Spanish language, much of it never before synthesized and analyzed.33 Certain useful government documents, such as the periodic reports of the Costa Rican and Honduran Legislative Commissions on Narcotics Trafficking, are publicly available. Bodies of relevant laws may be reviewed as well, those dealing specifically with drugs as well as those focused on related subjects, such as bail, extradition, and search and seizure. Furthermore, various U.S. government sources, including congressional hearings and reports, once-classified documents published by the National Security Archive, and DEA and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) materials, can clarify points about regional drug transshipment.
Most important, drug rings operating in the bridge states have slipped up, and the seizures and arrests that have unraveled their operations have exposed many activities. As our extensive Index of Cases attests, much information has been published in case reports and other legal documents from criminal proceedings in market and bridge states alike. Furthermore, antidrug officials have often consented to be interviewed, and a handful have written accounts of the drug trade, as have various traffickers after arrest. And, although few secondary sources deal directly with drug smuggling via the bridge states, much of the drug literature touches indirectly on the subject.
Thus, we took on the task of canvassing a broad array of sources on Central American drug trafficking and then sifting through a wealth of data to determine just how drugs have moved across the region and with what consequences. In conducting dozens of interviews in our five case studies, we spoke with many officials, including ministers of interior and justice, diplomats, legislators, foreign ministers, and even a prime minister. In addition, we contacted a host of officials working at different levels of the criminal-justice systems, including police officers, jurists, prosecutors, defense lawyers, public defenders, human rights observers, and prison wardens. We conversed with social workers, public health officials, and clerics with insights on the drug trade. We interviewed editors of newspapers within the bridge states, along with a range of academic observers, including professors at the region’s most highly regarded universities. We met as well with various authorities from the United Nations Latin American Institute for Crime Prevention and the Treatment of Offenders, including the director of the Organized Crime and Drug Traffic program. In each of the five countries we communicated with a slew of individuals on a not-for-attribution basis, including private citizens, foreign diplomats, and law-enforcement officials.
From this research we have tried to weave together many threads—individuals and organizations, places and routes, policies and laws, antidrug failures and successes—into a single fabric that presents the Central American drug trade accurately and holistically, nationally and regionally. Although no research project concerning secret illicit activity can be foolproof, we have attempted to corroborate information by relying on multiple sources, wherever possible, while weeding out material that seemed biased, implausible, or contradictory. In hopes that our work will stimulate others to sift through this information and to qualify, correct, and amplify our findings, we have tried to be as thorough as possible in indicating the sources that substantiate our points.
Clarification of Terms
Where preexisting scholarship is scarce, clarifying the terms used takes on particular importance. In this regard, categorizing the Central American countries as bridge states, as opposed to market states, ought to be qualified by the fact that drug consumption has risen sharply in each republic. For many years traffickers have purposefully stimulated domestic markets in the region by compensating bridge-state associates with drugs rather than cash, and these were then often transferred to local dealers in local markets.34 Furthermore, after traffickers have crashed planes, botched airdrops, or jettisoned cargoes during pursuit at sea, lost drug shipments have often been sold within the bridge countries. In fact, with significant drug use occurring throughout the Americas, the distinction between bridge and consumer states has become blurred. Indeed, because much cocaine headed for Canada passes through U.S. territory or waters, in a sense even the United States has served as a bridge country as well as the leading market state.35 Nevertheless, the chief role for the Central American countries in the drug trade has been to serve as a route to consumers elsewhere. This distinguishes them from countries that are principally markets.
While the Central American republics are most commonly referred to as bridge states, an alternative metaphor conceives of the Latin American drug trade as a pipeline, with much of the product originating in South America, particularly in Colombia.36 This image, however, also needs to be qualified and further elaborated. Some Central American countries have produced drugs for export, most notably, opium in Guatemala and marijuana in Belize and Panama. These drugs might be envisioned as entering the pipeline along its course, adding to the main flow from South America. Moreover, most drugs passing through the pipeline have been directed to Mexico, and Mexican traffickers have then transported the drugs across the border into the United States.37 Hence, the Central American portion of the pipeline has not necessarily emptied into a market country, though it sometimes has. Instead, it has often deposited the drugs into what might be envisioned as the key reservoir state, where supplies have been pooled before being smuggled into the U.S. market.
One might wonder, then, why we chose to confine our case studies to Central America, rather than extend them to Mexico. Unlike the Central American republics, Mexico is not a prototypical transshipment country. Not only does it include a large and growing market of millions of drug consumers but over the past four decades it has housed numerous leading drug syndicates and has thus served as the headquarters for many trafficking ventures. In contrast, although important traffickers and organizations have flourished across Central America, these drug rings have never rivaled, much less overshadowed, Colombian groups, as their Mexican counterparts have grown to do. A quintessential bridge country has one paramount role—to provide passage to market for drugs. Mexico is thus not an archetype of a bridge state but is instead a special case, worthy of separate studies to analyze its various functions in the international drug trade.
In clarifying our terms, we come next to the problematic term cartel. While an economic cartel is an arrangement among businesses to avoid free competition in a particular market by regulating prices and output, the word has been used differently with respect to the drug trade. Popular use of cartel in the drug context dates to 1983, when U.S. authorities had traced the cocaine in dozens of seizures to Medellín kingpin Jorge Luis Ochoa. It appeared that Ochoa and other prominent Medellín traffickers had engaged in some joint decision making and division of tasks. While the phrase export cooperative might have been more accurate, the DEA and various federal prosecutors began to use cartel to describe the thick web of interconnections that appeared to link Ochoa with other leading Colombian traffickers headquartered in Medellín.38
The word cartel thus came to signify mostly Colombian and Mexican, even occasionally Bolivian, criminal organizations that over an extended period procured considerable supplies of cocaine, oversaw their transport to market, and reaped significant profits. Certainly, this description makes for an imprecise definition. Determining whether a drug ring of some magnitude has attained cartel status is an inexact science. Nevertheless, the use of cartel has become deeply entrenched in discourse about the Latin American drug trade, frequently employed by journalists, politicians, counternarcotics officials, prosecutors and judges, and many, though not all, scholars.
Given how often cartel appears, we adopt its usage as well, though we hasten to add certain clarifications. First, the term does not necessarily imply an ability to thoroughly control the supply of a drug or to form a monopoly or even an oligopoly that so diminishes competition as to permit price fixing.39
