the longest time frame.12
Our research soon revealed that the many transnational criminal organizations active in Central America were putting into effect varied, numerous, and often quite creative drug-smuggling schemes.13 These aimed to tap the enormous potential profits inherent in the drug trade while avoiding interdiction, that is, the interception and seizure by law-enforcement officials of drugs and traffickers traveling from source to market countries, as well as of the back flow of drug profits.14 Criminal efforts to establish efficient smuggling routes and methods, followed by official attempts to counter them, have caused the drug trade to evolve, state by state and organization by organization, as traffickers and police have tried to adapt to each other’s actions.15
In the chapters that follow we explore where, when, and why smugglers have periodically changed their routes and modi operandi to avoid detection. We detail the growing magnitude of the regional trade, and we identify key traffickers in Central America and their organizations. Although the bridge states have shared many experiences, we draw special attention to the aspects of Central American trafficking operations that have varied by drug and by country. In analyzing state efforts to curb the trade, we examine what was typical and what was singular about the historical development of key institutions and how this affected antidrug initiatives.
Although in many respects we have disaggregated the Central American societies, we have also focused on the ways in which this activity is regional as well as national. As we shall show, traffickers, routes, and law-enforcement efforts have often involved more than a single bridge state. For an accurate picture of the Central American drug trade, a panorama must be created, in which developments in the different republics can be set next to one another and compared and contrasted. When approached from that perspective, the challenges of the Central American drug trade have underscored grave deficiencies in countering organized crime in more authoritarian societies and more democratic ones, in civil law and common law judicial systems, in postcolonial and long-independent states, and in countries at very different levels of development.
Empirical and Theoretical Contributions
In examining the complex workings of the Central American drug trade, our book has empirical and theoretical dimensions.16 One scholar wrote, “Like plants in nature, theories and explanations grow out of the dirt of observations of reality. . . . Getting your hands dirty with the nitty-gritty details . . . is a good way to test the abstractions of theory, and perhaps to develop alternate theory, or modifications of theories.”17 In that spirit we have aimed to write an empirical book that sets forth and illuminates important data regarding the Central American drug trade, while using inductive observations to provide the first detailed, comparative account of drugs and the law in this region.
Exploring this variety of transnational crime in this region of a globalized world seemed to us to invite an interdisciplinary approach. We are political scientists, but we have also drawn on the disciplines of law, history, geography, economics, and criminal justice. Furthermore, in conducting our fieldwork, we found it necessary to live for a period in each of the five countries, to become closely familiar with the geography, culture, institutions, and procedures of each society; to develop networks of sources; and to begin to ferret out information. We then tried to assemble for scholarly analysis the type of information that, if assembled at all, had heretofore been largely restricted to antidrug and intelligence services.
Our work also has a theoretical dimension in seeking to go beyond laying out facts to pose conceptual questions about the role of bridge states in the international drug trade and to develop a framework to better understand how states have tried to contend with this aspect of transnational crime. From this standpoint this volume continues our past work on the state. In the mid-1990s we collaborated on our first book exploring the role of state sovereignty in international relations. At a time when many scholars were portraying sovereignty as “perforated, defiled, cornered, eroded, extinct, anachronistic, bothersome, even interrogated,” we struck off on a different course, arguing that, although the implications of sovereignty for international affairs now vary from past eras, the concept has remained at the center of international discourse.18 Other scholars then elaborated on that basic theme, arguing that sovereignty has remained viable, though reflective of “organized hypocrisy,” or subject to occasional revolutions in meaning.19
When the Central American drug trade is viewed through an international relations lens, certain preliminary points stand out. Academics have long agreed that relations between states should no longer be the sole focus of scholarly attention in this field. Furthermore, it is no longer self-evident, as it may once have seemed to be, that states are automatically the chief actors in the international drama with other entities present on the stage but playing bit parts.20 Drug organizations amount to transnational actors that take on far more than minor roles in these bridge states. Indeed, they contend with, challenge, and sometimes overwhelm bridge-state institutions. This book thus aims to further our understanding of the relationships between states and one important class of nonstate actors.
A study of bridge states is also interesting for students of international relations, because the Central American drug trade accelerated just in the period when the cold war era was succeeded by one marked by expanded trade, diminished militaries, enhanced regional integration, and increased globalization. We wondered how these broader phenomena would affect drug trafficking. While the drug trade via Central America has certainly spotlighted the difficulties of mounting an effective multilateral campaign against agile, wealthy, and opportunistic nonstate actors, we believed that in such an era of rapid change, it was particularly important to relate drug smuggling through the Central American bridge states to broader international trends.
As the issues of the post–cold war world have become more sharply defined, we became especially interested in another overlooked and underexplored aspect of the clandestine side of globalization: how exactly have governments tried to contend with the illicit dimensions of the global economy?21 Where in the middle decades of the last century scholars often portrayed states as omnicompetent, if not omnipotent, entities, and international relations was sometimes portrayed in terms that might be likened to leaders moving pieces on a diplomatic-military chessboard, scholarship toward the end of the cold war and throughout the post–cold war era has increasingly focused on the deficiencies and incapacities of states.22 Indeed, in this age many governments have been unable to discharge even their most basic functions: maintaining law and order, promoting a sound economy, defending territory from foreign depredations, and operating a fair and effective legal system.23 Increasingly, governments purport to regulate all kinds of activity that they have no real ability to oversee, and in many societies the notion that the state has a legal monopoly on violence seems like a curious abstraction largely irrelevant to daily life. Again, to us these points seemed directly relevant to bridge-state drug trafficking.
Such observations brought us, in turn, to what has been called the most prominent theoretical debate at the close of the twentieth century and outset of the twenty-first: to what extent are states retreating in light of increasingly global markets and increasingly pervasive transnational actors, some of them quite powerful? When confronted with the illicit global economy, states do not abandon the field so much as they
