative. While some unofficial transnational networks of mid-level personnel interacting in the implementation of antidrug measures have coalesced, these have tended to be more fragile in Central America than in a more cohesive, developed, wealthy, and technologically advanced region such as western Europe.11 Given the lack of resources and training, cross-national law-enforcement networks have been prone to lapse into inactivity.

Deep-seated concerns that neighbors or more powerful countries might infringe on sovereignty have also hampered cooperative antidrug initiatives.12 With seven states sharing a relatively small region, Central America has numerous land and maritime boundaries. Despite increasing interdependence and globalization, borders remain highly relevant to the drug trade and efforts to counter it.13 Whether on land, sea, or air, borders have tended to be sufficiently fluid to permit traffickers reasonably easy ingress and egress, but they have then bedeviled authorities trying to stop the rapid passage of drug shipments. Furthermore, free trade policies have brought expedited inspections of vehicles, border posts open for longer hours, and ready access to neighboring countries.14 Criminals have often easily crossed the region’s porous borders, either merging into legitimate traffic or simply ignoring customs posts and entering where they liked. Foreign traffickers have suddenly appeared in a country during a transshipment operation and then just as abruptly vanished. The inability of authorities, whether police or military, to cross Central American boundaries in hot pursuit, indeed, to exercise any of a range of law-enforcement functions on another state’s soil, has hampered official efforts to contend effectively with transnational organizations able to move speedily and alter plans nimbly.15

In addition, across Central America, armed forces have proven to be largely inadequate to provide for national security when confronted with the asymmetrical threats posed by transnational criminal groups. Because for many years patrols of airspace have been inadequate and radar coverage limited, most unauthorized drug flights have proceeded unhindered. For its part, while the U.S. military has long tracked drug planes and forwarded such intelligence to the DEA and national authorities in Central America, the U.S. Air Force has not been constituted as a law-enforcement agency and has been of limited utility in stopping aerial drug smuggling.16

Moreover, since the navies and coast guards of these bridge states typically have had only a tenuous grip on offshore activities, local authorities have infrequently intercepted maritime shipments, unless tipped off by the DEA. In any event, as fears of communist subversion have diminished and democracy has taken root, governments across the region have drawn down military forces.17 In some places the deemphasis of national security has helped to ensure the ready transit of drugs, but in others, officers have searched avidly for opportunities for additional compensation—a boon to drug trafficking in those states in which the military has exercised substantial control. Capitalizing on their extraordinary resources, drug organizations have gained extensive experience in corrupting those who might oppose them, including members of militaries.

At sea the U.S. Coast Guard, the principal maritime antidrug force in international waters off Central America, has not been able to enter the territorial waters of these bridge states to enforce drug laws absent specific agreements authorizing joint operations. Thus, between 1991 and 2003 the U.S. government signed cooperative agreements for maritime counterdrug operations in all five of the countries we studied.18 These so-called ship-rider agreements typically enabled the coast guard to proceed with patrols or in hot pursuit so long as an official of the state in whose territorial waters the operation was occurring was on board to authorize formally any law-enforcement action. All told, this has proven to be a particularly successful antidrug initiative. Nevertheless, while these treaties were being conceived, negotiated, and approved, maritime drug smuggling soared. In addition, having to follow the procedures laid out has sometimes proven cumbersome.19 Traffickers have periodically succeeded in evading pursuit, even after a U.S. ship has spotted their vessel and started to give chase, and in Honduras and Panama supplementary implementing arrangements had to be designed to correct flaws in the treaties. Indeed, the ship-rider approach has been ideally suited only for those times when the U.S. Coast Guard was conducting planned operations near a country’s territorial waters and could get a local official on board before suspected vessels were sighted.

Within the Central American states, where large drug loads have been seized and leading traffickers arrested, the U.S. government has frequently led the way. Operating through its DEA, the U.S. Department of Justice has had the financial and technological resources needed to develop intelligence on upcoming drug shipments. DEA agents have operated out of U.S. embassies across the region, recruiting informants and cultivating ties with the local authorities in charge of actually arresting traffickers and seizing drugs.20 However, the DEA, too, has limited resources. The budget for Central America has been modest, and the number of agents assigned to the region has not been large. Their attention has been chiefly directed toward major organizations and trafficking ventures, rather than smaller criminal groups moving lesser quantities.

Although the DEA has been institutionally stable, retaining most policies and personnel despite periodic government transitions and occasional scandals, such has often not been the case with the national police forces with which it has cooperated. In Central America constant turnover in personnel and other institutional difficulties have often led to real discontinuity in antidrug law enforcement. When faced with soaring international trafficking, Central American governments have frequently responded by terminating and then reorganizing counternarcotics institutions when they have become discredited. Governments have removed antidrug officials to eliminate suspect individuals, punish lack of success, offer up a scapegoat, or reward political patrons. Whether such turnover has been merited or not, in most of the bridge states the reporting requirements, chains of command, even the names of antidrug units have repeatedly changed. This constant state of flux has contributed to ongoing institutional weaknesses.

Yet another factor promoting Central American drug trafficking has been the conflicting and overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions. Typically, many national actors have had antidrug responsibilities: customs officials; naval, army, and air force personnel; antinarcotics, anticorruption, and other special units; and multiple police forces, run by the judiciary and by federal or provincial authorities.21 Many of these units have been secretive, reluctant to share information or otherwise cooperate with one another. Latin American militaries have been especially so and have frequently taken advantage of their distinctive legal status as well.22 Infighting over turf has then commonly occurred, as different units have grappled with one another for scarce resources, for their vision of strategies and objectives, for public and governmental attention, and on occasion, for assuming the prime position to reap bribes.

Furthermore, the complexities, confusions, sometimes even chaos in enforcement have been overlaid on often patently inadequate laws dealing with drug trafficking. Apart from Belize, which has struggled with a somewhat different set of legal problems, the rest of the region has been firmly rooted in civil law traditions.23 Their legal systems have not traditionally recognized conspiracy to be a crime, and wiretapping and various undercover operations, including controlled deliveries, have been difficult to undertake lawfully, such that perpetrators can be successfully prosecuted.24 In addition, traditionally, penalties for trafficking drugs have been much lower than those found in most developed countries. These ingredients, combined, form a recipe for a highly ineffective legal regime versus organized crime.

On top of these factors, after decades of internal violence and civil war plagued Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, by the late 1990s an estimated one to two million weapons were circulating through Central America, no longer controlled by regular or rebel armed forces.25 Not only have traffickers purchased and put to use grenades, high-powered automatic weapons, and other small arms, but these have also contributed to increasingly violent domestic crime. And other criminal activity has often diverted the attention of authorities from drug trafficking. Indeed, some officials have suspected that drug organizations have actively encouraged it for precisely this reason.

Meanwhile, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries engaged in the Colombian civil war have had ready access to cocaine supplies and their own steep demand for weapons. Central Americans have thus participated in numerous arms-for-drugs exchanges, including barter transactions involving combinations of money, weapons, and narcotics.26 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, arms-for-drugs deals have occurred periodically in Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, some of large scale.27 Capitalizing on this, an undercover U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in a 2002 sting operation arranged to trade an array of Russian-made weapons, including shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, nine thousand assault weapons, three hundred thousand grenades, and sixty million rounds of ammunition to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) in exchange for $25 million in cocaine. In this case twenty-five Costa Rican officers then trapped and arrested the AUC representatives at a hotel meeting arranged, purportedly, to seal the deal.28 In other cases, however, the authorities have failed to root out arms-for-drugs transactions or have taken action too late to stop them.

A handful of cardinal factors that have affected much of the region have thus greatly stimulated drug trafficking through the Central American bridge states. Arms, poverty, overmatched militaries, weak legal regimes, dismal law enforcement, and ineffective cooperative efforts have joined with geography to create an ideal region for drug transshipment. In addition, in much of Central America the state, historically, “has been used as a means of obtaining and enlarging personal fortunes.”29 This, too, has promoted the extensive narco-corruption through which criminal groups have arranged for drugs to flow through these countries without interruption.

One might at first assume that because our five Central American case studies coexist within a fairly small region and have shared historical experiences and social and economic obstacles, their political, judicial, and law-enforcement systems would closely resemble one another, and the development of the drug trade within their boundaries would follow identical courses. Indeed, the common characteristics of these countries, once derogatorily labeled “banana republics,” have gained considerable attention. Observers have pointed to the interference of various Central American militaries in political affairs, the chronic instability of many of the political systems, the pervasive corruption hampering government functions, and the numerous twentieth-century U.S. interventions.

With respect to the drug trade, however, we have been struck as much by the distinctions among our case studies as by their similarities. In terms of geography the Central American bridge states have varying combinations of jungle, mountains, islands, inland waterways, and lengthy coastlines, each of which factors into transshipment schemes in different ways. Indeed, we have coined the phrase “the geotactics of the drug trade” to denote the manner in which drug networks have formulated trafficking strategies by assembling different methods, routes, and logistics, many dependent on geographic factors. To take one of many possible examples, the placid sea dotted with cayes that lies behind the Belizean barrier reef has encouraged speedboat deliveries of cocaine, while narcotics have been routinely shipped via the deep-water ports of Honduras and Panama.

In a private conversation with the director of the United Nations Drug Control Program, a Caribbean police commissioner declared that the drug problems of the twenty-nine countries being discussed “were like fingerprints: no two were identical, and, for that same reason, no two strategies to combat them could be identical either.”30 Likewise, both drug trafficking and counternarcotics activities in the Central American bridge states have varied in notable ways. Political, judicial, and law-enforcement institutions have functioned in somewhat different manners. The degree of transparency; the content of laws, policies, and procedures; the levels of resources and official competence and motivation; the sophistication of institutions; and institutional flexibility and rigidity have differed from state to state. The region, in fact, hosts a spectrum of regime types, each with its own distinctive profile. Although the historical experiences of these countries have paralleled one another in certain significant respects, they have contrasted markedly in others.31 Each society has provided trafficking organizations and also antidrug policy makers with a particular set of bridge-favoring and disfavoring factors, and while threads of common color reappear, a singular pattern has marked each country.32

The Central American experience suggests that, to analyze bridge-state trafficking, one must first grasp the social, economic, and political contexts in which traffickers have been operating, and one must thus explore not simply the commonalities but the many ways in which a region’s bridge states have differed. Rather than being confined to operating in a single type of bridge state, drug organizations have shown themselves to be highly adaptable: they have instituted successful trafficking schemes in a range of settings. Thus, as drug syndicates have considered where to concentrate their efforts, the profile of each country has helped to determine the speed with which drug trafficking has taken hold; the manner in which it has evolved; the amounts of different drugs that have been transshipped; and the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of antidrug efforts.

The Principal Drugs Trafficked via Central America

Over the years smugglers have succeeded in slipping through Central America sizable amounts of three primary illicit drugs: marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. Though the particular methods and routes to market have differed, the trail has normally led back to Colombia, which has exported the vast majority of all the psychoactive substances transshipped through the region. However, the passage of each of these drugs has had distinctive features. The period and the ways in which trafficking gathered momentum have by no means been identical, nor have government institutions been equally affected.

Central American Marijuana Trafficking

Marijuana trafficking within Central America has taken two principal forms: direct exports and transshipment of Colombian cannabis. Although much of the marijuana grown in the region is also consumed there—mostly within the producer state, though occasionally in neighboring ones—drug rings have exported some to North America. Transnational criminals have also found it profitable to transport through Central America significant quantities of high-quality Colombian marijuana. While in the mid-twentieth century modest amounts of other drugs transited the region, marijuana was the first to pass through in large shipments. Successful marijuana organizations thus blazed paths, initiated smuggling methods, marshaled networks of associates, and developed other relevant expertise in moving drugs toward market.

The principal psychoactive chemical in Cannabis sativa L, or marijuana, is tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), and marijuana potency is measured by the THC percentage found in the dried plants. Traditionally, Mexican varieties of marijuana have tended to be among the cheapest, lowest grade, and most common. Quality has improved over time, as traffickers in Mexico invested in better strains, and a few notable varieties—Acapulco Gold, Zacatecas Purple, Michoacán, and Popo Oro among them—gained early and enthusiastic followings among consumers. However, even after years of effort to develop enhanced Mexican marijuana, its average THC level, as seized along the U.S. border in 2003, measured only 4.8 percent.33

In contrast, more potent Colombian marijuana has regularly fetched the highest prices in the North American market.34 In the 1970s, after eradication curbed Mexican output and the use of paraquat in aerial spraying frightened consumers, American traffickers stimulated the growth of a Colombian marijuana industry by providing seeds, financing, and technical assistance.35 The cannabis cultivated in the lower Sierra Nevadas on Colombia’s Guajira Peninsula then quickly gained an excellent international reputation.36 Users came to value such varieties as Red Dot, Red Point, and San Miguelito, and the pale yellow strains like Santa Marta Gold and Blue Sky Blonde.37

In stark contrast the THC for most Central American marijuana has tended to be rather low, and cannabis from the region has resembled cheap Mexican varieties or the darker and more commonplace strains, such as Mango Viche and La Negra, grown at lower altitudes in southern Colombia. International demand for Central American marijuana has generally been weak. While Costa Rica and Guatemala have occasionally exported the drug, the only Central American strains of marijuana for which significant foreign markets have developed are Belize Breeze and a variant of Red Dot known as Panama Red. During the 1980s cannabis production in Belize crescendoed, as it moved for a period into the first rank of marijuana-exporting countries. And, though in much smaller quantities, producers on Panama’s Las Perlas archipelago have long cultivated some marijuana for export.

To move Central American cannabis to the North American market, most traffickers have preferred maritime shipments, though smuggling networks once also transported much Belizean marijuana by small plane. As for South American marijuana, while some aerial trafficking has occurred, drug networks have regularly shipped Colombian marijuana to Mexico to be exported overland into the United States, while routing other shipments toward western Europe.38 Most commonly, however, numerous vessels carrying marijuana through the Caribbean basin have aimed directly for the United States. Rather than employing Colombian vessels, which have the signal drawback of flying the flag of a leading drug-producing state, smuggling rings have often preferred to use boats registered elsewhere, such as Panama or Honduras. Typically older seventy- to ninety-foot fishing trawlers, characterized by extra fuel drums on deck and relatively large crews to assist in unloading, such “mother ships” have sometimes passed through Caribbean and Pacific waters off the Central American coasts.39

Map 1.2

The U.S. Coast Guard has led international efforts to stem maritime drug passage. Given time and resource constraints and the large number of legitimate commercial ships, making a bust at sea can be challenging without prior intelligence on the vessel, its route, and even the location on board of the drugs.40 Nevertheless, in their continuous patrols of U.S. territorial waters and of the Gulf of Mexico, Caribbean Sea, and Pacific Ocean, coast guard ships have routinely attempted to do so. Coast guard officials (including navy ships with a coast guard officer on board) are authorized to stop and inspect any boat flying the U.S. flag or located in U.S. territorial waters, that is, within twelve miles of the shore of the United States or one of its possessions. In international waters, however, given the venerable doctrine of freedom of the seas, U.S. authorities cannot board vessels of another state at will. When a coast guard crew suspects drug trafficking, it radios the ship, requesting permission to board to check its documentation or seaworthiness. Signs of drug trafficking might be spotted in the ensuing inspection. If the ship’s master refuses boarding privileges or if suspicious matters emerge during the inspection, the coast guard can check information about the vessel with authorities from the flag state. If drug-trafficking suspicions remain, the coast guard may request a Statement of No Objection through the U.S. Department of State, from the country in which the ship is registered, to board, inspect, and enforce appropriate criminal laws on the vessel, using force if necessary.41

Central American states have almost invariably cooperated in issuing these statements. Their governments have also been engaged in implementing antidrug policies of various sorts, and collaborating in major seizures can help officials appear vigilant and competent, domestically and internationally. Central American governments have not wanted to seem to be shielding traffickers, which might cause political trouble at home and antagonize the U.S. government, possibly threatening the continued flow of development assistance. Nevertheless, despite international cooperation, considerable U.S. resources, and some immense seizures, drugs continue to be successfully shipped to market. The maritime transit zone is vast—perhaps six million square miles—shipping has been extensive, and patrols cannot cover the region comprehensively.

As for Central American marijuana exports, this dimension of the trade had multiple effects. Colombian traffickers gained dominance in international cocaine trafficking by adapting methods developed in marijuana smuggling.42 They thus naturally took note of successful marijuana exports via Central America and drew on already existing domestic drug networks there. In fact, the marijuana trade often established Central American criminal groups and then helped bridge-state traffickers to become more capable and elusive, wealthy and well connected.

Marijuana, however, has not been an ideal drug for transnational criminal enterprises. Because it has to be shipped in bulk, rather than in a concentrated form, and its odor is quite distinctive, authorities have found cannabis fairly easy to interdict. Furthermore, marijuana is not as addictive as harder drugs. Since it is relatively easy to grow, global supplies have usually been plentiful, something that has capped its price and resulted in lower profit margins than heroin or cocaine.43 Consequently, experienced marijuana traffickers, intent on maximizing profits and with smuggling methods, routes, and networks already in place, have often moved to the transport of hard drugs.44 Just as marijuana has been a gateway to more dangerous drugs for users, so it has often led to more lucrative drug smuggling for traffickers.

Central American Heroin Trafficking

The Central American heroin trade has diverged from that of marijuana in numerous respects. Traditionally, Europe has been the leading western market for diacetylmorphine, or heroin, originally supplied largely by producers in South and Southeast Asia. Even in North America, Asian producers controlled the heroin supply for many years, with the drug often imported via couriers or inside shipping containers.45 In the late 1950s Colombians did engage in some heroin trafficking, cultivating ties with the U.S. mafia in pre-Castro Havana.46 However, not until the late 1960s and early 1970s did more substantial heroin transshipment occur through Latin America.47 Traffickers came to capitalize particularly on Panama’s role as a busy commercial crossroads and international air hub and on members of its political elite, who could use their influence and social stature to help ensure uninterrupted transit.

Another noteworthy development occurred in Mexico. Here, early in the twentieth century Chinese immigrants had introduced opium poppies (Papaver somniferum L.), hardy and adaptable plants well suited to tropical and semitropical regions.48 With the development of processing and refining skills, Mexican heroin made inroads in the U.S. market. In the 1950s and 1960s Mexican heroin accounted for an estimated 10–15 percent of U.S. consumption, a market share that climbed rapidly in the 1970s, as Turkish authorities curtailed production there.49 Although opium cultivation increased substantially over the next two decades, Mexican civil and military authorities vigorously eradicated it in the mid-1970s and again from 1985 to 1990.50 Nevertheless, the ease of smuggling heroin across the Mexico-U.S. border counterbalanced the relatively high costs of Mexican production.51 In addition, Mexican heroin proved difficult to stamp out, because a handful of powerful, readily identifiable groups has never controlled it.52 Instead, the heroin industry has been highly fragmented, opportunistic, and marked by shifting ad hoc arrangements among farmers, processors, and traffickers.53 The lack of vertically integrated, multipurpose organizations has precluded the “decapitation” of heroin-trafficking groups by killing or capturing kingpins, a strategy commonly employed against cocaine cartels.

In the drug trade widespread trafficking in one country often comes to profoundly affect its neighbor. As one U.S. Customs agent observed, “Agents and police can’t change [the drug business]. . . . It’s like trying to stab a piece of mercury with an ice pick. It just goes someplace else.”54 When counternarcotics authorities pressured Mexican opium producers, some figured turning south would be the best way to maintain profits and outlast antidrug campaigns. Thus, from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s and again in the early twenty-first century, significant opium crops were cultivated in the mountains of northwestern Guatemala along the Mexican border.

Then, in the 1990s the prospect of creating a lucrative South American heroin industry attracted attention from many criminal organizations, including remnants of the Medellín cartel looking to increase profits and regain past prominence.55 While two years would elapse before a newly planted coca bush would become productive, and while high-quality coca came only from the Andes, opium poppies were annual plants, could be grown in many places, and had a short 120-day growth cycle. Although most Colombian producers aimed for two crops a year, some found three annual harvests to be possible. And, because immediate replanting after spraying had occurred was economically viable, antidrug authorities could be quickly put on the defensive again, and production could continue.

Just as important, heroin has been the easiest of the major drugs transiting Central America to hide and transport. Since in a typical year heroin might retail at $1,700 per gram, cocaine at $170, and marijuana at $12, to reach identical sales levels a heroin trafficker would have to transport to market only a hundredth of the product of a marijuana trafficker and a tenth of that of a cocaine trafficker.56 Small shipments of heroin, tasteless and odorless, could be slipped past police, customs inspectors, and even trained drug-sniffing canine units more easily than either marijuana or cocaine.57 Furthermore, Colombian syndicates had the wherewithal to hire Southeast Asian narcotics chemists with expertise in the formulas and refining techniques needed to produce high-quality heroin.58 They could also capitalize on some preexisting trafficking strategies and channels for wholesale and retail distribution and marketing. And, while a drug like cocaine is a stimulant that addicts often take for five years or less before becoming overwhelmed, heroin is a depressant that an addict can use over a longer time frame. This has helped to ensure stable demand.

