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,
