The Stimulus for Central American Drug Trafficking
Geography must stand as the initial factor that has transformed Central America into perhaps the world’s preeminent bridge region. These states, squarely situated between South American producers and the immense market of North American consumers, have enjoyed relatively easy access to Mexico—that paramount gateway into the United States. In addition, the lack of sustained, broad-based economic development, coupled with pockets of extreme poverty, has helped to produce ready supplies of collaborators for foreign and domestic trafficking organizations.8 “For every one arrested,” one foreign law-enforcement official declared, “there are a hundred hungry souls eager to take his place.”9 In this way, personal economic travails have aligned with the objectives and operations of international drug-trafficking organizations.
Had those working in Central American drug trafficking confronted modern laws against transnational organized crime, vigilant law enforcement, able prosecution, and stiff penalties, including imprisonment in secure penitentiaries, the potential costs of involvement might have deterred some individuals. In fact, these bridge states have also attracted smuggling organizations because their criminal-justice systems, often antiquated and haphazardly constructed, have usually functioned poorly. Legal institutions have tended to be underfunded and prone to intimidation and corruption, offering wealthy traffickers multiple opportunities to escape conviction or at least lengthy imprisonment. While trying to contend with new and different varieties of crime in rapidly urbanizing societies that have expanded quickly with youthful populations, chiefs of police have often had to stretch their poorly compensated forces to cover their countries as best they could. Transnational criminal networks have thus been able to exploit the grave limitations of domestic law enforcement.
A catalog of cross-regional factors relevant to the drug trade must also include the nationalistic sensitivities, occasionally developing into animosities, that have long divided various Central American peoples. Historical tensions between certain of these countries and the United States have also sometimes resulted in difficult relations. Only infrequently have leading policy makers in neighboring states been simultaneously disposed to prioritize antidrug measures, especially those going beyond rhetoric to require significant outlays of resources.10 Other domestic and foreign-policy issues, some of which have involved conflicting priorities, have often distracted top officials from countering the drug trade. It is true that, from time to time, collaborative projects involving joint patrols, shared intelligence, and common border monitoring have occurred—sometimes stimulated by outside encouragement or pressure. But, on the whole, intraregional counternarcotics efforts have been slow to develop and have proven to be easily derailed. Few have been especially inspired or creative. While some unofficial transnational networks of mid-level personnel interacting in the implementation of antidrug measures have coalesced, these have tended to be more fragile in Central America than in a more cohesive, developed, wealthy, and technologically advanced region such as western Europe.11 Given the lack of resources and training, cross-national law-enforcement networks have been prone to lapse into inactivity.
Deep-seated concerns that neighbors or more powerful countries might infringe on sovereignty have also hampered cooperative antidrug initiatives.12 With seven states sharing a relatively small region, Central America has numerous land and maritime boundaries. Despite increasing interdependence and globalization, borders remain highly relevant to the drug trade and efforts to counter it.13 Whether on land, sea, or air, borders have tended to be sufficiently fluid to permit traffickers reasonably easy ingress and egress, but they have then bedeviled authorities trying to stop the rapid passage of drug shipments. Furthermore, free trade policies have brought expedited inspections of vehicles, border posts open for longer hours, and ready access to neighboring countries.14 Criminals have often easily crossed the region’s porous borders, either merging into legitimate traffic or simply ignoring customs posts and entering where they liked. Foreign traffickers have suddenly appeared in a country during a transshipment operation and then just as abruptly vanished. The inability of authorities, whether police or military, to cross Central American boundaries in hot pursuit, indeed, to exercise any of a range of law-enforcement functions on another state’s soil, has hampered official efforts to contend effectively with transnational organizations able to move speedily and alter plans nimbly.15
In addition, across Central America, armed forces have proven to be largely inadequate to provide for national security when confronted with the asymmetrical threats posed by transnational criminal groups. Because for many years patrols of airspace have been inadequate and radar coverage limited, most unauthorized drug flights have proceeded unhindered. For its part, while the U.S. military has long tracked drug planes and forwarded such intelligence to the DEA and national authorities in Central America, the U.S. Air Force has not been constituted as a law-enforcement agency and has been of limited utility in stopping aerial drug smuggling.16
Moreover, since the navies and coast guards of these bridge states typically have had only a tenuous grip on offshore activities, local authorities have infrequently intercepted maritime shipments, unless tipped off by the DEA. In any event, as fears of communist subversion have diminished and democracy has taken root, governments across the region have drawn down military forces.17 In some places the deemphasis of national security has helped to ensure the ready transit of drugs, but in others, officers have searched avidly for opportunities for additional compensation—a boon to drug trafficking in those states in which the military has exercised substantial control. Capitalizing on their extraordinary resources, drug organizations have gained extensive experience in corrupting those who might oppose them, including members of militaries.
At sea the U.S. Coast Guard, the principal maritime antidrug force in international waters off Central America, has not been able to enter the territorial waters of these bridge states to enforce drug laws absent specific agreements authorizing joint operations. Thus, between 1991 and 2003 the U.S. government signed cooperative agreements for maritime counterdrug operations in all five of the countries we studied.18 These so-called ship-rider agreements typically enabled the coast guard to proceed with patrols or in hot pursuit so long as an official of the state in whose territorial waters the operation was occurring was on board to authorize formally any law-enforcement action. All told, this has proven to be a particularly successful antidrug initiative. Nevertheless, while these treaties were being conceived, negotiated, and approved, maritime drug smuggling soared. In addition, having to follow the procedures laid out has sometimes proven cumbersome.19 Traffickers have periodically succeeded in evading pursuit, even after a U.S. ship has spotted their vessel and started to give chase, and in Honduras and Panama supplementary implementing arrangements had to be designed to correct flaws in the treaties. Indeed, the ship-rider approach has been ideally suited only for those times when the U.S. Coast Guard was conducting planned operations near a country’s territorial waters and could get a local official on board before suspected vessels were sighted.
Within the Central American states, where large drug loads have been seized and leading traffickers arrested, the U.S. government has frequently led the way. Operating through its DEA, the U.S. Department of Justice has had the financial and technological resources needed to