Fig. 1.1 Cultivation of opium in Colombia and Mexico, 1991–2009

Sources: INCSR (2009), 33; INCSR (2000), 54; INCSR (2010), 196.

Note: Figure 1.1 tracks the net of hectares cultivated, that is, total hectares cultivated less hectares eradicated. Although satellite imagery helped to determine the number of hectares cultivated, analysts concentrated their efforts “on those areas that are most likely to have cultivation,” and not “the entire country for any hint of illicit cultivation.” INCSR (2009), 30. Note further that the statistics do not reflect the fact that some hectares could be replanted after eradication had occurred.

The bulk of heroin production occurs far from the North American market, but it has commanded such high prices that transporting a relatively small amount to consumers has brought tremendous profits. With prices reaching $200,000 a kilo in U.S. cities in the early 1990s, the trafficking through Central America of high-purity Colombian heroin climbed thereafter.59 Poppies were first cultivated in Colombia in 1986.60 Two years later, Colombian counternarcotics police destroyed the first heroin laboratory, as well as the largest poppy fields that had ever been found in the country. In 1991 U.S. Customs authorities first seized Colombian heroin, and during the 1990s Colombian producers came to dedicate more than eight thousand acres to opium poppies.61 As Colombian production climbed, the Central American states became immersed in the transshipment of South American heroin. By 2001 it was being sold for $60,000 to $125,000 per kilo, depending on purity, and heroin supplies regularly moved through Central America, by land, by sea, and especially by air, usually toward the key U.S. market.62

Fig. 1.2 Projected heroin production in Colombia and Mexico, 1995–2009

Sources: INCSR (1996), 85, 149; INCSR (1997), 14, 22, INCSR (1998), 13, 20; INCSR (1999), 15, 19–20, INCSR (2000), 47, INCSR (2001), http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2000/888pf.htm, INCSR (2002), 2:5, 2:14; INCSR (2003), 2:5; INCSR (2004), 99; INCSR (2005), 129; INCSR (2006), 25; INCSR (2007), 32, 120; INCSR (2008), 124; INCSR (2009), 208, 419; INCSR (2010), 196.

Note: Before 1995 the U.S. government did not include in its reports estimated heroin production figures, as opposed to related data such as hectares under cultivation and production of opium gum. Because supporting statistics had been provided by the governments of Mexico and Colombia only up through November of particular years, the State Department was unable to immediately calculate for its annual reports the potential heroin yield in either Mexico or Colombia for 2003 or for Mexico in 2004. However, the statistics were later reported for Colombia in INCSR (2007), 120, and for Mexico in INCSR (2009), 181.

From the mid-1990s into the early twenty-first century, about 60 percent of the heroin seized in the United States originated in Colombia, and in 2000 the Colombian market share climbed further, given drought and eradication in Mexico.63 Although the underlying statistics are not precise, figs. 1.1 and 1.2 illustrate that by 1992 Colombia had decisively overtaken Mexico as the largest poppy and heroin producer in the Americas, a position it generally maintained for a decade.64 Most recently, an intensive eradication campaign, financed by the U.S. government, reduced net acreage in cultivation and reversed the trend of increased Colombian heroin trafficking. In particular, the U.S. Congress passed Plan Colombia, signed into law in 2000. This comprehensive $1.3 billion assistance package aimed to encourage the Colombian peace process while supporting counternarcotics measures, instituting judicial and democratic reforms, and protecting human rights.65 It was followed in 2001 by the Andean Counterdrug Initiative, which further expanded an array of narcotics policies, including intensive poppy-eradication campaigns.

Fig. 1.3 Heroin seizures in key Central American bridge states, 1991–1999

Sources: DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2000), 1; DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2003), 2; DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2001), 2; DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2003), 3; DEA, Resources, Panama (2000), 3; DEA, Resources, Panama (2001), 2, with the gaps in these data filled in by the country reports in INCSR (1991) to INCSR (2010).

Although Colombian heroin transshipment initially occurred primarily via Panama and Guatemala, it was not so confined for long, and by the early twenty-first century, officials across Central America had uncovered significant heroin-trafficking operations.66 While the drug can be transported in many ways, the most typical method has been by courier flown out of the major Colombian airports in Bogotá, Cali, and Medellín, and occasionally Barranquilla. After a layover somewhere in Central America, a different courier, whose documents would not alert customs officials to recent passage from Colombia, would carry the heroin to market. The drugs might be taped to the body; concealed in shoes, clothes, or suitcases; or swallowed in pellets of eight to ten grams, encased in wax or latex. In the early twenty-first century, drug networks started to transship larger individual loads: twenty to thirty kilos, with cocaine and heroin sometimes combined in a single shipment. As figs. 1.3 and 1.4 illustrate, Central American heroin confiscations steadily rose through the 1990s and into the twenty-first century, until opium-poppy eradication dramatically reduced the heroin flow from Colombia.

Fig. 1.4 Heroin seizures in key Central American bridge states, 2000–2010

Sources: DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2000), 1; DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2003), 2; DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2001), 2; DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2003), 3; DEA, Resources, Panama (2000), 3; DEA, Resources, Panama (2001), 2, with the gaps in this data filled in by the country reports in INCSR (1991) to INCSR (2011), 137, 206, 272.

Central American Cocaine Trafficking

Although marijuana and heroin exports have helped to initiate extensive drug shipments via Central America, the transshipment of cocaine hydrochloride truly elevated the stature of these small republics within the international drug trade. As early as the late 1970s Colombian traffickers came to grasp the vast, highly profitable potential of dealing in cocaine. Unlike marijuana, cocaine could be compactly packaged for transport. And, to turn a substantial profit, much less had to be stowed in a light plane, making for safer transshipment.67 Authorities periodically noted that the annual supply for all U.S. consumers could be carried by perhaps six to nine tractor trailers, depending on demand in the year in question.68 Cocaine also lacked marijuana’s distinctive smell; indeed, only specially trained police dogs could sniff out cocaine.69 Even more advantageous, in preparation for sale, pure cocaine could be mixed with other ingredients to increase its volume, thus adding profits.70 Most important, the narcotic was highly addictive and resistant to medical treatment, and its alluring image brought cocaine to be referred to as “the champagne of drugs.”71 One U.S. source declared, “In a competitive, achievement-addicted, ‘Type-A society,’ cocaine’s ability to make us feel empowered, euphoric, energetic, and ebullient fits our culture like a glove.”72

Criminal enterprises discovered that South American cocaine production could be readily expanded. Furthermore, they came to see that if cocaine could be supplied in sufficient quantities and at moderate prices, other drug users might well shift to it. Indeed, production rose, prices fell, and demand grew.73 The Rand Corporation estimated that 38–68 tons of cocaine had been smuggled into the United States in 1981, but four years later cocaine imports had increased to 111–153 tons. In 1985 the U.S. cocaine market peaked at 5.7 million users. These developments spurred competition among dealers, and cocaine purity climbed spectacularly. In 1983 the average purity of cocaine on U.S. streets stood at about 35 percent; by 1986 that figure had risen to 65 percent. In that year the U.S. State Department estimated that Latin American coca growers were producing fully 377 tons of cocaine. A decade later, a national narcotics intelligence committee figured potential cocaine production at 760 tons.74

And so, notwithstanding the lengthy history of marijuana transshipment or the extraordinary profits associated with the heroin trade, cocaine smuggling offered drug rings considerable competitive advantages. Most important, South American criminal organizations had easy access to supplies of coca, which were readily expanded as demand grew. For Central Americans the passage of immense quantities of cocaine immersed their countries in the drug trade. Although marijuana could readily be grown in the hills and mountains of Central America, producers failed to follow suit with coca plants (Erythroxylon coca), perennial natives of the eastern slopes of the Bolivian and Peruvian Andes. Rather, the steps to grow and process coca tended to occur in South America, and its link to Central America was almost exclusively in cocaine transshipment.

The lower reaches of the Andes were thought to provide the ideal location for farmers intent on large-scale coca-leaf cultivation with the requisite high alkaloid levels.75 While Panamanian authorities periodically found and eradicated minor plantations right along the Colombian border, significant modern production never really took hold outside of South America. Instead, the soil, climate, and long growing seasons favored Bolivian, Peruvian, and eventually Colombian coca farming. So, too, did the legions of poor subsistence farmers available to tend the crops, and the long-standing, and entirely legal, tradition within much of the Andean region of cultivating coca to chew to provide vitamins and energy and to ward off the cold and fatigue of high altitudes.

In the 1970s first Chilean and then Bolivian traffickers, most notably Roberto Suárez Gómez, helped to initiate the rapid growth of the cocaine trade.76 Then, through the latter 1970s and into the early 1980s Colombian organizations rose to dominance.77 Just as geographic variables are key to understanding the evolution of bridge-state drug trafficking, so they influenced Colombian ascendancy in cocaine production. Not only did Colombia’s Amazon jungle abut the coca-producer states of Peru and Bolivia, but Colombia featured long Caribbean and Pacific coastlines with multiple deep-water ports.78 Traffickers from Colombia also jumped in to fill the vacuum created when General Augusto Pinochet expelled nineteen leading Chilean traffickers to the United States.79 Moreover, Colombian drug rings tapped into abundant national entrepreneurial and commercial know-how as well as long experience in importing such contraband as whiskey, textiles, appliances, and cigarettes, while exporting sugar, coffee, and emeralds, and eventually marijuana.80

Initially, the Colombian syndicates served as intermediaries, buying drugs from the existing Andean producers and then working out their delivery to market. Eventually, however, Colombian drug cartels encouraged Colombian farmers to plant coca to diminish the costs and risks inherent in importing coca base from Bolivia and Peru. According to the CIA, by the mid-1990s Bolivia and Peru produced about 85 percent of the world’s coca, with 15 percent originating in Colombia and elsewhere.81 Thereafter, the Colombian share of coca production climbed steadily, and by 2001 Colombia had become the world’s leading center of coca cultivation.82

After being harvested, coca then has to be processed into cocaine hydrochloride. To isolate the key alkaloid that drug users value, cocaine production proceeds through two lengthy stages: from leaf to paste and from paste to crystal. Here, Colombian organizations had taken the lead by the late 1960s, thereafter refining 80–90 percent of the cocaine exported to foreign markets.83 Coca grown outside of Colombia has thus been flown or transported overland from Peru, Bolivia, and sometimes Brazil into refining laboratories in Colombia, where drug rings for many years then dominated transportation to market as well. Colombian traffickers usually exported it from Colombian soil, but to avoid detection they sometimes first shipped it to a neighboring South American state such as Venezuela or Brazil. Then, much of the cocaine would be transported via the land, sea, or air space of the bridge states to market. While the retail sale of cocaine has often been left to others, Colombian cartels have created their own distribution networks, taking payment in market countries from wholesale buyers, or through narcotics brokers, who for a fee have held shipments and contacted or searched out such buyers. Indeed, in the late 1980s authorities estimated that the U.S. distribution infrastructure of Colombian drug organizations consisted of about 200 individual groups, including 120 in Florida alone.84

The Central American share of the cocaine-transshipment business has varied over time and is, in any event, impossible to gauge with great precision, particularly on a state-by-state basis.85 This does not mean, however, that no statistics exist. When their superiors, the media, or politicians demand facts, officials have made educated guesses as to amounts transiting one country or another. They have triangulated from seizures actually made, information gleaned from court cases and informants, and judgments as to production and consumption to try to determine about how many tons have passed through each bridge state annually. Although cocaine transit via Central America has plainly increased markedly, the rise in exports has not proceeded in linear fashion. Drug organizations have been nimble and proactive, frequently changing the location of transshipment schemes within a bridge state and between different bridge states. The amounts sent via any particular route in any particular period have thus depended on a constellation of factors favoring or disfavoring shipping through one country or another.

Among the credible estimates, the judge who heard the most major drug cases in Honduras in the late 1980s concluded that cocaine traffickers were then shipping about 35 tons annually through his country.86 In 1990 Guatemalan sources believed that drug syndicates exported approximately 50 tons from that country.87 In 1991 the Costa Rican director of narcotics, the U.S. ambassador, and other sources estimated that 40–60 tons of cocaine transited Costa Rica each year.88 That same year, a leading Panamanian official figured that, even soon after General Manuel Noriega’s ouster, 24 tons of cocaine passed through Panama.89 In 1993 U.S. and Colombian law-enforcement sources estimated that about a quarter of the U.S. narcotics trade involved Central America and that drug organizations were transshipping a combined 165–275 tons of narcotics through all the Central American bridge states annually.90 That figure continued to rise over the years. In 2001 the DEA estimated that 300–400 tons of cocaine passed through the Central American corridor to Mexico and the United States, and the figure of 400 has repeatedly been cited thereafter.91 As the new century approached, an estimated 60–65 percent of U.S. cocaine imports entered the country via this critically important bridge region.92

Fig. 1.5 Cocaine seizures in key Central American bridge states, 1990–1999

Sources: INCSR (2000), 154, 170; INCSR (1999), 190; INCSR (1997), 160; INCSR (1996), 139; INCSR (1994), 172; INCSR (1991), 136, 138, 150, 187; INCSR (1990), 184, 174; INCSR (1989), 100; INCSR (1988), 184, 127, 121; DEA, Resources, Belize (2000), 1; DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2000), 2; DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2001), 2; DEA, Resources, Honduras (2000), 1; DEA, Resources, Panama (2000), 3.

Given the sheer size of the cocaine trade and the considerable law-enforcement resources ranged against it, some trafficking ventures were bound to fail. In the 1980s most cocaine seizures occurred in the United States: two tons in 1981, twenty-seven tons in 1986, and one hundred tons in 1989.93 By the 1990s, however, as fig. 1.5 illustrates, Central American authorities, regularly acting on DEA information, were confiscating sizable quantities of cocaine each year. But, as fig. 1.6 demonstrates, seizure figures had risen substantially by 2006 and thereafter. As our case studies detail, they were also arresting some substantial drug traffickers as well as large numbers of local drug dealers and users.94 Figs. 1.5 and 1.6 also demonstrate that, taken as a group, the Central American bridge states were not surrendering to transnational organized crime; rather, the states were persisting in law-enforcement efforts and then vigorously reasserting themselves, with considerably larger seizures occurring over time.

Fig. 1.6 Cocaine seizures in key Central American bridge states, 2000–2010

Sources: INCSR (2011), 137, 206, 272, 293, 439; INCSR (2010), 219, 308, 498; INCSR (2009), 150, 210, 289, 467; INCSR (2008), 154, 162, 168, 185; INCSR (2007), 19, 147, 154, 160; INCSR (2006), 129, 136, 142; INCSR (2005), 160, 170; INCSR (2004), 132, 155; INCSR (2003), 5:4, 5:29; INCSR (2002), 5:3, 5:27, 5:25; INCSR (2001), 5:23; DEA, Resources, Belize (2003), 3; DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2003), 2; DEA, Resources, Honduras (2001), 1.

Nevertheless, the cocaine interdicted in Central America en route to market has amounted to a small fraction of all that has passed through these countries. The most optimistic estimates have authorities interdicting 10–15 percent of the narcotics heading to the United States through this bridge region.95 The estimate of 5 percent is, perhaps, more realistic, and various law-enforcement authorities have declared that the actual figure might be a mere 2 percent.96 Thus, Central American seizures have lagged well behind estimated interception rates in market countries of 10–25 percent.97 Consequently, while many seizures have occurred, the contribution made by bridge-state interdiction has been too modest to deter criminal groups from transshipping drugs through these countries.

Methods of Trafficking Drugs Through Central America

“Ant Traffic”

In the 1970s drug enterprises routinely employed individual couriers, so-called mules or burros, who carried small amounts of drugs to market in their luggage or on their persons.98 In addition to the few duped into transporting drugs, mules ranged from poor individuals to students to wealthy elites, all enticed by promises of “easy money.” Over time, courier techniques became more elaborate, with some couriers even carrying drugs in their stomachs or body cavities.99 Trafficking organizations naturally came to favor those least likely to arouse the suspicion of customs authorities, such as diplomats or members of ship or plane crews. Members of groups such as the elderly or pregnant women have had the added bonus of being able to avoid x-ray screenings at many security checkpoints.100 A popular variant on air couriers has had underlings driving cars or pickups outfitted with hidden compartments. The steady march of small quantities of drugs via Central America came to be termed “ant traffic,” and the carriers, while insignificant singly, have together carried considerable amounts of drugs, especially cocaine and heroin.101

Air Transport

Although drug networks, particularly minor ones, have continued to rely on these time-tested courier methods, the principal organizations, intent on moving larger quantities, soon turned to the widespread use of propeller planes.102 By 1977 Colombian traffickers had started to transship a significant percentage of cocaine exports by air, and by the mid-1980s authorities estimated that 80–90 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply arrived aboard aircraft.103 Smugglers outfitted fleets of small planes with extra fuel tanks, long-range navigation systems, and sophisticated communications technology, and aerial shipments of four hundred to eight hundred kilos of drugs soon became commonplace.104

Although a light plane with additional fuel bladders can fly from Colombia to the United States directly, such a route is much more vulnerable to being tracked on radar and intercepted.105 The smaller the aircraft, the more difficult it is for authorities to follow its course, but the more heavily loaded, the slower it will fly and the shorter the distance it can travel before refueling. Thus, to evade radar and maximize payload, traffickers might load a Cessna 310 with perhaps five hundred kilos of cargo and fly it at low altitudes for up to eight hours at 240–360 miles per hour, then refuel.106 By incorporating a bridge-state pit stop, drug rings have been able to transport larger quantities more successfully than by using direct flights. But this method requires advance arrangements for logistical support en route. Planes that carry drugs north might return empty, or, to repatriate profits, they might carry weapons, merchandise, or cash.

Interim stops in the different Central American countries thus became a vital ingredient in the successful transit of drugs. While some flights headed from Central America to the United States, more commonly their destination was northern Mexico. By the mid-1980s U.S. Customs agents knew of five hundred Mexican airstrips and 132 stash houses within a hundred miles of the U.S. border.107 The Medellín cartel alone regularly employed eight different named routes, while sometimes experimenting with new flight plans and also combining portions of existing, well-tested ones. In looking back over the decade of Medellín preeminence, one cartel insider declared, “At the beginning there were maybe two or three flights a week, but by the end airplanes were almost continually taking off and returning with cash.”108

When interdiction during refueling has threatened, aerial smugglers have moved to touch-and-go landings or to airdrops, in which a plane would descend to a couple hundred feet and parachute duffel bags of cocaine to boats or waiting ground crews. They have also frequently combined tactics, as when vacuum-sealed and waterproof packages have been tossed into the sea to be picked up by speedboats and eventually moved along by truck, boat, or plane. Over time, to increase efficiency and payoffs, drug organizations have sometimes employed large jets able to fly from Colombia to North America and even Europe.109 During flights from Panama to Mexico in 2006, drug planes were reported to have refueled while airborne for the first time.110

Maritime Transport

During the late 1980s rivals in Cali began to supplant the Medellín traffickers who had pioneered cocaine smuggling by air, and their specialty came to be maritime drug transport. In 1985 the U.S. Coast Guard had first started to seize shipments amounting to thousands of kilos of cocaine, and by the end of the decade aerial cocaine transit had decreased to an estimated 40 percent of the total.111 Colombian cocaine has often been exported by sea from the country’s five principal ports: Santa Marta, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Turbo, on the Caribbean, and Buenaventura on the Pacific. Maritime-trafficking schemes have employed an array of vessels—yachts, speedboats, fishing and coastal-supply boats, ocean-going freighters, and eventually even semisubmersibles and submarines—with some ventures combining motorboat transit with that by fishing vessel or container ship.112 Of these, the most important method over the decades has been to send drugs on commercial ships, with smugglers taking advantage of the millions of containers that enter the United States annually with at best abbreviated customs inspections of the goods inside.113

Here, drug organizations have governments in a bind. Key measures enhancing modern maritime commerce—expedited customs inspections, deregulated shipping industries, and privatized port facilities—have also encouraged smuggling by sea.114 Although the Container Security Initiative program of 2002 has brought U.S. officials into certain foreign ports to work with customs officials to inspect suspicious cargoes, drug shipments have managed to evade the screening process or pass through it undiscovered.

