organizations largely to avoid Costa Rica, the country with the strongest institutions. And yet Costa Rica has long been a critically important bridge state.
We have found that drug organizations can successfully operate in the face of the region’s stronger government institutions as well as its weaker ones. Furthermore, institutions are but one factor in determining the extent of bridge-state drug transshipment. We shall see that noninstitutional factors, including geography, also greatly influence trafficking. Moreover, even the stronger and more stable institutions in Central America have often been rigid and inflexible. Institutions that are generally functioning effectively might not have been designed to cope with transnational criminal networks or with the particular stresses imposed by extraordinary drug flows. Their strengths seem not to include the adaptability needed to change to meet drug-trafficking challenges. In the case studies we thus note both the weak institutions and the rigidity of otherwise strong institutions that have helped to determine the extent of the drug trade.
The essence of our argument is that although the Central American bridge states have the power to join with outside powers, and occasionally with one another, to disrupt the operations of any particular criminal group transshipping drugs across their waters, territories, and skies, they have been overwhelmed by the drug trade as a whole. The social, economic, political, and geographic factors that propel this dimension of the illicit global economy—especially the North American and European demand for drugs produced in South America that governments throughout the world have outlawed—are too formidable for these states to counter effectively. When a large array of transnational criminal groups choose to ride these powerful currents toward wealth, Central American states lack the resources needed to stop, or even to dramatically curb, drug transshipment through the region. The balance of forces can thwart the efforts of the strongest countries in the region—newly developed Costa Rica, solidly democratic Belize, and economically dynamic Panama. And it can wreak havoc on the weakest—poverty-stricken Honduras and deeply fractured Guatemala.
The best that these bridge states can do is to try to minimize the bridge-favoring factors that traffickers perceive in sending drugs through their state and to maximize the bridge-disfavoring factors so as to encourage drug rings to shift more of their business to a neighboring state. However, altering certain bridge-favoring factors is impossible. For example, Belize and Guatemala flank Mexico, and Panama borders Colombia, making each of them attractive transshipment sites. Altering other bridge-favoring factors may be possible but also very costly, time-consuming, or uncertain. Consequently, Central American bridge states, even with extraordinary amounts of outside assistance, can devote many resources to countering drug smuggling and yet, despite disrupting many drug rings, can remain incapable of stemming the flow of drugs from South America to North American and European markets.
1. The trail of bridge-state trafficking studies was blazed in Griffith, Drugs and Security, but this work deals almost exclusively with Caribbean, not Central American, drug trafficking. For the multipolarity of early twentieth-century cocaine production, culture, and uses, see Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 190, 248.
2. Addressing the paucity of research, one scholar wrote, “Anyone attempting to do research on drug trafficking in Central America will come up against a dearth of information on this subject. Therefore, research . . . will have to begin at the most basic level.” Juhn, “Central America,” 389.
3. Reuter, “Political Economy,” 128; Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 1.
4. Regions rarely “break easily along neatly perforated lines.” Claude, Swords into Plowshares, 113. Some might question including Panama, or even Belize, in Central America and wish to exclude them on geographic, historical, or cultural grounds. Vis-à-vis the drug trade, however, it seems to us that both should properly be considered Central American bridge states.
5. The Kerry Commission observed that traffickers want to conduct their business smoothly, which is most readily accomplished in states with stable governments but weak institutions. U.S. Senate, Law Enforcement: Report, 10.
6. In 1985 the first DEA agent assigned to undertake undercover work entered El Salvador. He later wrote, “As I leafed through the files, I discovered the drug war in this corner of the globe amounted to piles of reports documenting traffickers’ identities and movements, but few seizures and arrests.” Castillo and Harmon, Powderburns, 112.
7. See generally U.S. House, Nicaraguan Government, and Cockburn and St. Clair, Whiteout, 283.
8. U.S. Department of State, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (hereafter cited as INCSR) (1991), 145. In the early 1990s, one source claims, the Cali cartel bought four 230-kilo cluster bombs from Salvadoran military officials. Strong, Whitewash, 267.
9. Metric tons are hereafter referred to simply as tons. “Costa Rica el guardián de Centroamérica,” Siglo Veintiuno (Guatemala), 14 February 1999, 22.
10. The Kerry Commission concluded that “individuals who provided support for the Contras were involved in drug trafficking, the support network of the Contras was used by drug trafficking organizations, and elements of the Contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers.” See U.S. Senate, Law Enforcement: Report, 36. Once the Sandinista regime took control, the CIA and DEA, through undercover informant Barry Seal, procured photos implicating Sandinistas in cocaine trafficking. A former internal affairs official in Nicaragua’s Interior Ministry, Álvaro José Baldizón Avilés, likewise testified that Nicaraguan officials had trafficked in cocaine. Imprisoned Nicaraguan trafficker Enrique Miranda Jaime stated that from 1981 to 1985 he had been personally involved in Sandinista efforts to raise funds by drug trafficking. And, Medellín insider Roberto Escobar later revealed that Sandinista officials had agreed with the cartel to hide its leading fugitives and to use an
island for aerial trafficking. See U.S. House, Nicaraguan Government, 3; Shannon, Desperados, 150–55; CIA, Allegations of Connections, 6; and Escobar, Accountant’s Story, 69, 119.
11. “Central America Fights Its ‘Drug Bridge’ Image,” United Press International, 30 August 1990.
12. In 2007 Nicaraguan authorities seized 20 tons of cocaine, 184 kilos of heroin, and $5.5 million in confiscated assets, a twelve-fold increase over the prior year. “Police Make Record Drug Busts in 2007,” Nica Times (Costa Rica) (hereafter cited as NT [CR]), 11 January 2008, 2. In 1991 Salvadoran authorities seized approximately three tons of Medellín cocaine in a container off a Liberian ship transporting goods from South America for a Mexican company. See “Salvador’s Drug Role Growing,” Miami Herald (hereafter cited as MH [US]), 4 December 1991, international ed., 3A, and “Gran decomiso de coca en El Salvador,” La Nación (Costa Rica) (hereafter cited as LN [CR]), 30 October 1991, 30A.
13. Use of the word transnational is meant to highlight the fact that nonstate actors engaged in the drug trade are carrying out activities that cross state boundaries, as opposed to the interactions between governments that are the traditional focus of international relations. See Farer, Transnational Crime, xvi, n1.
