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