Traffickers have appreciated not only the low interception rates but the sheer bulk of drugs that could be forwarded by ship and soon were moving quite large quantities. Thus, in one six-month period in 1987, U.S. authorities seized sixty-six maritime cargo containers packed with multiple tons of cocaine, including a 3.1-ton seizure in Palm Beach, 2.5 tons in Chicago, and 2 tons in Miami and in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That same year, agents in Port Everglades, Florida, discovered nearly 4 tons of cocaine, transshipped through Honduras, and in 1988 a similar load was interdicted in Tarpon Springs, Florida. In 1989 Mexican authorities made the largest cocaine confiscation ever recorded, seizing a 4.8 ton shipment. Thereafter, as antidrug officials repeatedly eclipsed this record, vessels registered in Central American states were frequently involved. Among the largest busts, in 1995 the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted the Panamanian vessel Nataly I, carrying 12 tons.115 Enormous cocaine seizures at sea continued in the twenty-first century. In 2001 and 2004 authorities stopped two Belize-flagged ships, taking nearly 12 tons from one and more than 11 from the other. And, in the Pacific Ocean U.S. authorities seized nearly 20 tons from a Panamanian vessel in 2007.116

But, to focus on the enormous drug busts alone risks overlooking the constant stream of smaller loads, whose significance, in sum, may well have outweighed even the most immense single shipment. In the summer of 1998, the U.S. Customs Service, operating in Florida’s noncontainerized shipping zone on the Miami River that serves small Caribbean freighters, made a 500-kilo cocaine seizure on a Honduran-registered vessel, another of more than 700 kilos from a Belizean ship, and yet another of almost 2.3 tons from a Panamanian freighter.117 Organizations trafficking drugs by ship have usually secreted them within shipping containers holding such products as wood, crates of hammocks, barrels of butane, and bags of coffee and sesame seeds.118 Perishable items such as flowers, meat, seafood, fruits, and vegetables have often been favored because they can be subject to expedited customs inspection.119 Alternatively, criminal groups have hidden drugs in secret compartments under the decks or inside tanks.120 In one case Costa Rican authorities uncovered a scheme using divers to insert sealed cocaine packets into the outer hulls of ships headed to the United States.121

Whether hidden within a container or inside the ship itself, cocaine has often been brought onto vessels in Central American ports. Alternatively, drugs have sometimes been loaded in South America and have then passed through Central American territorial waters, sometimes transferred from one vessel to another. In addition, drugs have often been carried on ships registered as part of the merchant marines of different Central American states. The region’s ports and free trade zones have thus factored into many transshipment schemes, with the colossal duty-free port at Colón, Panama, the most significant of all.

By the end of the twentieth century, speedboats, often termed cigarette boats or simply go-fasts, were in vogue, carrying cocaine up the Caribbean and Pacific coasts to destinations in Mexico, Guatemala, or Belize. Unlike freighters, fishing vessels, or yachts, which ordinarily fly the flag of a state, go-fasts are not typically registered in that way: a speedboat found in some distant place is very likely engaged in criminal activity. Hence, as stateless vessels, they are subject to U.S. jurisdiction when intercepted far from home. Their low, open hulls and powerful engines make them exceptionally fast and difficult to detect. The speediest boats could outrun most vessels they might meet. While antidrug authorities have confiscated numerous go-fasts, operating them for routine police patrols has often been judged too expensive.122 Thus, criminal enterprises moving cocaine by cigarette boats have had a decided edge, not usually available to those pursuing them. Helicopters or planes have been able to keep tabs on suspicious speedboats, yet these have also been expensive to operate and not always available.

As speedboats have headed north from South America, they have sometimes stayed within the coastal states’ territorial seas, but, particularly in the Pacific, they have at times veered dozens or even hundreds of miles offshore, well into the exclusive economic zones of Central American countries or even into international waters beyond. However, for the traffickers, all of these offshore routes have raised considerable logistical difficulties. Most important, speedboats are gas-guzzlers and need to be periodically resupplied with fuel. Central American associates have often assisted, stockpiling gasoline on fishing boats so that refueling can occur far out at sea.

Whether the drug loads have traveled by container ship, freighter, fishing vessel, speedboat, or even yacht, the cumulative total of small, medium, and large drug transit by sea has certainly been vast. By 1996 the CIA estimated that traffickers were smuggling three times more cocaine by sea than by air. And by 2004 the DEA calculated that drug syndicates were shipping a hundred tons of cocaine through Central American waters annually.123

Ground Transport

Alongside air and sea trafficking, the ground transport of drugs north through Central America has amounted to a third principal transshipment method. Occasionally, cocaine heading to Europe might be brought for a short distance by car or truck to a convenient port or airport, but cocaine being transported overland through multiple countries has normally been headed to the United States.124

Overland drug trafficking has sometimes been used to shift drugs between neighboring bridge states, for instance, from Panama to Costa Rica or from Honduras to Guatemala, prior to export. Ground transport has also been a vitally important method of getting drugs from the bridge states of Belize and Guatemala into Mexico, that key gateway to the U.S. market. And, of course, drugs have often crossed the U.S. border by land. Most significant for the bridge states, drugs have sometimes been trucked, or transported by car, the length of Central America. This approach soared in importance in the 1990s. Before that time the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had obstructed long-range ground transit, but the free trade arrangements of the post–cold war era eased it.125

With time, overland drug shipments have grown markedly in size, as leading drug organizations have come to favor tractor trailers rather than pickups or passenger cars. Large quantities of drugs can be hidden behind false walls or within the merchandise inside eighteen-wheelers. As commerce has increased, the legitimate flow of goods has helped drug trucks heading north to escape detection. Only in the late 1990s were certain authorities able to respond with mobile X-ray units to help inspectors find false compartments in vehicles and containers, and there were not enough of these to do more than curb cocaine trucking to some modest extent.

Continuing Interdiction Difficulties

Across the different smuggling methods, the threat of interdiction has caused drug rings to turn to ever more inventive schemes to try to outwit authorities.126 In the later 1980s one group crafted plastic imitation yams and stuffed them full of drugs, another inserted 560 kilos of cocaine in a shipment of antique machine guns, and still another packed dead armadillos with narcotics.127 In both the United States and Europe, authorities have found sacks of tropical fish that also contained clear bags of pure, liquefied cocaine.128 In the early 1990s, as authorities more commonly called on canine units to sniff out drugs and even drug earnings, traffickers attempted to mask the telltale odors with such items as dog food, spoiled seafood, beeswax, grease, glue, wine, and car and truck batteries.129 In 1992 Honduran police determined that a corpse being sent to the United States for burial had been filled with cocaine, and in 1995 Panamanian Customs authorities, acting on a DEA tip, discovered liquid heroin inside thirty-three-gallon containers of perfume.130 In 1997 the U.S. Southern Command director of counterdrug operations observed that traffickers had been making furniture and even a bathtub out of material containing cocaine, intending to extract the drugs upon their arrival in the United States.131

The most salient point is that, rather than deterring many traffickers, interdiction created a dynamic that encouraged additional production of cocaine, more ingenious smuggling methods, and the use of numerous drug routes through different bridge states. As this occurred, shipment size steadily increased. Indeed, within a span of about a dozen years, cocaine-trafficking organizations had shifted from typical loads of less than five kilos to those of hundreds of kilos with the occasional shipment of multiton quantities.132 While authorities within Central America have made numerous significant drug seizures, the sheer quantities of drugs being exported have overwhelmed the capacity of law enforcement. After reviewing the profusion of ways in which drugs can be effectively moved—couriers, planes, vehicles, and vessels, one observer declared, “These varied forms of travel have created a byzantine maze of air, land, and water routes, making it virtually impossible for a significant portion of their shipments to be intercepted.”133

Central American Drug Traffickers

As the cocaine trade developed into an illicit commercial enterprise that earned billions of dollars a year, it came to involve a host of criminal enterprises. Some groups have focused on only a single type of drug, but many have capitalized on available opportunities to become polydrug organizations. As early as 1985 DEA charted several hundred drug-trafficking rings in Mexico and Colombia alone that could together move tons of cocaine and marijuana per month.134 Certainly, the fortunes of individual enterprises within the Latin American drug business have constantly waxed and waned. Yet considerable demand coupled with high profit margins have ensured that new criminal groups could make the quick earnings needed to branch off from established drug organizations or to spring up in place of those the authorities had disrupted.135 Thus, as particular groups have fallen on hard times, entrepreneurial successors have quickly replaced them, forming a virtually seamless web of traffickers intent on moving drugs to market as effectively as possible.

Although a range of foreign and domestic criminal organizations—some large, others small—have moved drugs through Central America, Colombian and Mexican enterprises have played the most critically important roles. Active for many years, these organizations have moved the largest shipments and fostered a good deal of the drug-related corruption and violence. Kingpins have sometimes used a bridge state, most often Panama or Costa Rica, to meet with others to arrange the details of drug deals.136 They and their closest associates have made key decisions regarding which bridge states to use and how frequently, which routes to employ and for how long, and which smuggling methods to rely on and when to alter them.137

Colombian and Mexican traffickers have sometimes created local cells within the bridge states to assist in their operations, that is, permanent or semipermanent representatives stationed in that country working on transshipment. Alternatively, to transport drugs as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, they have sometimes outsourced jobs to existing Central American networks that might do business with multiple foreign drug rings. Because the fingerprints of leading Colombian and Mexican traffickers are evident in numerous drug-transshipment schemes in the bridge states, we turn next to an overview of the principal cartels active in Central America.

Drug Enterprises Within Central America

Even the largest and most profitable foreign drug organizations at work in Central America have had relatively few permanent employees, as compared to legitimate businesses. The degree to which a drug organization was vertically integrated varied from one group to another and from one period to another, but none was like a multinational corporation with a dense, hierarchically organized, Weberian bureaucracy at its headquarters.138 Rather, drug organizations tended to be lean, decentralized, and highly compartmentalized criminal groups. Kingpins, advised by family members and other inner-circle associates, might determine business strategy and make key decisions regarding routes and methods, which tasks ought to be handled in-house and which ought to be delegated to subcontractors, and when to employ violence, intimidation, and bribery. Associates would procure drug supplies and oversee bridge-country transit, market distribution, security, and money laundering.

To ensure business efficiency, drug smuggling has often functioned as a “fronted-goods business.” That is, as one trafficker put it, “A small amount of money is paid up front, but everyone does not get paid in full till the money flows back down from the ultimate user. That means everyone has a stake in the success of the mission.”139 Beyond this, at home, in the bridge countries, and in markets, drug rings have used the “stick” of violence against those who let them down and the “carrot” of extraordinary compensation for jobs well done. Family members of even low-level, expendable employees have stood as collateral, readily killed by the organization if the employee were to try to cheat it or reveal its secrets to competitors or the authorities.140 Drug groups have also used bribes, bullets, and threats to suborn, dispense with, or intimidate judges, police officers, politicians, prosecutors, customs officials, prison wardens, and a host of others who might stand in their way. Consequently, one DEA agent declared of the Medellín traffickers at the height of their power, “There isn’t a cop that will arrest them; there isn’t a judge that will try them; there isn’t a jail that will hold them.”141

The Era of Medellín Cartel Preeminence

Through much of the 1980s the world’s leading cocaine smugglers were from Medellín, accounting for as much as 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States.142 While organizations headquartered in Bogotá, in Pereira, along the north coast of Colombia, and especially in Cali also held shares of the cocaine trade, Medellín was preeminent, and the loose links among its traffickers solidified to some extent over time.143 Specifically, the principals cooperated in moving drugs and shielding their operations from law enforcement. By pooling the resources of different producers and refiners, they were able to provide a regular cocaine supply. They also minimized risk by coinsuring or cofinancing transportation, partnering to send shipments to market that contained cocaine from multiple groups.144 By using an array of pathways and avoiding putting too much of any one trafficker’s cocaine in any single load, even allowing for losing one or more shipments, a considerable overall annual profit might still be registered.

As between Medellín traffickers and their Cali counterparts, these criminal enterprises sometimes acted cooperatively, and sometimes competitively. Both of the leading Colombian cartels shared interests: for instance, shaping antidrug laws, resisting extradition to the United States, intimidating investigative journalists, and stopping left-wing guerrillas from kidnapping their people for ransom.145 Not only did top Colombian drug organizations sometimes recognize and act on such shared interests, they often peacefully resolved their differences, particularly in the early 1980s and before. For a period Medellín and Cali traffickers even jointly financed and operated a Panamanian bank deeply involved in money laundering. And, on occasion, the different Colombian cartels agreed, at least tacitly, to divide particular markets geographically, rather than to shed blood competing with one another.146 For a period Cali traffickers dominated New York, Medellín traffickers took the lead in south Florida, and a number of Colombian syndicates competed in California, which eventually became, principally, Cali territory.147

Nevertheless, the Medellín and Cali cartels were competitors as well: alternative business entities within a single illegal capitalist industry. They typically utilized separate transshipment with distinctive security, financial, and intelligence arrangements. To gain market share, they sometimes tipped law-enforcement officials to their counterparts’ operations. And, at length, the principal Medellín traffickers lost their grip on the cocaine trade on account of pressure from rivals as well as authorities. Treachery within organizations occurred as well. In 1987 Colombian officials arrested Carlos Lehder Rivas, who had masterminded many transshipment schemes, especially aerial ones, and his own colleagues were thought to have turned him in.148

According to the DEA, Cali traffickers often had better intelligence information on their Medellín counterparts than did the police.149 Early in 1988 Cali kingpin Hélmer Herrera Buitrago instigated a damaging turf war and eventually assisted authorities in tracking down Medellín’s leaders.150 Thereafter, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha was killed in 1989, and the Ochoa brothers—Jorge Luis, Fabio, and Juan David—surrendered in 1990. Then, as the Medellín cartel disintegrated during the intense hunt for Pablo Escobar, Cali kingpins were actively engaged in the so-called People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar (or Los Pepes) death squad that murdered scores of Escobar’s associates, “stripping away the layers of protection around him.”151 Finally, in December 1993 police snipers killed Escobar, definitively ending the Medellín cartel’s reign.

For our purposes, Medellín kingpins were critically important in the decision to shift trafficking operations from the Caribbean to Central America, and Medellín operatives went to work in each of the bridge states that form our case studies. Antidrug officials across the region pointed to the cartel as having opened an array of cocaine-transshipment routes through their countries, with aerial trafficking of particular importance. Thus, the era of Medellín preeminence was closely tied to the rise of Central American bridge-state trafficking.

The Era of Cali Cartel Preeminence

As the principal Medellín smugglers fell, the Cali cartel—best thought of as a “loose association of five major drug syndicates”—grasped the opportunity to grow in scope and stature.152 Cali traffickers eventually initiated even more intensive Central American operations than their Medellín counterparts had. They gained a reputation for conducting their drug-smuggling ventures in a low-profile, businesslike, and less flamboyant style.153 The head of the DEA office in Colombia noted that Cali traffickers “always tried to avoid attention. . . . They killed people left and right—law enforcement, informants and their own people who did not play by the rules—but they always managed to cover it up or make it look as if someone else did it. In Medellín, if Escobar killed someone, he left his calling card as a warning. While Escobar seemed to be concentrating on openly intimidating the government through terrorism, the Cali crowd was penetrating and buying the government while concealing its terrorist-type activity.”154

Under the leadership of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, Gilberto and Miguel, and José Santacruz Londoño Cali traffickers thus succeeded in becoming the next dominant force in cocaine exporting. Of course, even at the apex of its power, the Cali cartel could not form an entirely unified, multilayered enterprise that set prices or otherwise controlled the cocaine trade. Instead, numerous other groups played significant roles in cocaine trafficking. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s U.S. law-enforcement officials declared that Cali accounted for 70 percent of the cocaine imported to the United States and 90 percent of that trafficked to Europe.155 In 2000 DEA international-operations chief William Ledwith testified to Congress that the Cali cartel had become “the most powerful organized crime group in history.”156

The very prominence of Cali traffickers, however, caused U.S., Colombian, and Central American authorities to join forces against them, helped along by jealous rivals. In February 1988 the DEA received three anonymous letters, later traced to the Medellín cartel and reportedly to Pablo Escobar’s brother, Roberto, that revealed that the Cali cartel was smuggling cocaine into the United States from the Amazon hidden in hollowed-out lumber. In March 1988 a ship carrying lumber from Leticia, Colombia, in the Amazon docked in New Orleans. U.S. agents intercepted two tractor trailers transporting the cargo and found large quantities of cocaine. Soon thereafter, another ship carrying lumber from the Amazon arrived in Saint Petersburg, Florida. The shipment was transported to a nearby warehouse, where DEA agents watched a forklift separate 701 cedar boards into a separate pile. When agents moved in, 3.3 tons of cocaine were found hidden in those boards. The forklift operator, who also owned the New Orleans and Saint Petersburg warehouses where the cocaine had been found, as well as the ships that traveled from Colombia to the United States, was Mike Tsalickis, a Florida native who had been appointed by the U.S. Embassy in 1967 to serve as U.S. consul in Leticia. Once featured in a National Geographic book, Tsalickis had earned a living in the Amazon running a zoo, hotel, and sawmill, while exporting wildlife. When Cali kingpin Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela was arrested in Spain in 1984, he was carrying an address book containing Tsalickis’s home and work phone numbers. A U.S. federal court eventually convicted Tsalickis of drug trafficking, sentencing him to twenty-seven years.157

Although Tsalickis had declined to cooperate with authorities, law-enforcement operations continued to seize Cali cocaine and arrest Cali traffickers, including in 1992 Harold Ackerman, the cartel’s point person in Miami. Information and evidence accumulated, and in major police operations during the summer and fall of 1995, seven top Cali traffickers were arrested and one killed.158 Behind the scenes, Cali Cartel security chief Jorge Salcedo and Guillermo Alejandro Pallomari González, the chief accountant for the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, fearing for their lives, surrendered to U.S. authorities, providing DEA with key informants prepared to divulge further details of Cali trafficking.159 These law-enforcement moves fractured the efficient logistical systems that had characterized Cali transshipment operations, diminishing the cartel’s competitive edge.

The highly compartmentalized structure of Cali operations, which had long hampered counternarcotics efforts against the cartel, also slowed the transition to the next generation of kingpins, led by Herrera Buitrago and Joaquín Mario Valencia Trujillo.160 In any event, their reign was much briefer, as Panamanian authorities arrested key operator José Castrillón Henao in 1996 and extradited him to the United States two years later. At length, Castrillón became an extraordinarily valuable government witness.

As the case studies that follow demonstrate in detail, Central America was at the center of many Cali cartel transshipment operations. As Cali traffickers and the law contended with another, the Central American bridge states were central to important developments. Deeply involved in Cali trafficking, they were the site of key arrests and seizures that disrupted the organization and built legal cases against its kingpins.

The Post-Cali Cartel Era

The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, especially Gilberto, and José Santacruz Londoño had provided direction to and cohesion for the Cali cartel. Within the Colombian cocaine industry, their downfall led to increasing fragmentation and intense competition over market share. In general, the larger and more hierarchical and vertically integrated drug organizations have been, the more readily have top leaders been identified for arrest and prosecution, while an array of smaller networks subcontracting many operations has been even more challenging for law enforcement.161 Simply put, pursuing multiple criminal groups can spread resources thin. When asked to comment on the dismantling of the Cali cartel, one Colombian intelligence source analogized: “Hit [mercury] . . . with a hammer and it splatters into tiny drops which are much more difficult to spot, but it doesn’t stop being mercury.”162 By 1999 U.S. intelligence estimated that Colombia alone contained more than three hundred active drug-smuggling networks.163

At first, traffickers from the Northern Valley cartel came to the fore. Initially an offshoot of Cali, this extremely violent organization at its height held sway over much of Colombia’s Pacific coast, smuggling enormous quantities of cocaine while diversifying into heroin.164 And yet even as the configuration of forces in the cocaine trade shifted, bridge-state transit remained vitally important. Not only did Northern Valley traffickers often utilize Central American transshipment routes, but various of their kingpins spent considerable periods in Panama, where certain notable arrests occurred.

As had been true at one point of Medellín traffickers, as it rose to prominence, the Northern Valley cartel sometimes cooperated with Cali. In 1994 Cali kingpins are thought to have persuaded Northern Valley counterparts to contribute along with them to Colombian presidential candidate Ernesto Samper’s election campaign.165 A U.S. Senate 1996 staff report observed that the Northern Valley worked with Cali counterparts to serve common business interests. For instance, for a time the Northern Valley group leased certain airstrips it controlled to Cali.166 Similarly, Castrillón later reported that Cali’s Valencia Trujillo had offered the services of Castrillón’s maritime cocaine-smuggling network to Northern Valley traffickers.167 Nevertheless, when agreements disintegrated, when threatening actions occurred, or when tempting opportunities to gain market share arose, the cartels violently clashed.

