DOAN Department of Antinarcotics Operations (Departamento de Operaciones Antinarcóticos)
LH La Hora
LPL La Prensa Libre
PNC National Civil Police (Policía Nacional Civil)
SAIA Antinarcotics Analysis and Information Services (Servicio de Análisis e Información Antinarcóticos)
SV Siglo Veintiuno
HONDURAS
LP La Prensa
SETCO Commander Executive Tourist Services (Servicios Ejecutivos Turistas Commander)
PANAMA
FDP Panama Defense Force (Fuerza Defensa de Panama)
LP La Prensa
PTJ Judicial Technical Police (Policía Técnica Judicial)
SMN National Maritime Service (Servicio Marítimo Nacional)
UNITED STATES
AP Associated Press
AWACS Airborne Warning and Control System
BINM Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (Department of State)
BNDD Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (Department of Justice)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
DEA Drug Enforcement Administration
FBI Federal Bureau of Investigation
INCSR International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (Department of State)
IPS Inter Press Service
LAT Los Angeles Times
MH Miami Herald
NYT New York Times
SLPD St. Louis Post-Dispatch
SPT St. Petersburg Times
UPI United Press International
WP Washington Post
OTHER
AUC United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia)
BCCI Bank of Credit and Commerce International
EU (MX) El Universal (Mexico)
FARC Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia)
PRI Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional) (Mexico)
PRIDE Parent’s Resource Institute for Drug Prevention
THC Tetrahydrocannabinol
Introduction
Exploring Central American Drug Trafficking
This book explores one distinctly understudied aspect of the international drug trade: the experiences of “bridge countries,” that is, states that may neither consume nor produce sizable amounts of illegal drugs but that lie on favored paths carved out between centers of production and key consumer markets. In the 1980s the Central American republics became critically important to the international drug trade and have remained so ever since, with illegal drugs continually transiting en route to North American, European, and various emerging markets. Central America is particularly well suited for one of the first comparative studies of bridge-state trafficking, because its trade in drugs has long been emphatically multipolar.1 Significant drug transit has occurred not only across the territories but in the skies above each state and through offshore Pacific and Caribbean waters. By studying Central American drug trafficking, we offer a first examination of social, political, and economic phenomena of extraordinary importance to an often overlooked region of the world.
Certainly, by the 1990s massive inflows and outflows of cocaine had come to affect profoundly each small republic. Nevertheless, no sound empirical foundation has yet been compiled, much less have theoretical explanations been offered, to illuminate the manner in which drug traffickers and law enforcement have contended with one another in Central America.2 One leading authority on drugs has written, “The topic of transnational smuggling attracts a good deal of rhetoric but not much that could be called research.” Another recent work declares, “Although studies of drug use are numerous and our understanding of local drug markets is growing, our understanding of the multimillion-dollar business of international drug smuggling is considerably less well developed.”3 This book thus aims to fill a gap in the literature by using extensive primary and secondary research to elucidate the dynamics of the Central American drug trade.
The Case Studies Selected
We organized our research around five case studies: Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama.4 Each has served as an important staging point in international drug transit throughout the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first. Although as early as the 1980s transshipment also occurred via El Salvador and Nicaragua, their high levels of instability and violence kept some traffickers at bay and greatly hampered antidrug activities.5 Throughout that decade, data are scarce, since their authorities were seldom seizing narcotics and even more rarely breaking up significant drug rings.6 Furthermore, the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran civil wars hampered the U.S. drug investigations usually critically important for seizures and arrests anywhere in the region. The Sandinista government was not prepared to cooperate with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and U.S. national security officials reportedly squelched DEA inquiries that involved trafficking related to the Salvadoran military, its bases, and its role in supporting the Nicaraguan contras.7
In later chronicling how drug problems had long been ignored, the U.S. State Department reported that El Salvador had seized a single kilogram of cocaine in 1989 and a mere 26 kilos in 1990.8 Even as late as 1998, of 31.6 metric tons of cocaine seized in Central America, Salvadoran authorities accounted for a mere 41 kilos.9 Similarly, in Nicaragua neither the right nor the left did much to stem drug passage in the 1980s.10 Indeed, before 1990 the country had never seized a Colombian cocaine plane.11 Instead, individuals on both sides of the Nicaraguan civil war trafficked narcotics for their own profit or to finance their causes. Thus, although drug transit eventually reached substantial levels in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and each enters our account in relation to trafficking in its neighbors, we chose to examine the five Central American countries in which the most data
