U.S. prices, see Reuter, “Political Economy,” 130, table 7.3. For European prices in this time frame, see “Tica detenida en París con catorce kilos de cocaína,” LN (CR), 20 July 1995, 10A. Some scholars have debated whether (or which) groups trafficking drugs have sufficient hierarchy and cohesion to be properly called organizations at all, as opposed to a term such as networks, which connotes a looser and less vertical structure. Compare Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 15–17; Zaitch, “Post-Fordist Cocaine,” 150, 170; and Williams, “Transnational Criminal Networks,” 69. We consider all groups of traffickers working together to be organizations, although some are much more tightly and extensively organized than others.
44. Reuter and Haaga, Drug Markets, 41.
45. Cave and Reuter, Interdictor’s Lot, v.
46. In 2010, for instance, a kilo of cocaine that cost $1,750 in Colombia might be purchased for roughly $6,000 in Central America, but multiples of those figures in the market countries. See “Carteles mexicanos del narco toman el continente,” LN (CR), 31 January 2010, 20A.
47. Andreas, Border Games, 82.
48. Thoumi, Political Economy, 134.
49. See “‘Mini carteles’ colombianos operan desde Panamá,” LP (PA), 10 January 2000, 5A.
50. In developing our points on Central American institutional weaknesses, we found particularly useful Levitsky and Murillo, Argentine Democracy.
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