As for Northern Valley leadership, in 1992 Colombian authorities arrested initial kingpin Iván Urdinola Grajales. While serving a plea-bargained seventeen-year prison term, he died in a Colombian prison a decade later. In 1995 police gained custody of another kingpin, Henry Loaiza Ceballos, who, harried by Cali rivals and law enforcement alike, turned himself in. The Henao Montoya brothers then rose to the fore. After José Orlando Henao Montoya surrendered to authorities in 1997 and then was murdered in prison the following year, Arcángel de Jesús Henao Montoya stepped up, until his 2003 arrest in Panama. At length, the Northern Valley organization split into three blocs, whose internal strife brought on considerable bloodshed.168 Eventually, Eugenio and Diego León Montoya Sanchez took charge, until their arrests in 2007, and in 2010 Venezuela expelled Carlos Alberto Rentería Mantilla, the last of the Northern Valley kingpins not already imprisoned or killed.169 At its apex the Northern Valley cartel may have controlled as much as 70 percent of the cocaine exported from Colombia annually, but other significant Colombian groups continued to traffic narcotics during Northern Valley’s period of dominance.170 In the early twenty-first century certain Cali traffickers rebounded for a period, and even remnants of the Medellín syndicate, now under Fabio Ochoa’s leadership, carried out major operations in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama.171

In the meantime, the irregular forces in the Colombian civil war took to cocaine trafficking to finance their operations. By the mid-1990s the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), regularly demanded fees for protecting coca crops, while imposing “taxes” on drug enterprises active in southwest Colombia.172 Notwithstanding fundamental ideological differences between the revolutionaries and many leading traffickers, the realities of power distribution in rural Colombia, coupled with the prospect of lucrative profits, overwhelmed conflicting politics.173 A 2001 U.S. government report on foreign terrorist organizations estimated—conservatively, according to later officials—that the FARC was receiving $300 million annually from the drug trade. By this time the FARC was controlling local markets in coca base and had started to supply drug rings with cocaine. Before long its operatives were moving narcotics across Central America, often through its Frente 58 unit. Eventually, FARC arms-for-drugs deals came to light in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama, while Nicaragua granted asylum to FARC leader Nubia Calderón de Trujillo, termed a drug kingpin by the U.S. government.174

For its part, as the right-wing Colombian paramilitary organization United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia, or Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), grew to control sizable tracts in northern Colombia, it too became deeply involved in cocaine trafficking.175 AUC cocaine transshipment first occurred under the leadership of Carlos Castaño, eventually murdered in an internal power struggle.176 In 2003 when the AUC was negotiating with the Colombian government to dismantle nine fronts in exchange for provisional amnesty, the fact that U.S. prosecutors had already indicted three AUC leaders on drug charges complicated negotiations. Although by 2008 the AUC had largely demobilized, many of its former commanders then capitalized on their expertise and connections to continue to traffic cocaine, still sending much of it through Central America.

Just as the connections of the Medellín, Cali, and Northern Valley cartels affected bridge-state trafficking, so too did the repercussions of the Colombian civil war and the increasing involvement of the FARC and the AUC. However, mention of these more prominent drug organizations should not divert attention from the broader trend in twenty-first-century Colombian trafficking. The fewer and somewhat more vertically integrated criminal syndicates of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to numerous drug rings that relate to one another horizontally, with Colombian brokers generating cocaine loads, and numerous so-called offices independently outsourcing activities to specialists in transportation, laundering, and other functions, including another set of brokers in the United States who take charge of arranging distribution.177

The Preeminence of Mexican Cartels

Mexican traffickers, with their unparalleled abilities to move drugs across the border into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, had been greatly benefited by the shift away from Caribbean cocaine trafficking. Marijuana, grown in Mexico from the nineteenth century on, had traditionally dominated the Mexican drug trade, with the U.S. market its most lucrative outlet.178 In their efforts to reap the even larger profits of cocaine smuggling, Mexican criminal groups could call on strong existing organizational infrastructures, years of experience in marijuana and human trafficking, and a two-thousand-mile border flanking the largest cocaine market.

Colombian traffickers soon recognized the business advantages to subcontracting to Mexicans the job of getting the cocaine into the United States, the phase at which so many arrests and seizures occurred. Thus, starting with a 1984 agreement brokered by Honduran trafficker Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros, Mexican drug rings began to charge Colombians one thousand to two thousand dollars per kilo for cross-border transportation. This worked so well that by 1987, according to Robert Bonner, former DEA administrator and U.S. Customs commissioner, 80–90 percent of U.S. cocaine had been smuggled via Mexico. This arrangement, however, caused the Mexican groups to grow in wealth and strength, while multiplying their connections in South and Central America and the United States.179

Perhaps most important, by the early 1990s Colombian cartels were often providing their Mexican associates with a commission of a percentage of the drugs being moved, in lieu of cash payments.180 The DEA traced this policy change to a 1989 dispute between Colombian traffickers and Mexican transporters, who had brought tons of cocaine into Sylmar, California, for temporary storage.181 When Colombian distributors attempted to repossess the cocaine, the Mexicans refused to release it while awaiting full payment for their services. But, before the stalemate could be resolved, the DEA raided the Sylmar warehouse and in the largest U.S. cocaine seizure confiscated 21.5 tons. Thereafter, Colombian and Mexican traffickers agreed that the Mexicans would take a percentage of each future drug shipment as compensation. This, however, entrenched Mexican traffickers in U.S. cocaine distribution, bringing them yet more influence within the cocaine industry.182 In 1992, for instance, Cali traffickers sent about 100 tons of cocaine far out into the Pacific Ocean on mother ships to rendezvous with Mexican vessels. Mexican smugglers then brought the drugs to shore and oversaw their transit across the U.S. border. After returning some of the cocaine to Cali representatives for distribution, the Mexicans took possession of about half the entire shipment to distribute through their own networks.183

The next cardinal factor contributing to the rise of Mexican cocaine-smuggling networks was the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, markedly expanding traffic along the border.184 In the mid-1990s, poised for aggressive expansion and bridling at their long subordinate status vis-à-vis Colombian groups, Mexican traffickers increased their presence in the bridge states, while threatening to buy directly from Andean producers unless the Colombians came to more favorable terms for cross-border transit.185 Although Colombians continued to dominate cocaine refining, Mexican muscle flexing brought on renegotiation.186 Colombians directing cocaine shipments through Mexico began to pay considerably more to their Mexican associates. Furthermore, certain Mexican enterprises did begin to work directly with suppliers, buying cocaine in South America and moving the drugs to the U.S. market themselves.187 And, in response, some Colombian drug rings looked to move more cocaine to the United States by circumventing costly Mexican assistance.188

Map 1.3

Each of these developments had significant consequences for Central America. Deftly capitalizing on their advantages, Mexican organizations soon rose to become the new leaders of the Latin American cocaine trade.189 Because Mexico borders two Central American countries and its traffickers had ties throughout the region, the shifting configuration of power further enhanced the importance of this key bridge region. And, just as the drug trade within Colombia was distributed geographically, with certain traffickers predominant in Medellín, others in Cali or Bogotá, so the same was true of Mexico. Criminal groups staked out their turf and then fought tenaciously to retain or expand it. Thus, while Mexican drug-related violence as well as Mexican drug-trafficking schemes has long been evident in Central America, each now climbed markedly.

Particular Mexican Cartels Active in Central America

One Mexican drug organization of some note in the early years of the Central American drug trafficking boom was the cartel headquartered in the far northern state of Sonora. Originally led by Rafael Caro Quintero, Sonoran traffickers focused especially on the export of Mexican marijuana, rather than smuggling cocaine via Central America. However, they allied with counterparts in Guadalajara for a period, and Caro’s close links with Guadalajara kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo extended to both men participating in the 1985 kidnapping of DEA agent Enrique Camarena.190 The agent’s torture and murder then factored into the development of the Central American drug trade. Honduran kingpin Matta Ballesteros was deeply involved, and gaining custody of Matta became a key DEA objective. Moreover, while the target of a worldwide hunt, Caro fled to Costa Rica, where he was arrested and extradited to Mexico in the spring of 1985. As for the Sonora cartel, although Rafael’s brother Miguel took over, leading it until his arrest in 2001, repeated clashes with the Gulf cartel steadily diminished its importance.

The Guadalajara cartel, founded in the 1970s by Alberto Sicilia Falcón, also gained very early prominence. Guadalajara kingpins long supervised marijuana and opium cultivation in Mexico’s “Golden Triangle”—the mountains of Sinaloa, Durango, and Chihuahua, where most of the country’s drugs are produced—and it frequently trafficked drugs into the U.S. Southwest. As Guadalajara traffickers entered the cocaine trade, they reached out from their traditional territory in northwest Mexico to become active in Baja California, in the Pacific ports of Acapulco and Lázaro Cárdenas, and as far east along the U.S. border as Nuevo Laredo. Cocaine kingpin Félix Gallardo and heroin kingpin Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo built up the cartel. Once Félix was apprehended in 1989, however, the organization split apart. One center of power shifted to Culiacán where Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera developed the Sinaloa cartel. This organization controlled routes within Mexico that ran from Chiapas all the way to the U.S. boundary, and Sinaloan traffickers launched transshipment schemes across Central America with a major presence in Costa Rica.191

The Juárez cartel also grew out of Guadalajara’s fragmentation, and it came to be led by the nephews of Fonseca Carillo—Amado, Cipriano, and Vicente. The most able of the three, Amado Carillo Fuentes, initially seized control, gaining the nickname “Lord of the Skies” for moving large cocaine shipments by air.192 For a period in the 1990s Juárez dominated Mexican cocaine smuggling, enjoying the allegiance of other Mexican cartels and cultivating relationships with Cali and other Colombian traffickers. However, with Carillo’s death in mid-1997 during a botched plastic-surgery operation, bloody struggles among Mexican drug enterprises eventually ensued, as an initial truce ruptured and contenders vied for primacy. With Vicente Carillo Fuentes in charge, the Juárez cartel clashed violently with the Gulf and Tijuana cartels, which had temporarily allied. Not only did Tijuana traffickers fight with Juárez counterparts, but both struggled with Sinaloa for dominance in the Chihuahua–Ciudad Juárez–El Paso, Texas corridor.193 In the course of this bloody violence, the Juárez cartel shifted more of its operations south, with its southeast cell, headquartered in the Yucatán, taking a central role in drug transit via Belize. However, starting in the latter 1990s, law-enforcement successes, pressure by rival Mexican cartels, and eventually Mexican military operations left Juárez a shadow of what it once had been.

The final consequence of the splintering of the Guadalajara cartel was that Félix Gallardo’s nephews, the Arellano Félix brothers, came to lead the Tijuana cartel, sometimes simply termed the Arellano Félix organization. For Tijuana traffickers the Tijuana–San Diego corridor has been critically important to importing drugs into the United States. And for receiving cocaine, the Tijuana cartel has had interests in trafficking all along Mexico’s Pacific coast, including Baja California. In mainland Mexico, Tijuana’s tentacles have extended into Sinaloa and Sonora, and its ambitions have overlapped with those of the Sinaloa cartel, with which it has feuded. Twenty-first-century U.S. and Mexican law-enforcement efforts have diminished Tijuana; one brother (Francisco Rafael) was arrested in 1993, another (Ramón) was killed in 2002, a third (Javier) was arrested in 2006, and a fourth (Eduardo) was apprehended in 2008. Then, after Teodoro García Simental gained control, the Mexican Federal Police promptly captured him. Over the years, however, Tijuana has been quite active in Central America. Its traffickers have run numerous drug transshipments through Costa Rica and Guatemala, for instance, and in recent years have clashed violently with Gulf cartel counterparts in Guatemala.

From the Central American perspective, the Gulf cartel, one of Mexico’s most long-standing, has eclipsed Sonora and Tijuana in importance, while rivaling Juárez and Sinaloa.194 Contraband smuggling along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, dating at least to the 1940s, when it was identified with the border city of Matamoros, first developed smuggling networks, routes, and methods. The Gulf cartel has long specialized in moving drugs, first marijuana, then cocaine as well, especially through the Nuevo Laredo– Laredo, Texas corridor. One of the first Mexican kingpins, Juan Nepomuceno García, initially led the organization, but eventually his nephew Juan García Abrego took over operations, expanding its size, functions, and reach and extending its connections in Mexican politics and in the Colombian cartels. Once closely allied with the Cali cartel, Gulf traffickers have long relied on routes through Central American bridge states, including Belize and the Caribbean side of Costa Rica, and they have diversified from cocaine trafficking into the transshipment of precursor ingredients for methamphetamine.

The Gulf cartel has also been especially important for spawning another significant Mexican drug ring: Los Zetas. In 1996 García Abrego was captured and expelled to the United States, and thereafter the Gulf cartel’s long-standing strategy of corrupting key military, political, and law-enforcement figures faltered. Threatened by rivals and federal authorities and facing internal dissension, the new kingpin Osiel Cárdenas Guillén formed his own special forces, recruited from an elite Mexican Army unit that had received U.S. training. This Los Zetas group acted at first as the Gulf cartel’s enforcers, intimidating potential informants, deserters, and debtors, while clashing with other cartels and Mexican law enforcement alike. In the twenty-first century the upper echelons of the Gulf cartel came under pressure with the arrest of José Albino Quintero Meraz in 2002 and Cárdenas Guillén in 2003. Although for some years Cárdenas continued to run many Gulf operations from his cell, he was extradited to the United States in 2007, and shortly thereafter Los Zetas branched off on its own.195

Headquartered first in central and eastern Mexico—Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, and Zacatecas—Los Zetas had fought its way into the front ranks of Mexican drug organizations by 2009, employing extreme cruelty to intimidate rivals and the public. At first, it lacked the connections to thrive on its own, so for a short period Los Zetas allied with the Salvadoran Mara Salvatrucha gang, more expert in certain aspects of moving and distributing drugs. With time, however, Los Zetas gained such a reputation for violence and such a capacity to traffic drugs effectively that it has threatened other Mexican cartels. It has also become deeply involved in drug transportation via northern Central America with extraordinary influence in Guatemala, where it has recruited former Guatemalan soldiers, the elite kaibiles, established training camps, and fought local authorities, Mexican rivals, and Guatemalan associates alike.

For its part, La Familia, headquartered in Michoacán, has shunned the term cartel, preferring to project an image of being God-fearing, community-spirited, Michoacán locals, employing the poor and the dispossessed and awakening them to fundamentalist evangelical Protestantism.196 In truth, while sometimes blaming others for crimes its people have perpetrated, La Familia has engaged in terrorism, launching the 2008 grenade attack on Independence Day in Morelia that killed 8 and injured 110, and it has viciously attacked rival traffickers, torturing and murdering them, sometimes with dismemberment or decapitation. Before his killing in a two-day shoot-out in late 2010, Nazario Moreno González led La Familia, alongside José de Jesús Méndez Vargas. Under their tutelage the organization came to dominate the import of drugs, including large quantities of cocaine, through the major Pacific port of Lázaro Cárdenas. One specialty has been in trafficking methamphetamines: importing pseudoephedrine and exporting and distributing meth. In 2009 La Familia reportedly helped the Sinaloa and Gulf cartels against Los Zetas, dispatching lieutenants and hit men in coordinated attacks in Veracruz and elsewhere. As part of this arrangement, La Familia has apparently advised Sinaloa on producing meth, while Sinaloan traffickers have permitted La Familia to transport cocaine along its routes, including via Guatemala, without paying them a transit fee.197

While these principal Mexican drug organizations have been vitally important to bridge-state trafficking, an array of other Mexican criminal groups has been at work in Central America as well. In 2001, while identifying the Juárez, Gulf, and Tijuana cartels as predominant, the DEA reported that of the fifteen to twenty leading drug organizations, nine were Mexican. In 2003 DEA statistics suggested that Mexican cartels were responsible for 77 percent of the cocaine entering the United States, a figure that jumped to 92 percent by the following year. In 2004, at a time when illegal drug sales were grossing $65 billion, regional DEA director Larry Holyfield declared, “The largest groups of narcotics traffickers are in Mexico. They are the most dangerous, the strongest, and they have incredible trafficking networks.”198

As was the case with the Cali and Medellín cartels, law-enforcement authorities have been able to kill or arrest numerous kingpins. And some high-level Mexican traffickers have been arrested in Central America, further disrupting operations. However, again, new leaders have sometimes taken charge and fragments of once-dominant syndicates have grown to prominence themselves. Instability has encouraged both entrepreneurs and extreme violence, as contenders have tried to grasp control and gain market share. In 2001 antidrug officials noted that some major arrests had stimulated the rise of sixty new trafficking groups, some paying fees to larger organizations to gain access to the U.S. drug market.199 In 2007 the U.S. Government Accountability Office reported that Mexican traffickers, including The Federation, were at work across the United States, amassing $23 billion in drug profits.200 During a forty-four-month law-enforcement operation against La Familia that concluded in 2009, U.S. authori-ties seized 12 tons of drugs and $32.8 million and arrested more than 1,200 associates, while discovering that the Mexican organization had cells in nearly every U.S. state. In 2010 U.S. officials ended another two-year operation, in which they seized $154 million, 2.5 tons of cocaine, 69 tons of marijuana, and more than 630 kilos of heroin, while arresting 2,200.201

The rise to dominance of Mexican traffickers has been especially significant for the Central American bridge states, which were ideally situated for the scores of transshipment schemes aimed at transferring drugs from South America to Mexico. There, Mexican cartels could take charge of transport into the United States, relying on their own methods and secure routes within Mexico proper and along the U.S. border.202 All of the Central American bridge states, and especially neighboring Belize and Guatemala, have had the experience, connections, and location needed to play vitally important roles for Mexican drug rings.

Anatomy of a Central American Bridge State

Since transferring tons of drugs from farmer to consumer requires extensive activities en route, smuggling organizations have carried out numerous functions within the bridge states. Drug enterprises have hired truck drivers, mechanics, loaders, bodyguards, and longshoremen. They have employed pilots familiar with flying small aircraft around Central America, preferably with a daredevil or outlaw mentality, often paying a per-kilo price to transship drugs.203 They have also contracted with local captains to traverse coastal waters, avoiding law enforcement and hidden hazards alike. At sea, Central American fishing vessels have refueled speedboats. On land, associates have supplied aviation fuel to drug planes. Indeed, the essential bridge-country function has been to serve as a pit stop, where aircraft, ships, and vehicles could be refueled, repaired, or serviced. During ongoing transshipment, safe houses have been provided for traffickers so that drivers, pilots, captains, and crews could be rested or rotated. After drugs have been imported, bridge states have functioned as forward staging bases, in which supplies could be warehoused while awaiting shipment to market.204

Some Central Americans have been hired to perform discrete tasks, such as leasing a private airstrip. Others have become more integral and multipurpose members of an organization, taking on different jobs in a series of aerial, maritime, or overland drug ventures. Leading bridge-state traffickers have even invested in transshipment schemes or masterminded aspects of them.205 Mid-level associates have hidden drugs in legitimate merchandise or repackaged them to make their transit more secure, such as vacuum-sealing them for water drops. When transshipment operations have gone awry, drug rings have called on Central American cells or cartelitos to salvage what they could from botched deliveries or compromised shipments. Sometimes an organization’s fugitives have been hidden from the DEA or other foreign police forces. Central American colleagues have assisted pilots and route supervisors looking to evade capture or to flee from jails and prisons. They have plotted out escape plans and furnished plane tickets, false passports, and new identities.

Valuable Goods and Services

Before his murder, U.S. trafficker Barry Seal, a convicted cocaine smuggler turned government witness, appeared before the President’s Commission on Organized Crime and claimed that the Medellín cartel was “as professional as any Fortune 500 company.”206 Certainly, the leading Colombian drug organizations once ranked among the wealthiest multinational businesses, with resources that could outstrip those that any state in the region could devote to combating them. With transit costs a small fraction of potential profits, traffickers have had money to finance tasks such as sending operatives to spread disinformation, while keeping tabs on the authorities, the competition, and informants.207 To determine changes in police tactics and strategies, drug organizations have developed informants within law enforcement and recruited local people—janitors, clerks, cab drivers, prostitutes, gang members, low-level employees— to assist in surveillance or provide useful tips.208 Major drug organizations have had the ability to bug phones and intercept and record conversations.209

While social scientists may be disinclined to focus attention on technological factors,210 the ability of transnational criminal groups to acquire and utilize high-technology items has vitally affected the manner in which traffickers and law enforcement have contended with one another in the bridge states. One reason that drug organizations have posed such a challenge to those aiming to curb their activities is their ability to spend lavishly on goods as well as expertise. They have purchased automatic weapons and such accessories as night-vision goggles and laser-equipped guns, most far superior to those of Central American authorities.211 Drug rings have invested in electronics: global-positioning systems, cell phone encrypting devices, voice-disguising scramblers, and spy equipment, sometimes employing former intelligence officers to operate them.212 Planes with sea-sweeping radar have been sent out in front of large maritime cocaine loads to try to ensure that the way was clear for following speedboats.213 These planes, some costing six-figure sums, have been outfitted with multiple 200- or 300-horsepower engines, enabling maximum speeds of up to fifty knots that provide the ability to outrun local pursuers.214

To maximize effective trafficking while minimizing losses of product and personnel in transit, drug rings have cultivated links to officials in the bridge states, including judges, politicians, military personnel, and law-enforcement agents. The most prominent traffickers, whether domestic or foreign, have routinely developed networks of friends and acquaintances from whom favors might be expected. They have aimed to extend their influence by giving generously to needy individuals, political campaigns, and particular communities. Drug rings have thus taken full advantage of the patron-client relationships long ingrained in Latin American life, expanding business contacts, utilizing extended families, and nurturing relationships with the influential.

