Although the DEA has been institutionally stable, retaining most policies and personnel despite periodic government transitions and occasional scandals, such has often not been the case with the national police forces with which it has cooperated. In Central America constant turnover in personnel and other institutional difficulties have often led to real discontinuity in antidrug law enforcement. When faced with soaring international trafficking, Central American governments have frequently responded by terminating and then reorganizing counternarcotics institutions when they have become discredited. Governments have removed antidrug officials to eliminate suspect individuals, punish lack of success, offer up a scapegoat, or reward political patrons. Whether such turnover has been merited or not, in most of the bridge states the reporting requirements, chains of command, even the names of antidrug units have repeatedly changed. This constant state of flux has contributed to ongoing institutional weaknesses.
Yet another factor promoting Central American drug trafficking has been the conflicting and overlapping law-enforcement jurisdictions. Typically, many national actors have had antidrug responsibilities: customs officials; naval, army, and air force personnel; antinarcotics, anticorruption, and other special units; and multiple police forces, run by the judiciary and by federal or provincial authorities.21 Many of these units have been secretive, reluctant to share information or otherwise cooperate with one another. Latin American militaries have been especially so and have frequently taken advantage of their distinctive legal status as well.22 Infighting over turf has then commonly occurred, as different units have grappled with one another for scarce resources, for their vision of strategies and objectives, for public and governmental attention, and on occasion, for assuming the prime position to reap bribes.
Furthermore, the complexities, confusions, sometimes even chaos in enforcement have been overlaid on often patently inadequate laws dealing with drug trafficking. Apart from Belize, which has struggled with a somewhat different set of legal problems, the rest of the region has been firmly rooted in civil law traditions.23 Their legal systems have not traditionally recognized conspiracy to be a crime, and wiretapping and various undercover operations, including controlled deliveries, have been difficult to undertake lawfully, such that perpetrators can be successfully prosecuted.24 In addition, traditionally, penalties for trafficking drugs have been much lower than those found in most developed countries. These ingredients, combined, form a recipe for a highly ineffective legal regime versus organized crime.
On top of these factors, after decades of internal violence and civil war plagued Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, by the late 1990s an estimated one to two million weapons were circulating through Central America, no longer controlled by regular or rebel armed forces.25 Not only have traffickers purchased and put to use grenades, high-powered automatic weapons, and other small arms, but these have also contributed to increasingly violent domestic crime. And other criminal activity has often diverted the attention of authorities from drug trafficking. Indeed, some officials have suspected that drug organizations have actively encouraged it for precisely this reason.
Meanwhile, the guerrillas and the paramilitaries engaged in the Colombian civil war have had ready access to cocaine supplies and their own steep demand for weapons. Central Americans have thus participated in numerous arms-for-drugs exchanges, including barter transactions involving combinations of money, weapons, and narcotics.26 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, arms-for-drugs deals have occurred periodically in Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama, some of large scale.27 Capitalizing on this, an undercover U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent in a 2002 sting operation arranged to trade an array of Russian-made weapons, including shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles, nine thousand assault weapons, three hundred thousand grenades, and sixty million rounds of ammunition to the Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC) in exchange for $25 million in cocaine. In this case twenty-five Costa Rican officers then trapped and arrested the AUC representatives at a hotel meeting arranged, purportedly, to seal the deal.28 In other cases, however, the authorities have failed to root out arms-for-drugs transactions or have taken action too late to stop them.
A handful of cardinal factors that have affected much of the region have thus greatly stimulated drug trafficking through the Central American bridge states. Arms, poverty, overmatched militaries, weak legal regimes, dismal law enforcement, and ineffective cooperative efforts have joined with geography to create an ideal region for drug transshipment. In addition, in much of Central America the state, historically, “has been used as a means of obtaining and enlarging personal fortunes.”29 This, too, has promoted the extensive narco-corruption through which criminal groups have arranged for drugs to flow through these countries without interruption.
One might at first assume that because our five Central American case studies coexist within a fairly small region and have shared historical experiences and social and economic obstacles, their political, judicial, and law-enforcement systems would closely resemble one another, and the development of the drug trade within their boundaries would follow identical courses. Indeed, the common characteristics of these countries, once derogatorily labeled “banana republics,” have gained considerable attention. Observers have pointed to the interference of various Central American militaries in political affairs, the chronic instability of many of the political systems, the pervasive corruption hampering government functions, and the numerous twentieth-century U.S. interventions.
With respect to the drug trade, however, we have been struck as much by the distinctions among our case studies as by their similarities. In terms of geography the Central American bridge states have varying combinations of jungle, mountains, islands, inland waterways, and lengthy coastlines, each of which factors into transshipment schemes in different ways. Indeed, we have coined the phrase “the geotactics of the drug trade” to denote the manner in which drug networks have formulated trafficking strategies by assembling different methods, routes, and logistics, many dependent on geographic factors. To take one of many possible examples, the placid sea dotted with cayes that lies behind the Belizean barrier reef has encouraged speedboat deliveries of cocaine, while narcotics have been routinely shipped via the deep-water ports of Honduras and Panama.
In a private conversation with the director of the United Nations Drug Control Program, a Caribbean police commissioner declared that the drug problems of the twenty-nine countries being discussed “were like fingerprints: no two were identical, and, for that same reason, no two strategies to combat them could be identical either.”30 Likewise, both drug trafficking and counternarcotics activities in the Central American bridge states have varied in notable ways. Political, judicial, and law-enforcement institutions have functioned in somewhat different manners. The degree of transparency; the content of laws, policies, and procedures; the levels of resources and official competence and motivation; the sophistication of institutions; and institutional flexibility and rigidity have differed from state to state. The region, in fact, hosts a spectrum of regime types, each with its own distinctive profile. Although the historical experiences of these countries have paralleled one another