The lower reaches of the Andes were thought to provide the ideal location for farmers intent on large-scale coca-leaf cultivation with the requisite high alkaloid levels.75 While Panamanian authorities periodically found and eradicated minor plantations right along the Colombian border, significant modern production never really took hold outside of South America. Instead, the soil, climate, and long growing seasons favored Bolivian, Peruvian, and eventually Colombian coca farming. So, too, did the legions of poor subsistence farmers available to tend the crops, and the long-standing, and entirely legal, tradition within much of the Andean region of cultivating coca to chew to provide vitamins and energy and to ward off the cold and fatigue of high altitudes.
In the 1970s first Chilean and then Bolivian traffickers, most notably Roberto Suárez Gómez, helped to initiate the rapid growth of the cocaine trade.76 Then, through the latter 1970s and into the early 1980s Colombian organizations rose to dominance.77 Just as geographic variables are key to understanding the evolution of bridge-state drug trafficking, so they influenced Colombian ascendancy in cocaine production. Not only did Colombia’s Amazon jungle abut the coca-producer states of Peru and Bolivia, but Colombia featured long Caribbean and Pacific coastlines with multiple deep-water ports.78 Traffickers from Colombia also jumped in to fill the vacuum created when General Augusto Pinochet expelled nineteen leading Chilean traffickers to the United States.79 Moreover, Colombian drug rings tapped into abundant national entrepreneurial and commercial know-how as well as long experience in importing such contraband as whiskey, textiles, appliances, and cigarettes, while exporting sugar, coffee, and emeralds, and eventually marijuana.80
Initially, the Colombian syndicates served as intermediaries, buying drugs from the existing Andean producers and then working out their delivery to market. Eventually, however, Colombian drug cartels encouraged Colombian farmers to plant coca to diminish the costs and risks inherent in importing coca base from Bolivia and Peru. According to the CIA, by the mid-1990s Bolivia and Peru produced about 85 percent of the world’s coca, with 15 percent originating in Colombia and elsewhere.81 Thereafter, the Colombian share of coca production climbed steadily, and by 2001 Colombia had become the world’s leading center of coca cultivation.82
After being harvested, coca then has to be processed into cocaine hydrochloride. To isolate the key alkaloid that drug users value, cocaine production proceeds through two lengthy stages: from leaf to paste and from paste to crystal. Here, Colombian organizations had taken the lead by the late 1960s, thereafter refining 80–90 percent of the cocaine exported to foreign markets.83 Coca grown outside of Colombia has thus been flown or transported overland from Peru, Bolivia, and sometimes Brazil into refining laboratories in Colombia, where drug rings for many years then dominated transportation to market as well. Colombian traffickers usually exported it from Colombian soil, but to avoid detection they sometimes first shipped it to a neighboring South American state such as Venezuela or Brazil. Then, much of the cocaine would be transported via the land, sea, or air space of the bridge states to market. While the retail sale of cocaine has often been left to others, Colombian cartels have created their own distribution networks, taking payment in market countries from wholesale buyers, or through narcotics brokers, who for a fee have held shipments and contacted or searched out such buyers. Indeed, in the late 1980s authorities estimated that the U.S. distribution infrastructure of Colombian drug organizations consisted of about 200 individual groups, including 120 in Florida alone.84
The Central American share of the cocaine-transshipment business has varied over time and is, in any event, impossible to gauge with great precision, particularly on a state-by-state basis.85 This does not mean, however, that no statistics exist. When their superiors, the media, or politicians demand facts, officials have made educated guesses as to amounts transiting one country or another. They have triangulated from seizures actually made, information gleaned from court cases and informants, and judgments as to production and consumption to try to determine about how many tons have passed through each bridge state annually. Although cocaine transit via Central America has plainly increased markedly, the rise in exports has not proceeded in linear fashion. Drug organizations have been nimble and proactive, frequently changing the location of transshipment schemes within a bridge state and between different bridge states. The amounts sent via any particular route in any particular period have thus depended on a constellation of factors favoring or disfavoring shipping through one country or another.
Among the credible estimates, the judge who heard the most major drug cases in Honduras in the late 1980s concluded that cocaine traffickers were then shipping about 35 tons annually through his country.86 In 1990 Guatemalan sources believed that drug syndicates exported approximately 50 tons from that country.87 In 1991 the Costa Rican director of narcotics, the U.S. ambassador, and other sources estimated that 40–60 tons of cocaine transited Costa Rica each year.88 That same year, a leading Panamanian official figured that, even soon after General Manuel Noriega’s ouster, 24 tons of cocaine passed through Panama.89 In 1993 U.S. and Colombian law-enforcement sources estimated that about a quarter of the U.S. narcotics trade involved Central America and that drug organizations were transshipping a combined 165–275 tons of narcotics through all the Central American bridge states annually.90 That figure continued to rise over the years. In 2001 the DEA estimated that 300–400 tons of cocaine passed through the Central American corridor to Mexico and the United States, and the figure of 400 has repeatedly been cited thereafter.91 As the new century approached, an estimated 60–65 percent of U.S. cocaine imports entered the country via this critically important bridge region.92
Fig. 1.5 Cocaine seizures in key Central American bridge states, 1990–1999
Sources: INCSR (2000), 154, 170; INCSR (1999), 190; INCSR (1997), 160; INCSR (1996), 139; INCSR (1994), 172; INCSR (1991), 136, 138, 150, 187; INCSR (1990), 184, 174; INCSR (1989), 100; INCSR (1988), 184, 127, 121; DEA, Resources, Belize (2000), 1; DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2000), 2; DEA, Resources, Guatemala (2001), 2; DEA, Resources, Honduras (2000), 1; DEA, Resources, Panama (2000), 3.
Given the sheer size of the cocaine trade and the considerable law-enforcement resources ranged against it, some trafficking ventures were bound to fail. In the 1980s most cocaine seizures occurred in the United States: two tons in 1981, twenty-seven tons in 1986, and one hundred tons in 1989.93 By the 1990s, however, as fig. 1.5 illustrates, Central American authorities, regularly acting on DEA information, were confiscating sizable