Associates within the bridge states have assisted in identifying targets for bribery, and local “bagmen” have delivered payoffs. A great range of corrupted officials have then worked to thwart the seizure of drugs and the arrest and imprisonment of traffickers. However, drug organizations at work in the Central American republics have been so intent on increasing their profits and market share that their political interests have been strictly limited. Central American traffickers have not aimed to overthrow regimes, create parallel government functions, or overtly install themselves in political power, objectives that have occasionally influenced the substance of local and national politics elsewhere in Latin America.215 Rather than seeking to destroy the political system, as a terrorist might, drug rings operating in Central America have opted to work within the established social order, manipulating it to their benefit.216

Drug organizations have also frequently wielded violence and intimidation in the bridge states. Of course, this is an industry naturally prone to bloodshed: possible prosecution discourages written records; criminal transactions often go sour; discreetly informing on a partner or competitor may well benefit a trafficker; and, at least in certain places, drug loads are regularly stolen.217 All such activities have spilled into Central America, causing drug-related violence to soar. Moreover, to coerce the support of reluctant officials and to interrogate, cow, or eliminate rivals, untrustworthy or uncooperative employees, and others who might potentially threaten their activities, drug rings active in Central America have utilized thugs and gunmen.218 While foreign drug enterprises have sometimes dispatched their own professional hit men to the bridge states, they have also employed local associates to strong-arm people or even to carry out contract killings.219 In these activities present or former members of the police and military have often had access to weapons and useful local knowledge, including contacts among gangs and arms and drug dealers. They have often been eager to supplement painfully inadequate salaries, and some have had extensive experience in intimidating officials, frightening the populace, and carrying out extrajudicial killings.

In the face of this rash of organized crime, authorities in the bridge states have not been idle. As transnational drug enterprises have amassed wealth and experience, they have been forced to contend with new and improved police strategies and techniques, usually spearheaded by the DEA. However, as evident in much transnational crime, including human trafficking, increased law enforcement tends to lead to enhanced criminal skill, organization, and sophistication.220 In the case of the drug organizations active in the bridge states, the most important response has been increasing specialization.221 Deal makers have assembled the pieces of transactions, while brokers have brought buyers and distributors together.222 Upper-level managers have acquired aircraft, supervised the shipment of particularly profitable loads, or overseen continual shipping through certain zones.223 Mid-level facilitators have taken on tasks ranging from obtaining beepers and cell phones for associates to renting vehicles, apartments, and stash sites, to otherwise coordinating conspirators.224

Screening Off Activities

While traffickers have had to attend to all such business exigencies, the illegal nature of these transnational ventures has required layers of complexity well beyond those found in legitimate commercial undertakings. To hinder law enforcement, functions have routinely been compartmentalized so that conspirators know little about activities other than their own tasks.225 Then, to keep their assets from being seized as the fruits of crime, trafficking organizations have constantly worked to hide the true source of their wealth. Implementing elaborate money-laundering schemes has been one cost of doing business. And, while Panama has served as the epicenter of financial operations for drug organizations, the cleansing of assets that could be traced to drug transactions has come to concern authorities across Central America. Indeed, couriers have regularly flown from the United States into all the Central American states, transporting extraordinary quantities of cash.

While criminal enterprises have often used profits to buy cars, planes, furniture, jewelry, and real estate, they have also frequently deposited drug profits in bank accounts, which, to hinder investigators, have usually been numbered or placed in the name of mistresses, relatives, or fictional or shell companies. The funds have then typically been transferred electronically through multiple accounts in multiple banks, often in different countries.226 At length, many of these funds have landed in some legitimate investment that would bring a return to the kingpins not obviously related to drug transactions. Trafficking organizations needing to camouflage large sums of drug profits have been particularly attracted to commercial undertakings with high cash flows: hotels, restaurants, flea markets, art dealerships, construction companies, car-and-boat dealerships, casinos, internet-betting operations, and currency-exchange and investment houses. Drug earnings have thus been unobtrusively merged into legitimate businesses operating in the region.227

In laundering money, multiplying their earnings, and further entrenching themselves in society as apparently legitimate business executives, major traffickers have had to interact with the global economic system. While often in dire need of expert counsel, rather then maintaining the in-house professionals routinely employed by legitimate corporations, they have preferred to subcontract for white-collar matters.228 And, given their wealth, traffickers have had few difficulties in finding eager assistance. Bankers and accountants within Central America have looked after business interests, while financiers and real estate agents have assisted with investment strategies. Lawyers, too, have played a vital part in ongoing operations. While primarily serving as defense counsel for imprisoned conspirators, attorneys have also frequently facilitated the business affairs of drug organizations. They have helped traffickers to buy legitimate enterprises, create shell companies, defeat asset-seizure laws, and handle underlings and inquiring officials alike.229

In detailing how leading foreign drug rings have recruited local attorneys, one former defense lawyer reported, “I was asked by someone who was to appear before the [Legislative] Drug Commission [of Costa Rica] to represent him. Ask for any amount of money, he said, and it will be on your desk. Just ask; just name a price. And if you don’t want it delivered to your desk, it can go to a bank account in the United States or Switzerland or Panama. He said to me, ‘I’m not asking you to do anything wrong, just appear with me, and it can all be yours: money, five-star hotels, travel, entertainment.’”230 Recognizing that traffickers have sometimes trapped attorneys by paying excessively for legal work but then later demanding help in illegal ventures, this attorney chose to turn down the offer. But, other lawyers have failed to reject extralucrative enticement, and some have later found that they lacked the willpower to resist demands for unlawful behavior, particularly when those were paired with threats or blackmail. Certain lawyers have turned to assisting criminal syndicates with activities well removed from the practice of law. Attempts to curry favor with wealthy clients have entwined lawyers in other criminal activity, occasionally through “fee” arrangements. Some attorneys have been convicted of directly trafficking drugs, and for a period the so-called lawyers’ cartel took a prominent role in the drug trade in central Honduras.231 The occasional report has even surfaced of a lawyer acting as a hit man for a drug ring.232

Much more frequently, lawyers have been used as bagmen and messengers delivering threats. From their headquarters in Cali, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers used noted U.S. and Colombian defense lawyers to “encourage” captured associates not to reveal operations to authorities and certainly not to implicate the kingpins.233 A carrot-and-stick approach helped to maintain a rigid code of silence. The cartel would cover the expenses of arrested employees, including supporting their families and paying their attorneys, as long as they refused to divulge information on its activities. Yet it would threaten to murder them and family members should cooperation with the authorities occur.234 The cartel called on its attorneys to deliver cash payments to imprisoned associates and their families and to visit arrested employees in jail, reminding them of the code of silence and its strict enforcement.235

U.S. Policy Responses vis-à-vis the Bridge States

The U.S. government has employed vigorous diplomatic-political tactics to try to coerce bridge-state governments judged to be insufficiently vigilant or enthusiastic toward more effective antidrug efforts.236 In particular, in the 1980s the United States began to link U.S. aid, loans, and trade preferences to counternarcotics assistance by foreign governments.237 Under §490 of the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. Congress has required presidents to certify annually that states are fully cooperating with U.S. counternarcotics efforts aimed at curbing drug production, trafficking, and consumption.238 While humanitarian and drug-control assistance would not be affected, a decertified state would ordinarily be ineligible for most U.S. military and development aid. Congress has also mandated that the U.S. government vote no on loan applications by decertified countries appealing to multilateral development banks.

This apparently strict regimen, however, has been tempered somewhat in practice. U.S. representatives have lacked the authority to veto proposed development-bank projects, and U.S. diplomats have not, traditionally, lobbied other governments to block loans on account of U.S. decertification.239 Furthermore, Congress has supplied the Executive Branch with a national-interest waiver, and this has often been used for states not satisfactorily cooperating in counternarcotics ventures, but in which decertification might adversely affect other U.S. national security concerns. Most frequently, U.S. diplomats have employed the process of deciding whether or not to certify as a means of sending stern messages to foreign officials that more tangible action is expected. In fact, most Central American countries, most of the time, have shown some antidrug efforts and successes each year, although occasionally, as in Belize in 1997, or Guatemala and Honduras in 2003, the U.S. government has publicly protested lackluster performance. Only after seizures rose were the countries again certified as fully cooperating partners in the effort to stop international drug trafficking.

The antidrug laws that have passed, the antidrug policies that have been implemented, and the antidrug resources that have been marshaled against drug networks have by no means been insignificant. In the bridge states considerable seizures have occurred. Many midrange and low-level associates and a few kingpins have been captured. Authorities have disrupted one organization after another, and even the largest and most powerful drug syndicates have failed to become permanent fixtures on the Central American scene. However, the relentless demand for illegal drugs and the consequent enormous profits to be made in their supply have continued to entice individuals into the drug trade. While the U.S. government has offered compensation for useful information via authorized payments by DEA agents or initiatives such as the State Department’s Narcotics Rewards Program, those cooperating with traffickers, rather than authorities, might earn even more considerable sums, with less risk.240 When drug rings have detected an informant, they have often acted brutally, torturing and murdering the individual and sometimes exacting further vengeance on relatives.

Thus, even though the U.S. government proclaimed a War on Drugs and has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to it, the overall drug supply has remained ample. Indeed, despite hundreds of tons that have been routed to Europe, and despite increasingly impressive annual seizures in the United States and in producer and transit countries, market prices have rarely spiked upward.241 In 1997 U.S. counternarcotics authorities conceded that there had been “little discernible effect on price or availability,” even after the seizure of a hundred tons of cocaine that year.242 For all of the money devoted to antidrug activities, for all of the crops eradicated, shipments seized, traffickers taken down, and networks dismantled, drug organizations have succeeded in sending plentiful quantities of drugs through Central America every year from the mid-1980s to the present. For consumers the price of these drugs has remained relatively stable and in some cases has actually decreased, even as drug purity has risen.

The North American and European Markets

A final noteworthy dimension of bridge-state trafficking involves the consumers to whom the drugs have been directed. The size of drug markets has largely determined the quantities of drugs that have passed through Central America, and the manner in which drugs have finally entered those markets has been the ultimate stage of the transshipment schemes that so often featured the bridge states. Of course, the United States has always been the leading market for Latin American illegal drugs. By the 1980s millions of Americans had tried marijuana and cocaine, and more than half a million had used heroin. In the following decades, however, drug use climbed significantly in neighboring countries as well. While a cocaine market developed more slowly in Canada, by the mid-1990s an estimated 250,000 Canadians used cocaine annually and 35,000–40,000 were on heroin, with Health Canada reporting in 2003 that approximately 1 million Canadians consumed illegal drugs.243 That same year, 3.5 million Mexicans were thought to be on drugs, a figure that increased by another million before the decade had elapsed. Indeed, between 2003 and 2009 the estimated number of Mexican drug addicts nearly doubled to 307,000.244 Thus, by the twenty-first century, marijuana, heroin, and cocaine traffickers were targeting all of the North American countries.

Despite extended efforts over three decades, the Central American bridge-state governments, even with the aid of the United States and other interested developed countries, have been unable to overwhelm the capabilities of the many organizations smuggling drugs through the region. Clear evidence of this has been the abundant supply of high-quality narcotics in the markets at the end of the drug pipelines. Between 1981 and 1996 the prices of cocaine and heroin in the United States fell by about two-thirds, while purity rose by 44 percent and 83 percent, respectively.245 A clearer testament to the overall success of traffickers in getting their product from its point of origin to market is difficult to imagine. Furthermore, drug production has been sufficiently large that even the seizure by authorities of enormous shipments has failed to diminish perceptibly the availability of drugs. At most, successful interdiction might cause very occasional temporary price increases, but drug users, undergirded by those who are addicts, make for a demand curve that remains largely unresponsive to modestly higher prices, particularly those of short duration.246

The U. S. Market

While U.S. demand for illegal drugs is not as high as it once was, large numbers continue to use drugs, and the most recent statistics indicate that use is once again rising.247 The U.S. market is well supplied because consumers have the money to buy drugs, which can enter the United States from many directions and through many methods. Indeed, with boundaries stretching almost ninety thousand miles in circumference and the world’s largest economy, the United States has been an exceedingly inviting target for traffickers. As early as the mid-1980s the U.S. Customs Service estimated that 682,000 commercial flights and 4 million shipping containers entered the country annually. By 1998, 86 million cars and 4 million trucks crossed the Mexico-U.S. border each year, as did 278 million people. Drug smugglers have long been able to either evade inspection or simply merge into the private and commercial traffic and get drugs past the DEA, customs, the border patrol, local police, and other authorities.248

Initially, the most popular method to smuggle drugs into the United States was on board light planes. In the mid-1980s officials estimated that some eighteen thousand unauthorized flights penetrated U.S. borders annually. Through most of the 1980s, drugs primarily arrived in the United States through Florida, as much as 70–80 percent of the cocaine, according to official estimates. As Central American transshipment increased, more flights were directed to remote airstrips across the U.S. border neighboring Mexico or flanking the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, as authorities caught on to simple aerial-import schemes, drug syndicates adapted with more sophisticated tactics, such as having drug planes evade radar by flying just above the water’s surface or dodging into the regular path of helicopter flights coming ashore from offshore oil operations. A technique known as “mating” involves two small planes flying so close to one another that they show up on radar screens as a single blip. One pilot in a clean plane would then land legally at a major airport, while the other would abruptly split off and drop a drug load elsewhere.249

Fig. 1.7 Estimated marijuana users in the United States, 1979–2009

Sources: DHHS, Household Survey, 1979, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.

Note: Given the large number of marijuana consumers, we have used a scale of 80 million, as opposed to 20 million for heroin and cocaine users. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 1979, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 were obtained from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and compiled using SPSS to find the estimated number of drug users in the United States in the listed years. These findings, however, are estimates and do not represent the actual number of drug users in the population. Usage of marijuana, cocaine, and heroin was defined in terms of having used the drug within the past year. This method was preferred over “ever using,” as it shows the demand for the particular drug, thereby eliminating respondents who experimented once with the drug. The population estimate is based on the percentage of respondents to the survey (number of “yes” respondents/sample size). This percentage, multiplied by the total population according to the U.S. Census, determines the estimated number of users. The margins of error in each of the six studies were relatively small, primarily on account of the large sample size relative to the population.

As for maritime trafficking, many shipments of marijuana and cocaine have arrived via the Florida coasts, though with time, U.S. destinations, particularly for marijuana imports, have ranged all along the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast to the Carolinas and even to New England. A mother ship might steer for a prearranged rendezvous point twenty to two hundred miles offshore. There, associates could approach in small vessels, and after an all-clear signal, the drugs would be off-loaded. The coastal boats would then scatter, either heading to remote locations along the shore or simply merging into the regular water traffic entering nearby ports. During the summer months, entry along U.S. coasts was particularly easily accomplished because offshore waters were full of pleasure boats, and drug deliveries could blend into offshore boating and sport fishing.250

When hidden cocaine has arrived secreted in a container vessel bound for a major U.S. port, associates might be poised to unpack it upon arrival or wait until it reaches its final destination. As a U.S. Customs official noted, “There are virtually thousands of individuals employed by ocean carriers, . . . as longshoremen, freight forwarders, brokers and in companies working in the importation or transportation industries, who know how, where, and when Customs examines cargo.”251 Thus, drug rings could create or tap into networks closely familiar with the shipping industry to off-load drugs and to provide counterintelligence on customs operations.

For the United States, marijuana has been the least important of the three principal psychoactive drugs trafficked via Central America, although the U.S. cannabis market has been large and stable and far more people have consumed marijuana than any other illicit drug. As fig. 1.7 shows, between 1979 and 2009 the number of U.S. marijuana users varied from just over thirty million to about seventy million.252 In addition, considerable profits have been made supplying the North American market with transshipped Colombian marijuana or high-quality Central American cannabis. However, many countries have produced marijuana; indeed, very large quantities have been grown in North America itself. In the early twenty-first century, to revive and add value to the marijuana trade, Colombian drug rings began to export a potent mixture of marijuana, glue, and additives known as pegón. This rose to become a noteworthy problem in Panama and has concerned officials in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala as well. Some pegón has even been exported to the United States. Nevertheless, over the last three decades only a modest portion of the international marijuana trade has originated in Central America or been transshipped through it.

Fig. 1.8 Estimated heroin users in the United States, 1979–2009

Sources: DHHS, Household Survey, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.

The morphine in heroin, exceptionally addictive, has resulted in a market with a steep demand curve. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. antidrug officials estimated that half a million people were using heroin annually in the United States, but the data shown in fig. 1.8 suggest rather higher numbers: that between 1979 and 2009 a total of 650,000 to about 930,000 users consumed heroin each year.253 At length, U.S. counternarcotics officials came to agree that earlier figures had been flawed, concluding that by 1998 the numbers of heroin users had actually reached at least 980,000 and perhaps 1.2 million, if casual users were included.254

Fig. 1.8 also illustrates that U.S. heroin consumption has remained at significant levels from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Just as the high price of cocaine made that drug a status symbol in the 1980s, so heroin eventually became more of an elite drug than it once was. By the later 1990s the purity of Colombian heroin had climbed from 60 to 95 percent, enhancing its allure, with one Costa Rican counternarcotics official observing, “Its quality is now better than that of the traditional Asian producers, and it’s gaining popularity in the United States, where addicts no longer need to inject it, but can inhale it (cocaine style).” Indeed, once heroin could be sniffed, like cocaine, or smoked, like marijuana, users no longer had to worry about contracting HIV/AIDS through contaminated needles.255

While heroin from Asia, often trafficked by Chinese and Nigerians, long dominated the U.S. market, developments in Latin America radically altered the dynamics of the U.S. heroin trade.256 Between 1995 and 1999 Colombian and Mexican heroin largely displaced Asian heroin across much of the country. Mexican heroin took over markets in the western United States, while heroin consumed east of the Mississippi River was usually Colombian. Some Mexican heroin originated in the poppy fields of Guatemala, and a substantial percentage of Colombian heroin had reached the United States after transshipment via Central American bridge states.257

Fig. 1.9 Estimated cocaine users in the United States, 1979–2009

Sources: DHHS, Household Survey, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.

However, for all of the significance of Central America in the trafficking of other drugs, the chief role of the bridge states in the international drug trade has been to ensure that a plentiful supply of cocaine reaches U.S. and European markets. Over the last several decades the United States has been home to the most significant cocaine consumers (fig. 1.9).258 Inhaling powdered cocaine has appealed to middle- and upper-class users, while those on society’s lower economic rungs have opted for the cheaper smokable variety known as crack, which has proven to be one of the most highly addictive drugs. As the twenty-first century approached, combining drugs gained popularity. For example, heroin was increasingly used “to cushion the ‘crash’ that follows the euphoria of using crack.”

The European Market

As the U.S. cocaine market started to get saturated in the mid-1980s, the wholesale price dropped by 70–80 percent.259 With bloody competitive struggles breaking out among dealers and their suppliers, such leading traffickers as Jorge Luis Ochoa, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, and Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros spent considerable time investigating European business opportunities and then capitalizing on their new connections to supply cocaine to European markets in Spain and other countries.260 U.S. Customs agent Robert Mazur, working undercover with top Medellín traffickers, reported that by 1987 Colombians had chosen to move decisively into the European market. In fact, the cocaine flow into Europe climbed rapidly at just this time. Between 1986 and 1987, seizures across Europe doubled; nevertheless, between September 1987 and February 1988 wholesale per-kilo profits dropped by two thousand dollars, indicating a rapidly rising cocaine supply.261

The criminal syndicates supplying growing European markets already had well-oiled transshipment operations active in Central American bridge states such as Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama. Drug organizations thus started to rely on Central American associates to launch large shipments toward Europe as well. Starting in the late 1980s, authorities in the primary European narcotics gateways—Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands—and then in such secondary entry points as France and Germany, even Poland, Romania, and Russia, uncovered multiple trafficking conspiracies via Central America.262 As the Colombian drug organizations reached toward distant markets that lacked the dense distribution networks laboriously built up in the United States, their traffickers infiltrated expatriate communities, such as Amsterdam’s Colombian population.263 Many also opted to integrate into their operations European criminal networks, from the Sicilian mafia to Russian organized crime.264

From this foothold, the cardinal events of the early 1990s—both the Soviet Union’s disintegration and the European Union’s consolidation and growth—contributed to climbing European cocaine trafficking.265 Borders across the continent became more easily and frequently traversed, making them at least appear to be more porous, thus encouraging the drug trade.266 The extensive arms trafficking involving former Soviet-bloc states engendered weapons-for-drugs deals.267 And, as fledgling democracies replaced police states in the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, enterprising Colombian traffickers hurried in, sometimes using them as a back door to enter more lucrative western European markets.268 Thus, through the 1990s cocaine imports soared in Europe, and by 2001 users in the European Union states consumed an estimated 100–130 tons.269 The steadily rising purity of seized cocaine in Europe attested to successful imports, and U.S. officials went so far as to argue that by 1998 Europe was “running a close second” to the United States as an international cocaine market.270 In 2007 the United Nations calculated that the United Kingdom had more than 980,000 cocaine consumers, and Spain more than 820,000.271 Thus, by the early twenty-first century very substantial numbers of European consumers had come to contribute to booming Central American cocaine transshipment.

Conclusion

In the 1970s marijuana and cocaine trafficking through Central America began to climb. By the early to mid-1980s cocaine had become the most important drug passing through these bridge states. In the 1990s cocaine trafficking truly took flight, becoming an immense export-import enterprise within Central America, albeit an illegal one. And, that same decade, Colombian heroin production brought on more drug smuggling. The five countries that are the subjects of our case studies—Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama— thus developed into critically important bridge states, with drug rings finding ways to capitalize on bridge-favoring factors in each Central American republic.

For their part, the governments of Central American states have responded in different ways and with varying efficiency and effectiveness to the millions of dollars in drugs transiting the region. In each country notable efforts to curb the trade have occurred, with numerous arrests and some large individual and annual seizures. However, drug rings have adapted with agility and flexibility to antidrug strategies, and for every route temporarily blocked by antidrug officials, traffickers have opened new pathways.272 New organizations have quickly sprung up to replace those taken down by authorities.273 This might be thought a natural condition of the drug trade, in which processes of fragmentation and amalgamation occur constantly and, often, simultaneously. As one scholar put it, “What is being defined and redefined, in reality, is the configuration of the criminal organizations that control the market.”274

Furthermore, instead of causing traffickers to recalculate the cost-benefit equation and abandon shipping drugs altogether, the interdiction of large shipments has often simply brought them to explore different routes and methods. Rather than disheartening members of a drug ring, loads that go astray have often stimulated redoubled efforts to make up for the lost profits.275 Confronting a large array of drug-trafficking groups, many wealthy, sophisticated, and determined, these bridge-state governments have often been discouraged and frustrated. Transshipment has highlighted many of their deficiencies, inadequacies, and incapacities, and ultimately such large quantities of drugs have transited without interception that market prices have remained too low to discourage consumption. Thus, the drug flow has not markedly tapered off. Continually prodded by the U.S. government to do more and further stimulated by the evident problems large-scale trafficking is posing for their societies, bridge-state governments have often fallen into a pattern of retreating, persisting, redoubling efforts, and then falling back again.

Trafficking groups have found that unpredictability paired with logistical efficiency has often been rewarded by a successful transhipment operation, leaving frustrated counternarcotics officials in its wake. In 1991 Guatemalan police officer Evin Linares observed, “Every time we think we have made a dent, we turn around and they are one step ahead of us again.” In 1998, in noting that traffickers are “able to switch night and day,” a U.S. official in Belize remarked, “If they see something’s not working in this area, they have a second plan, a backup. That’s why it seems as though we are always playing catch-up.”276 By 2003 State Department officials noted ruefully, “Battling the international drug trade is a complex, dynamic process. Contrary to expectations, it does not get easier with time. Every time we score a major success—and over the past decade we have scored many—the drug trade learns from it.” They concluded, “As successful counter-narcotics operations eliminate the less agile drug syndicates, those that survive get smarter and more sophisticated, adopting ingenious new strategies for concealment and survival. We have seen this already with the emergence of hundreds of small, less targetable syndicates that filled the void left by the destruction of Colombia’s Medellín and Cali cartels.”277

The most common responses by the Central American bridge states to extensive drug trafficking have been to try to create more disincentives and to launch institutional reforms. Politicians have fashioned drug laws to provide for more severe trafficking and money-laundering penalties.278 Although transshipment, rather than production, has been at the heart of the regional drug problem, authorities have embarked on energetic eradication policies, often successful ones, targeting marijuana cultivation as well as the production of opium in the Guatemalan highlands and coca in the southern border region of Panama.

Less auspicious have been most of the efforts aimed at strengthening weak judicial and penal systems and buttressing the police, customs, coast guard, and air force. While drug syndicates have strategized as to which officials to bribe, which institutions to target, and which weaknesses to exploit, governments have encountered long-ingrained and often quite intractable problems. Many officials have been reluctant to alter traditional ways of doing things. Resources have almost always been scarce. Enthusiasm for reform has tended to wax and wane. Corruption has been evident. While changes in the capabilities of government institutions have, in fact, occurred, these have tended to take place slowly and unevenly. The Central American activities of trafficking organizations have thus represented extraordinary stress tests for the region’s governments. Just as a structurally unsound dike might spring leak after leak, bridge states have often succumbed to immense pressure, and drugs have poured through.

As bridge states have tried to withstand traffickers and reassert their authority, they have often looked hopefully toward international cooperation. In the 1990s Central American leaders held various summit meetings that aimed to enhance regional security against drug trafficking and other threats. With great fanfare, joint strategies were plotted, declarations against the drug trade were pronounced, and broad agreements to blend national and regional security were rolled out.279 While these occasions provided photo opportunities and perhaps some modest domestic political advantage, the tangible consequences of these initiatives have been more difficult to trace. The familiar problems of multilateralist approaches seem to have afflicted these efforts: free-riders, differing strengths of feeling, and a tendency toward the “least common denominator,” that is, toward adopting only those measures that all members of the group wholeheartedly support.

More important than the multilateral efforts, governments have negotiated bilateral extradition and mutual legal assistance treaties, especially with the United States, to try to better administer justice: to render suspects more often and more efficiently and to enhance the transfer of the evidence needed to convict traffickers. Ship-rider agreements have aimed to bring U.S. naval power to bear on maritime trafficking off Central American coasts, while still respecting the sovereignty of the bridge states by acknowledging that foreign law-enforcement efforts can take place in their executive jurisdiction only by prior agreement and under at least nominal local supervision. Often using foreign aid, officials within the bridge states have improved drug-detection methods at ports, airports, and border crossings. Extensive training programs, usually funded from abroad, have attempted to professionalize or add expertise to prosecutors, judges, prison officials, special police units, and others on the front lines of antidrug efforts. While some real progress on all of these fronts has certainly occurred, international cooperation has not been sufficiently rapid, thorough, or far-reaching to stem the drug trade. Bridge states have resisted and persisted, but they have not gained the upper hand.

A notable aspect of the problem has been that microdecisions have too often trumped macropolicies. That is, when confronted by extensive drug trafficking through their states, public officials in the police force, customs, politics, and the judiciary, and private actors ranging from farmers, loaders, and couriers to lawyers, bankers, and accountants have had to make personal choices regarding the drug trade. Should technicians, manual laborers, and other blue-collar workers shun employment offers by drug organizations? Should professional services be confined to legal activities, such as providing an alleged trafficker with the best defense possible? Or, should illegal activities be undertaken as well? What are the potential benefits and risks involved in participation? Do the possible costs of joining in the drug trade—stress, arrest, imprisonment, danger to loved ones, even death—outweigh the prospect of substantial additional income? Should an individual be concerned about the drug trade’s impact on a local community and on national society?

Human nature suggests that an immediate return of benefits will often overwhelm concerns of potential future costs. In addition, the evident successes of transnational criminals and the evident weaknesses of the bridge-state institutions and procedures have, no doubt, entered these individual calculations. Transnational criminal groups, ranging from the large and powerful to the nimble and savvy, have grasped even fleeting opportunities to transship marijuana, heroin, and cocaine. Indeed, while the overall record of Central American businesses has often been disappointing, the enviable efficiency of Central American drug transshipment has stood out. One reason may be that, in contrast to the typical workings of multinational corporations with their foreign managers and their drive to profit distant shareholders, drug-trade earnings have cascaded downward through a relatively small number of local associates, providing an immediate and tangible monetary incentive to work effectively. In addition, the “outlaw mentality” may drive drug-trade participants to demonstrate that they are sufficiently strong and clever to beat the system and outwit law enforcement. And, there is that very real fear of death or imprisonment, should people act in sloppy or foolish ways as their organizations try to forward drug shipments to market.

Because the vast majority of the illegal drugs passing through Central America have originated elsewhere, it is perhaps natural that traffickers abroad have often directed the operations of smuggling networks. However, as we shall see in the case studies that follow, the brains and muscle involved in transshipment have never been wholly Colombian or Mexican. Over time, Central Americans themselves have done considerably more than simply take and implement instructions from foreign overseers. This fact is well illustrated by the careers of Central Americans prominent in drug-trafficking circles. These have included not merely such notorious figures as General Manuel Noriega of Panama or Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros of Honduras, but also a host of lesser, though still very significant, players in the other primary bridge states. Furthermore, although sufficient quantities of narcotics transit each of the Central American republics that a smuggling operation might be under way virtually anywhere in the region at any time, trafficking in each country is marked by certain time-tested sea and air routes and overland trails. These we also identify in the subsequent case studies, starting with the distinctive part played by Belize.

1. See generally Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars.

2. According to his brother, however, Pablo Escobar was paying a U.S. Customs agent to provide the schedules of AWACS planes so that his pilots could avoid flying at times or in areas under surveillance. Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 65–66.

3. See CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7, and Shannon, Desperados, 322.

4. For DEA official David Westrate’s congressional testimony, see Andreas, Border Games, 44.

5. Confidential interviews with U.S. officials familiar with Caribbean basin drug-smuggling patterns, July 1990, Guatemala City, Guatemala, and December 1991, Tegucigalpa, Honduras. See also “U.S. Technology Gleans Data on Drug Corridor,” Washington Post (hereafter cited as WP [US]), 26 June 1992, A26. According to insider Roberto Escobar, the use of AWACS was central to the Medellín cartel’s decision to send more drugs through Central America and Mexico. Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 67.

6. Smith, “Semiorganized International Crime,” 195.

7. Efficient routes have long moved drugs through Haiti and the Dominican Republic, while traffickers used Jamaica and the Bahamas intensively at even earlier dates.

8. According to one authority, “The hundreds of millions of under- or unemployed poor provide a vast seething cauldron in which criminality of all sorts can and does incubate and multiply.” Bagley, “Globalisation,” 34.

9. Confidential interview, December 1991, Tegucigalpa, Honduras.

10. With reference to the joint antidrug endeavors of Caribbean bridge states, one scholar likewise observed, “Collaboration among states may result in conflict over sovereignty and perception of the nature and severity of threats and, therefore, appropriate responses.” Griffith, “Political Economy of Drugs,” 107.

11. For basic information on European Union law-enforcement networks, see Slaughter, New World Order, 56.

12. See Joyce, “Transnational Criminal Enterprise,” 111. As Joyce observed, “Effective cooperation may require surrender of some of the core prerogatives of statehood in the spheres of criminal justice, law enforcement, and security.” U.S. authorities used sovereignty concerns to try to rally support for antidrug measures. “Technology Gleans Data,” A25.

13. Cf. Andreas, Border Games, 4.

14. See “Police Make Record Drug Busts in 2007,” Nica Times (Costa Rica) (hereafter cited as NT [CR]), 11 January 2008, 2.

15. See, for instance, “Just What the Smuggler Ordered,” WP (US), 2 August 1998, A1.

16. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. §1385, has generally prohibited the U.S. armed forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement. While the U.S. armed forces still lack arrest powers, the legal regime was loosened in the 1980s, with one important step a 1986 directive from President Ronald Reagan that classified drugs as a national security threat. See U.S. House, Posse Comitatus Act; “Reagan Order Defines Drug Trade as Security Threat, Widens Military Role,” WP (US), 8 June 1986, A26; and Andreas, Border Games, 43.

17. For the seven Central American republics, the total active military forces, including the paramilitary units of Costa Rica, and eventually Panama and Guatemala, rose from 173,410 in 1985 to 210,200 in 1990, and then dropped to 127,050 in 1995, 101,550 in 2000, and 88,250 in 2005, before rising slightly to 96,850 in 2009. See International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance (hereafter cited as MB), 1985–1986, 142–53; MB, 1989–1990, 184–99; MB, 1994–1995, 200–216; MB, 1999–2000, 222–37; MB, 2004–2005, 199–212; and MB, 2009, 65–88.

18. See DOS, Drug Interdiction Agreements.

19. In a representative instance in 1998 a U.S. patrol plane spotted a suspicious speedboat heading north along the Costa Rican coast. A U.S. Navy guided missile carrier, almost two thousand feet in length, in the area intercepted the go-fast, ultimately firing fifteen warning shots in an unsuccessful effort to stop it. However, the vessel fled into Nicaraguan territorial waters and vanished before the U.S. authorities could get Nicaragua’s approval to continue the hot pursuit.

20. Within the Central American republics the U.S. government opened DEA offices as follows: Panama City, Panama, in 1972; San José, Costa Rica, in 1974; Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1975; Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1981; Managua, Nicaragua, in 1989; Belize City, Belize, in 1992; and San Salvador, El Salvador, in 1992. Bartilow and Kihong, “Busting Drugs,” 114. Before DEA offices were opened in various of these countries, the office in a neighboring state sometimes covered their counterdrug activities, such as DEA agents stationed in Guatemala operating in Belize.

21. The complex of authorities tasked with antidrug responsibilities has also occasionally proved counterproductive in the United States and other market societies, though the extent of the problems in Central America would be difficult to match.

22. Astorga, “Mexico,” 98.

23. For a comparison of the administration of justice in Belize and Guatemala, see Fowler and Bunck, “Legal Imperialism.”

24. See Nadelmann, Cops Across Borders, 192–94, 225–35. While Nadelmann focuses on the misgivings of European officials regarding undercover operations, the same hesitations have surfaced in Central America.

25. See “Region Takes Aim at Weapons Traffickers,” TT (CR), 7 December 2001, 5; “The Most Violent Area in the Americas,” TT (CR), 18 August 2000, 8; and Cragin and Hoffman, Arms Trafficking. Between 1979 and 1990 the Nicaraguan government alone distributed 600,000 AK-47 rifles and recovered only 180,000 of them. “Armas sin control en el istmo,” LN (CR), 1 February 1997, 17A.

26. See Cragin and Hoffman, Arms Trafficking, 68.

27. Arms worth $1,200 apiece in Nicaragua could bring $2,000 or more in Colombia, and, rather than pay cash, Colombian fighters preferred to trade kilos of cocaine for weapons. In 2001, after a series of weapons confiscations in Panama and Costa Rica, Panamanian authorities noted that Colombian guerrillas were paying for contraband weapons with cocaine. See “Regional Pact Sought to Bust Illegal Drug Trafficking,” TT (CR), 9 November 2001, 9. In 2004 Panamanian police broke up a barter transaction that apparently was to involve 441 kilos of cocaine for 80.4 kilos of Lodex explosives manufactured in Costa Rica. “Eighty Kilos of Tico Explosives Found in Panama,” TT (CR), 26 March 2004, 3. The following year Honduran authorities arrested FARC collaborators attempting to arrange arms-for-drugs transactions. “Honduras Arrests Two FARC Agents,” TT (CR), 1 April 2005, N-3.

28. “Big Bust Nabs Arms Dealers,” TT (CR), 8 November 2002, 1A.

29. Pérez, “Drugs,” 150.

30. Calvani, Foreword to Island, 1, quoted in Maingot, “Decentralization Imperative.”

31. After noting the dramatic differences in Central American politics, one scholar declared that in the 1980s “it would have been difficult to find anywhere in the world three political systems as different as those of El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.” Paige, Coffee and Power, x, quote on 5.

32. Certain scholars have applied the concepts of competitive advantage and comparative advantage to South American cocaine-producing states. See, for instance, Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 35–37, and Thoumi, Political Economy, 168–75. The latter author, however, hesitates to use the term, because comparative advantage theories are traditionally couched “in terms of the relative endowment of factors of production . . . [—] natural resources, raw and skilled labor, capital and technology”— as opposed to “institutional factors such as corruption, lack of state legitimacy, and . . . inability to control large regions of the country” (177n5). In addition to these concerns, the term advantage may be better employed with respect to states competing against one another for economic primacy, than with the drug trade, which most officials find disadvantageous for their countries. Hence, we have coined the terms bridge-favoring and bridge-disfavoring factors.

33. “Cartels Face an Economic Battle,” WP (US), 7 October 2009, A01. For information on the development of Mexican marijuana in the 1960s and early 1970s, see Kamstra, Weed, 148–50.

34. In the mid-1980s marijuana costing $70 a pound in Colombia might be purchased for $240 a pound wholesale in Miami. Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars, 127–28.

35. Thoumi, Political Economy, 126.

36. Flanking the Caribbean and Gulf of Venezuela, Guajira is a sparsely populated corner of Colombia, isolated by the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, with nearly twenty-thousand-foot peaks and numerous cannabis plantations along its eastern slopes. Riley, Snow Job, 128–29.

37. Shannon, Desperados, 9, 73. One source observed, “The general rule is, the paler the gold, the stronger the grass. The palest weed is grown at the lowest range of the optimum growing altitude, around 500 meters above sea level, where the sun is hottest (any lower and the humidity saps the vital resins in the plant).” Nicholl, Fruit Palace, 9. The naming of different varieties of cannabis has served as a marketing ploy distinguishing the marijuana trade from those in cocaine and heroin. In fact, while many users can distinguish between high- and low-quality cannabis, they are hard-pressed to identify particular strains either by sight or use.

38. U.S. Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (hereafter cited as INCSR) (1997), 89. See also INCSR (1999), 102, noting that the prior year European authorities had seized significant quantities of Colombian marijuana.

39. See the testimony of U.S. Coast Guard officers, found in United States v. May, 470 F. Supp. at 388.

40. See Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 73–75, and Riley, Snow Job, 227–28.

41. See United States v. Leuro-Rosas, 952 F.2d 616.

42. Wilson and Zambrano, “Commodity Chains,” 304.

43. By the early twenty-first century U.S. growers were harvesting fully ten thousand tons of cannabis, with another five thousand tons produced in Canada and Mexico. INCSR (2003), 2:7.

44. Medellín trafficker José Cabrera testified that although he had originally shipped marijuana, increased risks caused him to shift to aerial cocaine trafficking. “Continúa hoy el testimonio de José Cabrera en juicio a Noriega,” La Prensa (Panama) (hereafter cited as LP [PA]), 21 October 1991, 1A.

45. “Drug Smugglers Join Shipping’s Box Revolution,” Journal of Commerce, 12 April 1988, 1A.

46. Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars, 44. For the early role of Cuba in international drug trafficking, see also Meyer and Parssinen, Webs of Smoke, 261–62.

47. For the development of heroin transshipment, see Clark and Horrock, Contrabandista, esp. 177–212.

48. Childress, Heroin Trade, 8.

49. Andreas, Border Games, 40. Harry Anslinger, director of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, testified that as early as 1941 Mexico was producing five tons of opium a year. Extradition of Ignacia Jasso Gonzales (La Nacha) from Mexico (case cited in ibid.).

50. See Riley, Snow Job, 128; Toro, Mexico’s “War,” 20, 23–25, 42–44; and Smith, “Semiorganized International Crime,” 194–95.

51. Reuter, Crawford, and Cave, Sealing the Borders, 18.

52. U.S. officials noted, “A mix of opium farmers, heroin processors, and small-scale trafficking groups operating independently or in mutually supportive business relationships controls Mexican heroin production.” INCSR (2007), 169.

53. Note the parallel to legitimate agriculture, where “U.S. grains tend to be handled by major agribusiness firms while fresh vegetables are moved by many specialized, small-scale distributors.” Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 22.

54. Shannon, Desperados, 72.

55. See “Hermanos ligados a cartel de Medellín,” La Nación (Costa Rica) (hereafter cited as LN [CR]), 5 August 1998, 10A.

56. For calculations relying on 1997 prices, see Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 22.

57. See “Aumenta el tráfico de heroína,” LP (PA), 15 August 2002, 5A.

58. “Colombian Cartels in Asia Connection,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 18 April 1993, 3. In noting that a “good chemist is like a good chef,” one counternarcotics agent observed, “Samples we are getting supposedly from Colombia show a similarity in composition to Southeast and Southwest Asian heroin.” Ibid.

59. INCSR (1992), 6.

60. Colombian National Police report “Amapola: Producción,” quoted in Thoumi, “Illegal Drugs in Colombia,” 74.

61. “Colombia’s Drug Lords Sending Heroin to U.S.,” New York Times (United States) (hereafter cited as NYT [US]), 14 January 1992, A10. See also “Poppy Plants in Colombia Raises Spectre of S. A. Heroin,” The Reporter (Belize) (hereafter cited as TR [BZ]), 18 July 1988, 16. If producers succeeded in harvesting a hectare of opium poppies the maximum of three times annually, they could produce ten kilos of opium gum or one kilo of pure heroin. INCSR (1999), 103.

62. DEA, Illegal Drug Price.

63. In 1996 the estimate was 62 percent, while in 2001, 59 percent of heroin submitted to DEA’s Heroin Signature Program was Colombian. INCSR (2002), 4:25, and INCSR (1997), 89. However, for statistical uncertainties associated with the HSP, see Childress, Heroin Trade, 14n10.

64. For numerous reasons, projected heroin yields are considerably less precise than figures for hectares cultivated. First, production depends on harvest size, and yet, as the U.S. government noted, “Small changes in soil fertility, weather, farming techniques, and disease can produce widely varying results from year to year and place to place.” Second, because the figures assume no losses between the opium harvest and its processing into opium gum, they estimate potential: they assume that the entire crop is duly processed into drugs. Third, the efficiency with which opium gum is processed into heroin may not be a constant variable, as is typically assumed. The DOS noted, “Differences in the origin and quality of the raw material used, the technical processing method employed, the size and sophistication of laboratories, the skill and experience of local workers and chemists, and decisions made in response to enforcement pressures all affect production.” Fourth, a 2001 research project found that yield and efficiency had improved in Colombia, further suggesting that potential heroin production had been underestimated for quite some time. Fifth, the DOS

initially based its figures on pure heroin yield; however, the yield of mere “export-quality” heroin would be markedly higher, and it appears that when figures were recalculated to correct for prior underestimating, the U.S. standard also shifted from pure to export-quality heroin. A further complication is that black tar heroin has also sometimes been exported and yet would require even less pure heroin than would export-quality. Quotes from INCSR (2009), 31–32; see also INCSR (2002, 2:14) and DEA, Special Report.

65. See Crandall, Driven by Drugs, 123–34.

66. See INCSR (1997), 89; INCSR (2001), available at http://www.state.gov/g/inl/rls/nrcrpt/2000/888pf.htm; and INCSR (2002), 4:25.

67. Kirkpatrick, Turning the Tide, 39.

68. See “Marijuana of the Eighties,” Los Angeles Times (United States) (hereafter cited as LAT [US]), 4 December 1985, 2, and the testimony of U.S. attorney Alan Bersin, U.S. House, Border Security, 17, quoted in Andreas, Border Games, 75.

69. After the 1988 seizure in Miami of almost 5.5 tons of marijuana in a shipping container, Michael Shaheen of U.S. Customs noted it could be smelled blocks away. “Drug Smugglers Join,” 1A.

70. Note, however, that virtually pure cocaine brought the highest price and most enhanced the seller’s business reputation.

71. “Conspiracy to Corrupt,” Financial Times, 14 February 1987, 1.

72. Waldorf, Reinarman, and Murphy, Cocaine Changes, 281–82, quoted in Wilson and Zambrano, “Commodity Chains,” 299.

73. See INCSR (1998), 9; Shannon, Desperados, 374, 388; “Drug Smugglers Join,” 1A; and “Stemming the Drug Flow,” TT (CR), 3 December 1999, 17.

74. The most authoritative U.S. estimate, a 2006 interagency assessment, concluded that 517–732 tons of cocaine were departing South America for the United States annually, with more directed to Europe. INCSR (2007), 15–16.

75. Coca shrub leaves contain fourteen alkaloids, that is, psychoactive compounds naturally found in various plants. Although coca will grow in tropical lowlands and has been cultivated in such places as Africa, India, Taiwan, Okinawa, and Indonesia (Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 73, 125–31), there “‘life is too easy’. . . . In the intense and humid heat it produces dense foliage, but the leaves have little potency. Lower-altitude plantations are also prey to a butterfly, the ulo, whose larvae feed on the leaf, and to various destructive lichens.” Nicholl, Fruit Palace, 296. “In the mist-filled valleys on the eastern slope of the Andes . . . water vapor from the Amazon rain forest rises upward, providing the proper warmth and wetness for the shrubs that bear the coca leaf.” Gugliotta and Leen, Kings of Cocaine, 120.

76. For Suárez Gómez, see Gamarra, “Criminal Organizations,” 175–83, and Henkel, “Bolivian Cocaine Industry.” While Bolivian and Peruvian organizations undertook some international transshipment, as Colombian syndicates assumed a dominant position, the Suárez organization came to supply Pablo Escobar.

77. A DEA agent who worked undercover in South America during the late 1970s noted that Colombian

traffickers would then buy base in Bolivia to convert to cocaine in Colombia because Bolivians grew the most potent coca. Levine, Deep Cover, 34. He estimated that Bolivia’s “Santa Cruz Mafia” supplied 80 percent of the world’s coca at that time. Levine, Big White Lie, 10.

78. Wilson and Zambrano, “Commodity Chains,” 304.

79. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 303–4.

80. Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 29, 37.

81. CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7. The U.S. Southern Command likewise figured that in 1995 Peruvians had cultivated 115,300 hectares of coca (54 percent of world production), Colombians 50,900 (24 percent), and Bolivians 48,680 (22 percent). “EU mantiene centro antidrogas desde 1992,” LP (PA), 26 September 1996, 2A. For earlier figures, see INCSR (1992), 27.

82. See INCSR (2002), 2:3, and “Colombia produce dos tercios de hoja de coca en el mundo,” LA (PA), 23 January 2001, 4A.

83. In 1998 the U.S. government reported that Colombian organizations were refining 80 percent of the world’s cocaine, a figure that rose to 90 percent by 2004. INCSR (1999), 3; INCSR (2005), 13.

84. For an estimate by a former member of the Federal Commission on Organized Crime, see “Colombian Chieftains Rule Drugs in U.S.,” Chicago Tribune, 3 April 1988, 6, and for a statement by the FBI assistant director of intelligence, see U.S. Senate, Structure, 46.

85. CIA analysts frankly conceded, “There are no authoritative estimates of the quantities of cocaine moved through Central America in the 1980s.” CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7.

86. For Judge Miguel Izaguirre’s estimate, see “En dos años Honduras puede ser como Panamá en asuntos de drogas,” La Prensa (Honduras) (hereafter cited as LP [HO]), 2 July 1988, 5.

87. See “Una tonelada semanal de cocaína pasa por el país,” El Gráfico (Guatemala), 30 May 1990, 7. For the U.S. estimate of one ton weekly, see “Guatemala Seen Slipping into a Haven for Drugs,” LAT (US), 30 August 1989, 1. See also “Guatemala: A Major Cocaine Player,” TR (BZ), 12 April 1992, 4.

88. See “Investigan base ‘narco’ en el Pacific Sur,” LN (CR), 2 June 1991, 10A, and “Embajador critica lucha antidroga,” LN (CR), 13 September 1991, 6A.

89. “Ruta de centroamérica preferida para los carteles de la droga,” La Hora (Guatemala) (hereafter cited as LH [GU]), 8 June 1991, 11.

90. “‘Narcos’ suramericanos abren nuevas rutas en centroamérica,” LP (HO), 2 April 1993, 46.

91. DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2001), 5–6. For references to the four-hundred-ton figure, see, for instance, INCSR (2003), 5:21.

92. By late in the 1990s the CIA estimated that traffickers shipped only about 10 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply directly from South America. Another 30 percent was transshipped via Caribbean islands, and the remaining 60 percent traversed the Central America–Mexico corridor (land territory and adjacent sea lanes). CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7. For nearly identical U.S. Army Southern Command figures, see “Drug Cops Agree to Cooperate,” TT (CR), 3 March 2000, 1A.

93. Andreas, Border Games, 43.

94. According to the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission of the Organization of American States, in 1995 the Central American states, including Belize, arrested 5,582 persons for drug offenses. CICAD, Total de detenidos, 2.

95. See U.S. Senate, Law Enforcement: Report, 1–2. For similar estimates, see “Agents Take Record Haul of Cocaine,” St. Petersburg Times (United States) (hereafter cited as SPT [US]), 20 November 1987, 1A, and “Aims of ‘Drug War’ Questioned,” TT (CR), 21 May 1999, 1A.

96. At an antidrug conference in San José, Costa Rica, in March 1998 both Guatemalan and Costa Rican counternarcotics authorities declared that they would be satisfied to intercept 2 percent. “Heroin: A Growing Threat,” TT (CR), 27 March 1998, 1.

97. See Farrell, “Global Rate of Interception,” and Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 93.

98. See, for instance, United States v. Grayson, 597 F.2d 1225; United States v. Navarro-Varelas, 541 F.2d 1331; and United States v. Gomez, 457 F.2d 593.

99. See “Embarazadas . . . de marihuana,” LP (HO), 18 October 1989, 29, and Centro, “Narcotráfico en Hon-duras,” 8.

100. “Cargaba heroína en su estómago,” LP (HO), 2 September 2009, 66.

101. See “Detienen a cinco mexicanos por introducir cocaína,” LP (PA), 7 January 1997, 5A.

102. CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7.

103. See Dinges, Our Man in Panama, 126; “U.S. Plans to Call Out National Guard,” Christian Science Monitor (US), 29 March 1989, 7.

104. For the alteration of planes to accommodate drug shipments, see United States v. Lee, 743 F.2d at 1244, and United States v. Nichols, 741 F.2d 767.

105. Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 69, and Reuter, Crawford, and Cave, Sealing the Borders, 46.

106. See “U.S. Radar System Detects Illegal Flights Here,” TT (CR), 9 August 2002, 8, and “Cap-turado avión con cocaína en Quepos,” LN (CR), 3 July 1987, 10A.

107. Shannon, Desperados, 322.

108. Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 64.

109. For the Michael Horn statement, see U.S. Senate, Drug Cartels, 37. One U.S. prosecutor proceeding against air-cargo companies engaged in bulk cocaine imports observed, “What began as single-engine Cessnas island-hopping 100-kilo loads into Florida rapidly evolved into four- to eight-ton loads in Boeing 727s.” “Drug Cartels’ Big Planes Are Big Problem,” WP (US), 6 Feb-ruary 1995, C11.

110. See “Narcotráfico en la frontera Tico-Panameña,” LP (PA), 18 April 2006, 6A.

111. Reuter, Crawford, and Cave, Sealing the Borders, 31; “U.S. Plans,” 7.

112. See INCSR (2002), 4:25; INCSR (2011), 49; Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 68–69; and Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 68–69. The range of vessels used is illustrated by United States v. Garate-Vergara, 942 F.2d 1543; United States v. Castro, 874 F.2d 230; and United States v. Alvarez, 810 F.2d 879. For submersibles, see “Cocaine-Toting Sub Busted in Pacific Ocean,” TT (CR), 19 September 2008, 8; “Drug Traffic Beneath the Waves,” WP (US), 6 February 2008, A4; and “Cops in Colombia Find Drug Sub,” TR (BZ), 17 September 2000, 23.

113. Until technology improved after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, a five-agent U.S. Customs unit might spend three hours inspecting a single container of a size that would fit behind a tractor trailer. Bartilow and Kihong, “Free Traders,” 124. See also “Drug Smugglers Join,” 1A, and “Drug Cartels Have Best Technology Money Can Buy,” Associated Press, 4 June 1997, 12A.

114. See Andreas, “Smuggling Wars,” 89.

115. For the 1987 through 1995 data, see “Mayor decomiso de cocaína en EEUU,” LN (CR), 20 November 1987, 8A; “U.S. Plans,” 7; “Massive Drug Load Seized in Pinellas,” SPT (US), 5 May 1988, 1A; “Abren nuevas rutas para la cocaína a través de México,” El Gráfico (Guatemala), 16 March 1989, 24; and “Castrillón Henao dirigía vasta red de narcotraficantes,” LP (PA), 25 April 1996, 45A.

116. “Drugs Found on Boat Flying Belize Flag,” TR (BZ), 3 October 2004, 1, and “Droga no pasó por el canal,” LP (PA), 23 March 2007, 8A.

117. “Drug-Busting X-ray Units Land at Port of Miami,” Journal of Commerce, 21 August 1998, 1A.

118. See, for instance, “En Guatemala extraditan a narco reclamado por E.U.,” LP (PA), 15 December 1990, 6A; “Hallan cocaína en barco hondureño,” LP (HO), 20 November 1987, 1; “Coca decomisada vale c. 55 millones,” LN (CR), 15 July 1989, 10A; “Cops Find Cocaine in Butane Gas Tanks,” TR (BZ), 26 July 1987, 10; and “Policía decomisó cocaína en barco norteamericano,” LN (CR), 24 July 1985, 10A.

119. See, for instance, “Autoridades decomisaron unos 12 mil kilos de cocaína,” LN (CR), 5 October 1986, 10A; “Perú: Intentaban mandar droga a Italia en el interior de pescados,” LH (GU), 12 July 1991, 20; and Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 70.

120. See Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 70, 75–78.

121. “En firme causa contra buzos por narcotráfico,” LN (CR), 29 October 1992, 12A.

122. See “Cien lanchas capturadas se desperdician por líos legales,” LN (CR), 13 August 2007, 14A.

123. “DEA se reúne con empresarios de Zona Libre,” LP (PA), 13 January 1994, 3A; CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7; and “Region Defines Maritime Drug-Prevention Plan,” TT (CR), 25 June 2004, 13.

124. As former DEA agent Michael Garland testified, cocaine headed to Europe would not ordinarily be sent overland into northern Central America. United States v. Martinez, 476 F.3d at 969.

125. Aguilera Peralta, “Fighting the Dragon,” 221.

126. Precisely when traffickers first used these schemes is often difficult to determine, because the police discovering a new smuggling method often lags behind its first use by months or years. Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 335.

127. See Abrams, “Drug Wars,” 79; “Gigantesco decomiso de cocaína en España,” LN (CR), 25 April 1988, 22A; and “Armadillos rellenos de marijuana,” LP (HO), 20 June 1989, 20.

128. “One of the bags in a big shipment leaked and killed all the fish, or we wouldn’t have discovered it,” DEA Special Agent Jack Hook said. “Who knows how much moved that way before we caught it?” “The Mexico Connection,” LAT (US), 13 April 1989, 1. See also Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 139n7.

129. See “Incautan otro cargamento con ocho millones de dólares,” LP (PA), 7 March 1992, 1A; “Costa Rica ligada al blanqueo de narcodólares,” LN (CR), 2 August 1994, 10A; “‘Somos inocentes,’ dicen tripulantes de avioneta,” LP (HO), 16 May 1992, 5; “Cerca de L. 100 millones en coca habría enviado a EUA, ex militar,” LP (HO), 12 September 1992, 19; “Banda trasegó 550 kilos de cocaína,” LN (CR), 19 July 1994, 10A; United States v. Bristol, 964 F.2d 1088; and “Descubren otra forma de transportar drogas,” LP (PA), 18 January 2004, 9A.

130. See “Decomisan cadáver cargado de coca,” LP (HO), 16 November 1992, 50, and “Cae cargamento de heroína líquida,” LN (CR), 3 February 1995, 10A.

131. “Best Technology.”

132. Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 23.

133. “Stemming the Drug Flow,” 17.

134. Shannon, Desperados, 420–21.

135. Because a kilo of cocaine, costing about two thousand dollars per kilo in Colombia, might be sold wholesale in the United States for fifteen thousand dollars per kilo, even small smugglers enjoyed extremely high profit margins. Thoumi, Political Economy, 150n27.

136. See “Policía confirma reunión de narcotraficantes aquí,” LN (CR), 25 December 1985, 10A, and Levine, Big White Lie, 227, 249.

137. See Duzán, Death Beat, 110.

138. See Lee, “Colombia’s Cocaine Syndicates,” 7–8, and Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 27–37.

139. Lee, “Transnational Organized Crime,” 2.

140. For more on this mindset, see Mazur, Infiltrator, 45. The more important the cartel managerial position, the more likely is the individual to be related to a kingpin by blood or marriage or will “at least have [family] roots in the region a capo comes from.” Chepesiuk, Hard Target, 146.

141. U.S. Senate, Law Enforcement: Report, 30.

142. Shannon, Desperados, 106, 346, and Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 88.

143. According to testimony by Carlos Lehder Rivas, after joining the Muerte a Secuestradores organization to counter the threat of left-wing hostage taking, he and nine other Medellín traffickers grew to cooperate closely: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez, Gustavo Gaviria, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Rafael Cardona Salazar, Pablo Correa Arroyave, Alonso Cárdenas, and Rodrigo Murillo. “Lehder confirma relación de Noriega con el cartel,” LP (PA), 20 November 1991, 1A.

144. See INCSR (1987), 91; Lee, “Transnational Organized Crime,” 18; Thoumi, Political Economy, 142, 145; Gugliotta and Leen, Kings of Cocaine, 95.

145. See Lee, “Colombia’s Cocaine Syndicates,” 5, and Clawson and Lee, Andean Cocaine Industry, 91–122. For the joint efforts by Medellín and Cali traffickers to eliminate such kidnapping, see Mermelstein, Man, 123; Gugliotta and Leen, Kings of Cocaine, 92; and Shannon, Desperados, 104–5.

146. See the Horn Statement in U.S. Senate, Drug Cartels, 37, and Castillo, Jinetes de la cocaína, 115.

147. Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 63–64.

148. For more on Lehder, see generally Kirkpatrick, Turning the Tide, and Lee, “Colombia’s Cocaine Syndicates,” 9–10.

149. DEA officials made this point in a December 1992 interview. Thoumi, “Illegal Drug Industry,” 134, 138n30.

150. “Sicario asesina a jefe del cartel de Cali,” LP (PA), 7 November 1998, 13.

151. Bowden, Killing Pablo, 269. For allegations that Los Pepes was using U.S. government intelligence information funneled through the Colombian Army, see pages 196–98, 217, 270. For skepticism regarding the extent to which the U.S. government was knowingly involved, see “The Fugitive,” NYT (US), 17 June 2001, 18.

152. Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 34.

153. Cali kingpin Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela once declared, “We don’t kill judges or ministers; we buy them.” Lee, “Transnational Organized Crime,” 8. See also Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 54.

154. Strong, Whitewash, 225.

155. Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 88.

156. “Target: Cali Cartel,” Tampa Tribune, 17 June 2001, 1.

157. Taylor v. United States, 1991 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 18099; Confesiones secretas, 49–60; “The Cali Connection,” SPT (US), 31 July 1995, 1A; “The Downfall of Jungle Mike,” SPT (US), 12 September 1993, 1F; “Pieces in Local Drug Puzzle Point to Cartel,” SPT (US), 8 May 1988, 1A; “Man Accused in Smuggling Once Called One-Man Peace Corps,” SPT (US), 5 May 1988, 4A; “Tsalickis Gets Twenty-Seven Years for Smuggling Cocaine,” SPT (US), 17 February 1989, 1B; Schreider and Schreider, Exploring the Amazon, 134–35, 141–43, 152–53.

158. Although Santacruz Londoño escaped from prison in January 1996, Colombian police killed him in less than two months.

159. Rempel, At the Devil’s Table, pp. 305, 315. After secret DEA negotiations, Pallomari flew to the U.S. and voluntarily surrendered for fear of being killed by Cali Kingpins for his knowledge of their operations. “Top Cali Aide Surrenders to U.S. Officials,” WP (US), 22 September 1995, A1. See also Confesiones secretas, 61–68, 188–90, and Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 37–38.

160. See United States v. Klimavicius-Viloria, 144 F.3d 1249.

161. Farer, Transnational Crime, xiv.

162. “Latin America’s Fragmenting Narcotics Industry,” Guardian (United Kingdom), 28 November 1997, 13.

163. For Defense Intelligence Agency information, see Chepesiuk, Hard Target, 276.

164. For the statement by rear admiral Joseph Nimmich, see “Drug Suspect’s Arrest Hailed,” LAT (US), 13 September 2007, A4.

165. Castillo, Jinetes de la cocaína, quoted in Thoumi, “Illegal Drug Industry,” 119. For Cali contributions to Samper, see Crandall, Driven by Drugs, 83–88.

166. U.S. Senate, Corruption and Drugs, 7, cited in Jordan, Drug Politics, 168.

167. See the affidavit filed by FBI special agent Roderick D. Huff in United States v. Valencia-Trujillo, No. 8:02- CR-329-T-17-EAJ (hereafter cited as “Huff affidavit”), 44.

168. More than 1,300 people were killed in the first ten months of 2004 alone. Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 264.

169. “Reputed Cocaine Boss Arrested in Colombia,” WP (US), 11 September 2007, A13. For Northern Valley cartel infighting, see Garzón, Mafia and Co., 36–41.

170. “Colombian Drug Lords Toppled,” Christian Science Monitor (US), 13 September 2007, 6.

171. See “EEUU congela bienes a capo ligado a empresas en Guatemala,” Siglo Veintiuno (Guatemala) (hereafter cited as SV [GU]), 29 March 2007, 8. At Fabio Ochoa’s 2003 trial U.S. federal prosecutors argued that between 1997 and 1999 Ochoa’s operation had exported 30 tons of cocaine a month. “Ochoa culpable,” LP (PA), 29 May 2003, 2A.

172. See INCSR (2001), 2:4, 4:18, and “Intelligence Network Threatens to Drop Country,” TT (CR), 26 October 2007, 7.

173. Francisco Thoumi observed, “The illegal [drug-trafficking] . . . industry and the guerrillas have been strange bedfellows. At times the government has been their common enemy, but they have fundamentally opposite goals. The industry represents a crude, unrestrained form of capitalism, while guerrilla organizations have their origins in the fight against the unfair, crude capitalism that has prevailed in Colombia. The conflict between the long-term goals of these two social groups is irreconcilable.” Thoumi, Political Economy, 159. See also Lee, “Colombia’s Cocaine Syndicates,” 17.

174. “U.S. Government Identifies FARC ‘Kingpin’ Operative Here,” NT (CR), 10 October 2008, N2.

175. INCSR (2004), 18, and INCSR (2008), 120.

176. A useful source on Castaño’s career, written by Pulitzer Prize–winning Colombian journalist Gerardo Reyes, is Nuestro hombre en la DEA. Castaño was killed in 2006, allegedly on orders of his brother Vicente. See also “Castaño, asesinado por su hermano,” LP (PA), 25 August 2006, 30A, and “Policía y ejército buscan a Castaño,” LP (PA), 14 October 2006, 6A.

177. See Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 35–36, and Garzón, Mafia and Co., 107.

178. Indeed, as late as 2006 the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy estimated that of the $13.8 billion that Mexican syndicates had amassed in total annual revenues, more than 60 percent, or $8.6 billion, continued to come from marijuana. “Economic Battle.”

179. Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 29; INCSR (1998), 4; Bonner, “New Cocaine Cowboys,” 36–37.

180. See Bonner, “New Cocaine Cowboys,” 37, and INCSR (1998), 4.

181. DEA, History Book, 1985–1990.

182. CIA, Allegations of Connections, 7.

183. Huff affidavit, 43–44.

184. For NAFTA’s effect on trafficking and interdiction, see Andreas, Border Games, 74–82; The trade liberalization marked by Mexico’s 1986 accession to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade also stimulated cross-border trade.

185. “Mexican Drug Traffickers Eclipse Colombian Cartels,” WP (US), 30 March 1997, 1A.

186. In 1996, despite instability within its cocaine industry, the Colombian minister of justice estimated that Colombia continued to export 80 percent of the world’s cocaine. “Colombia, primer exportador de cocaína,” LP (PA), 2 April 1996, 3A.

187. “Fragmenting Narcotics Industry,” 13.

188. FBI agent Huff stated of the Cali cartel kingpin: “Valencia was relentless in his exploration of other smuggling routes and methods . . . particularly . . . in a direct route from Colombia to the United States, as this would eliminate the high cost and periodic treachery associated with dealing with Mexican smugglers and traffickers. Valencia was weary of his Mexican associates’ lack of discipline and reliability in delivering cocaine pursuant to their agreement with him.” Huff affidavit, 49.

189. “Mexican Drug Traffickers Eclipse,” 1A.

190. Among U.S. federal cases the murder spawned were United States v. Alvarez-Machain, 504 U.S. 655; United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U.S. 259; and United States v. Caro-Quintero, 745 F. Supp. 599.

191. Grayson, Mexico’s Struggle, esp. 68–85, and Garzón, Mafia and Co., 98. See generally Grayson, Mexico.

192. See Jordan, Drug Politics, 151, and “Tons of Cocaine Reaching Mexico in Old Jets,” NYT (US), 10 January 1995, A1, A8.

193. For the 1993 Guadalajara airport shoot-out between Tijuana and Sinaloa traffickers that killed Catholic cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, who was meeting the Vatican’s ambassador arriving from Mexico City, see Rotella, Twilight on the Line, 150–60.

194. For the evolution of the Gulf cartel, see Garzón, Mafia and Co., 82–89. For its ties to top Mexican judicial and federal police officials, see Jordan, Drug Politics, 85–86.

195. “Top Mexican Cartel Chief Sentenced to Prison,” Wall Street Journal (United States) (hereafter cited as WSJ [US]), 27–28 February 2010, A12.

196. Note that some originally used the term La Familia to denote the close ties in the early 1980s between the Guadalajara and Sonora cartels. See Toro, Mexico’s “War,” 79–80, 80n78.

197. Grayson, Familia Drug Cartel, esp. iii, 3, 42–43, 58–60.

198. “Según la DEA: La mitad de los principales cárteles de drogas del mundo son mexicanos,” LP (HO), 23 April 2001, 39A; “El poderío de los cuatro cuarteles,” LP (PA), 26 May 2007, 5A; “DEA privilegiará lucha contra narcos mexicanos,” LP (PA), 26 May 2004, 2A.

199. “Surgen sesenta grupos de narcotraficantes,” SV (GU), 15 July 2001, 13.

200. The Federation refers to cooperation among Pacific-coast Mexican organizations, including the Sinaloa cartel, after a 2002 meeting in Cuernavaca. Garzón, Mafia and Co., 100.

201. “Mexican Drug Cartels Move North,” WP (US), 20 September 2007, A14; “U.S. Strikes Blow Against Mexican Cartel,” WSJ (US), 23 October 2009, A3; “U.S. Arrests Hundreds in Mexican Cartel Sweep,” WSJ (US), 11 June 2010, 1.

202. In 1997 retired DEA agent Donald Ferrarone testified to Congress that “every indicator now and over the last 20 years reveals the government of Mexico consistently works together with the major drug-trafficking families, seeing to it that the drugs . . . are offloaded securely, protected, shipped cross-country under convoy, stored and safely transported to our border.” Jordan, Drug Politics, 142. For a corroborating statement by a Medellín trafficker to an undercover U.S. agent, see Mazur, Infiltrator, 65. In 1998 a 230-page confidential assessment by Swiss officials investigating money laundering reportedly alleged that President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s brother Raúl had taken “control of practically all drug shipments transiting Mexico” during the Salinas administration. Jordan, Drug Politics, 259n42. Raúl Salinas was later convicted of ordering the assassination of his brother-in-law, president of the PRI; however, in 2009 the investigation of his alleged drug trafficking was closed. See Astorga, “Mexico,” 94, and Garzón, Mafia and Co., 84n118.

203. See generally Gross, Drug Smuggling, and Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 64.

204. See “Drugs: Central American Region a Cocaine Warehouse,” Interpress Service, 21 April 1999.

205. Lee, “Perversely Harmful Effects,” 191.

206. “Marijuana of the Eighties,” 1.

207. In 1994 the DEA discovered on a $1 million IBM computer, confiscated from José Santacruz Londoño, extensive telephone records, including those of the U.S. Embassy and its DEA office, and all of Colombia’s motor-vehicle records. This enabled Cali traffickers to gain clues as to the identity of informants. Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 239–40.

208. U.S. Senate, Law Enforcement: Report, 139.

209. “Cartels Have Best Technology,” 12A.

210. Strange, Retreat of the State, 7.

211. Drug czar General Paul Gorman told the U.S. Senate that Medellín traffickers, in certain respects, were better equipped than the U.S. Air Force. U.S. Senate, Law Enforcement: Report, 33. Barry Seal demonstrated Medellín communications equipment to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime, stating, “I don’t believe there’s any paramilitary group better equipped than my former associates.” “Marijuana of the Eighties,” 2. See also “Equipo satelital controlaba trasiego de droga por mar,” LN (CR), 9 August 2007, 18A; “Cartels Have Best Technology,” 12A; and “Stemming the Drug Flow,” 17.

212. See Huff affidavit, 111; U.S. Senate, Laundering in Panama, 34–35; and “Gozan de impunidad sin costo,” LP (PA), 23 January 1999, 6A. In arresting a Salvadoran trafficker in 1998, Guatemalan authorities found an encryption device and equipment to monitor police conversations. “Desmantelan red telefónica que servía a narcotraficantes,” LP (HO), 13 July 1998, 71A.

213. “Target: Cali Cartel,” 1.

214. See “Patrols Push Drugs into Deeper Waters,” TT (CR), 20 February 2004, 12, and “Ticos Tour U.S. Anti-drug Ship,” TT (CR), 16 August 2002, 1A.

215. La Familia has developed certain parallel state functions in Mexico. See Grayson, Familia Drug Cartel, viii, 61–62. In Honduras drug money was involved in the 1978 coup and 1984 attempted coup. However, the extent of penetration by Honduran traffickers and of their ambitions may be distinguished from Bolivia’s cocaine coup of 1980, sometimes characterized as a cartel buying an entire government. See Scott and Marshall, Cocaine Politics, 54, and Shannon, Desperados, 475.

216. Garzón, Mafia and Co., 29, and Bagley, “Dateline Drug Wars,” 158.

217. Here, we paraphrase Thoumi in Political Economy, 141.

218. For information on sicarios, see Duzán, Death Beat, 202–15; Salazar, No nacimos pa’ semilla; and Krauthausen and Sarmiento, Cocaína y Co., 85–90.

219. In 2009 Costa Rica’s chief prosecutor, Francisco Dall’Anese, observed, “The truth is we have cases of hit men every day.” “Dall’Anese: It’s Easy to Traffic Drugs Here,” TT (CR), 30 January 2009, 2. For the downfall in a Honduran DEA operation of alleged Medellín assassin Guillermo León Velásquez, suspected of seven Florida killings and others in Colombia, see “Capturan en Tegucigalpa pistolero del ‘Cartel,’” Tiempo (Honduras), 18 May 1990, 3.

220. Andreas, Border Games, 23.

221. For the statement of Ana Martes, former director of prosecutors, Colombian Attorney General’s Office, see “Por la fuga de dos extranjeras suspenden a director del COF,” SV (GU), 25 June 1996, 12.

222. As the Eleventh Circuit explained, “A ‘broker’ in the drug trade is a middle-man who for a fee will take on a consignment basis large shipments of drugs smuggled into this country to find a buyer for them.” United States v. Corona, 885 F.2d 766. See also Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 39–45, 55–56, and Levine, Big White Lie, 150. For the operations of one Cali cocaine broker, see Huff affidavit, 45–47.

223. See, for instance, United States v. Torres-Teyer, 322 F. Supp. 2d at 365. A New York federal court declared, “[Jorge] Torres-Teyer quite literally organized the Belizean trans-shipment operation. . . . He did not act as a mere manager or supervisor, but as a high-level operative who recruited, supervised, and directed dozens of individuals and organized their activity.”

224. United States v. Mejia, 448 F.3d at 447.

225. See U.S. Senate, Drug Cartels, 42. For compartmentalization in a Colombian cartel’s New York distribution network, see Natarajan, “Understanding the Structure,” 273–98.

226. Bank employees, particularly those evaluated on the daily number of clients serviced, have sometimes failed to record electronic-transfer data conscientiously.

227. Loría Quirós, Caro Quintero, 244, 247–50.

228. Lee, “Transnational Organized Crime,” 17.

229. For one case of a Costa Rican arrested after transferring property to a shell company, see “Detienan a abogados,” LN (CR), 23 September 1998, 10A.

230. Confidential interview with official, May 1990, San José, Costa Rica.

231. See, for instance, “En fuga abogado de Mario Valverde,” LN (CR), 13 March 1997, 5A.

232. For instance, Guatemalan attorney Javier Barba Hernández, eventually killed in a shoot-out with Mexican police, was a reputed executioner for the Guadalajara cartel. Shannon, Desperados, 280, 448. A prominent Mexican defense lawyer showed a British journalist the U.S.-manufactured grenades that narcotics suspects had given him in lieu of pay. “Conspiracy to Corrupt,” 1.

233. In particular, Cali employees were supposed to sign sworn affidavits, soon after arrest, “disavowing knowledge of, or involvement with, [Miguel] Rodríguez-Orejuela.” United States v. Abbell, 271 F.3d at 1291. For cases involving confidential informants against Cali traffickers intimidated into stopping their cooperation, see Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 156–57; United States v. Orjuela [sic], 809 F. Supp. at 196; and “Cartel’s Lawyers, Legal Profession Also on Trial in Miami,” SPT (US), 1 August 1995, 1A.

234. United States v. Abbell, 271 F.3d at 1291. See also Huff affidavit, 111.

235. United States v. Abbell, 271 F.3d at 1294. The Harvard-educated Michael Abbell, former prosecutor for the Department of Justice, was eventually convicted of money laundering for major Cali traffickers. See Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 163.

236. The U.S. government was not alone in publicly condemning lackluster performance. In 2001 the Grupo de Acción Financiera Internacional (GAFI) blacklisted Panama for failing to cooperate against laundering, and in 2007 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development greylisted Panama for withholding financial information. “Gobierno panameño se reúne hoy con funcionarios antinarcóticos de EU,” LP (PA), 4 January 2001, 2A; “Panamá y EU firman acuerdo,” LP (PA), 1 December 2010, 1A.

237. See Lee, White Labyrinth, xiv.

238. For discussions of the certification process, see Crandall, Driven by Drugs, 38–40, and “The Process Has Become an Annual Charade,” WP (US), 21 March 1999, B3.

239. See Thoumi, “Illegal Drug Industry.”

240. For the alleged terms of one DEA deal with a British confidential informant in the ship-repair business, see Daly v. Hubner, 2001 Ch.D. 1, although note that the court merely assumed that Terence Daly was accurately testifying to his DEA arrangement.

241. Although in a single week in 1989 U.S. authorities seized fully 30 tons of cocaine, higher street prices of cocaine did not follow. Thoumi, Political Economy, 195. U.S. cocaine prices did temporarily spike after the major Tranquilandia seizure. They also rose 19 percent between February and September 2005, and wholesale prices climbed again in 2007–8. See Strong, Whitewash, 142; INCSR (2006), 104–5; and Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 315.

242. INCSR (1997), 9.

243. See INCSR (1997), 125, and INCSR (2003), 5:10. Note, however, that in supplying Canadian drug users, heroin typically arrived in Canada from Asia and cocaine via the Caribbean, not Central America, and much marijuana was produced domestically. For Medellín’s difficulties in opening a Canadian cocaine market, see Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 74.

244. “Mexico Eases Ban on Drug Possession,” WSJ (US), 22–23 August 2009, 1. In 2004 Mexico’s National Council Against Addictions reported that 1.3 million Mexicans were addicted to some illegal drug, and in 2005 that 1.68 percent of the population between twelve and sixty-five had admitted using illegal drugs in the past year, which would amount to 911,000 users. For statistics on earlier Mexican drug use, see Toro, Mexico’s “War,” 47–49.

245. Lee, “Transnational Organized Crime,” 3.

246. See Reuter, Crawford, and Cave, Sealing the Borders, v.

247. The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ National Survey on Drug Use and Health reported that 8 percent of Americans twelve and over had used illegal drugs in 2009, as opposed to 8.7 percent in 2010. INCSR (2011), 13.

248. Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars, 100, and Andreas, Border Games, 4n3. See also “The New Frontier in the War on Drugs,” U.S. News and World Report 109, 3 December 1990, 22. For U.S. transportation methods of Medellín traffickers, see United States v. Mendoza, 78 F.3d 460.

249. Shannon, Desperados, 477n15. For DEA and Customs Service estimates, see Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars, 100. See also “Mexico Connection,” 1.

250. See Gross, Drug Smuggling, 45. A smuggler who had conducted extensive maritime operations declared, “They haven’t invented the radar yet that can tell the difference between a boat that is carrying dope and one that isn’t; they’re all blips on a screen.” Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars, 100.

251. See the Hoglund Statement in U.S. Senate, Drug Cartels, 57.

252. While use surveys are perhaps the best data available, their utility may be questioned. Apart from the accuracy of answers, as Francisco E. Thoumi has pointed out, “Typical questions asked in those surveys are: Have you ever consumed a particular drug? Have you consumed it within the last year? Within the last month? These questions do not provide good data about frequency, patterns, and amounts consumed each time.” “Illegal Drug Industry,” 137n8.

253. INCSR (1997), 12.

254. INCSR (2000), 45.

255. “Heroin: A Growing Threat,” 1; “Heroin Seizures Have Nearly Doubled,” TT (CR), 31 October 2003, 3; INCSR (1997), 12.

256. Although quite significant in the United States, Latin American producers held only a small portion of the global heroin trade. Given enormous crops in South and Southeast Asia, the cultivation of opium poppies by Colombian and Mexican producers combined amounted in 1997 to less than 4 percent of the world’s total estimated opium-poppy production. INCSR (1998), 1–2. As detailed in the Guatemalan case study, Guatemalan production was a fraction of Mexican and Colombian.

257. INCSR (2000), 46; INCSR (1997), 3; INCSR (1999), 15; and Chappell, “Colombian Heroin Threat.”

258. For an estimate that the United States absorbed roughly two-thirds of the world’s cocaine, see United States v. Klimavicius-Viloria, 144 F.3d at 1249.

259. Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 24.

260. Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 64. For early activities of Colombian drug entrepreneurs in Europe, see Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 78–79. Roberto Escobar alleged that, during Colombia’s violent struggles in 1987, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela asked a Basque terrorist he had met in a Spanish prison to train Cali associates to manufacture the large bomb used to destroy Escobar’s Bogotá residence. Escobar then hired the same individual to train Medellín’s bomb makers and later trafficked cocaine into Spain using the Basque’s network. Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 164–67.

261. Mazur, Infiltrator, 77, and “Narcotráfico apunta ahora hacia Europa,” LN (CR), 12 November 1987, 28A.

262. See Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 4. For Sicilian-Colombian links, see Jordan, Drug Politics, 77–78. For a comprehensive overview of trafficking methods into the Netherlands, see Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 138–42. While European criminal syndicates tended to engage in numerous illegal activities, including stealing cars and running prostitution rings, Mexican and Colombian networks tended to focus on drug trafficking alone. Williams, “Transnational Criminal Networks,” 70–71.

263. See generally Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine.

264. See Bartilow and Kihong, “Free Traders,” 120; Bagley, “Globalisation,” 36, 40–41; and Krauthausen and Sarmiento, Cocaína y Co., 172–73.

265. Chepesiuk, Drug Lords, 113. Note that in the first three months of 2004 European authorities seized 4,200 kilos of cocaine as opposed to 2,300 kilos in the first three months of 1993.

266. See Estievenart, “European Community,” 58–59, and Joyce, “Transnational Criminal Enterprise,” 100.

267. Although drugs and arms have typically been exchanged in complex multiparty transactions, they occasionally have been dealt bilaterally, as when the Camorra syndicate in Naples traded weapons to Basque Fatherland and Liberty (ETA) terrorists for cocaine. See Federal Research Division, “Nexus Among Terrorists,” 9, 21.

268. DEA, History Book, 1990–1995.

269. See Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 81n15. “For at least half a decade, the South American cocaine syndicates have been shipping hundreds of tons to Europe.” INCSR (1997), 9.

270. Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 84; INCSR (1999), 11.

271. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, World Drug Report 2007, quoted in Garzón, Mafia and Co., 119.

272. Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, viii.

273. In 1997 Michael Horn, DEA chief of International Operations, testified to Congress, “The drug trafficking arena is in a constant state of change: restructuring organizations, adapting to law enforcement efforts, responding to demand, and incorporating new trafficking groups that bring specialties or advantageous distribution networks to the trade.” See the Horn Statement in U.S. Senate, Drug Cartels, 44.

274. Garzón, Mafia and Co., 57.

275. As major heroin trafficker Kon Yu-Leung testified before the U.S. Senate, “I think it is important for you to know that although we lost half of our heroin shipments to law enforcement or stealing, that did not discourage us from continuing in the business. It only pushed us to smuggle more drugs to make up for our losses.” “The confessions of a heroin smuggler,” South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), 9 August 1992, 3.

276. “Guatemala Is Latest Battlefield in War on Drugs,” Associated Press, 12 May 1991; “Just What the Smuggler,” A1.

277. INCSR (2003), 2:11.

278. See Belize’s Misuse of Drugs Act (1990; Laws of Belize); Costa Rica’s Law no. 7233, Law on Drugs, Psychotropic Substances, Drugs of Non-authorized Use and Related Activities (1991; Ley sobre estupefacientes); Guatemala’s Law Against Drug Activities (1992; Ley contra la narcoactividad); Honduras’s Law on the Undue Use and Illicit Traffic of Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (1990; Código penal de Honduras); and Panama’s Law no. 13 (1990; Código penal de la República). Particular provisions of these laws were sometimes later amended or additional laws were passed to form a more elaborate legal regime. See, for instance, Guatemala’s Law Against Narcoactivity (2005; Ley contra la narcoactividad) and Law Against the Laundering of Money or Other Activities and Their Regulations (2005; Ley contra el lavado).

279. Aguilera Peralta, “Fighting the Dragon,” 222–24, includes a useful review of these developments.