Fig. 1.6 Cocaine seizures in key Central American bridge states, 2000–2010
Sources: INCSR (2011), 137, 206, 272, 293, 439; INCSR (2010), 219, 308, 498; INCSR (2009), 150, 210, 289, 467; INCSR (2008), 154, 162, 168, 185; INCSR (2007), 19, 147, 154, 160; INCSR (2006), 129, 136, 142; INCSR (2005), 160, 170; INCSR (2004), 132, 155; INCSR (2003), 5:4, 5:29; INCSR (2002), 5:3, 5:27, 5:25; INCSR (2001), 5:23; DEA, Resources, Belize (2003), 3; DEA, Resources, Costa Rica (2003), 2; DEA, Resources, Honduras (2001), 1.
Nevertheless, the cocaine interdicted in Central America en route to market has amounted to a small fraction of all that has passed through these countries. The most optimistic estimates have authorities interdicting 10–15 percent of the narcotics heading to the United States through this bridge region.95 The estimate of 5 percent is, perhaps, more realistic, and various law-enforcement authorities have declared that the actual figure might be a mere 2 percent.96 Thus, Central American seizures have lagged well behind estimated interception rates in market countries of 10–25 percent.97 Consequently, while many seizures have occurred, the contribution made by bridge-state interdiction has been too modest to deter criminal groups from transshipping drugs through these countries.
Methods of Trafficking Drugs Through Central America
“Ant Traffic”
In the 1970s drug enterprises routinely employed individual couriers, so-called mules or burros, who carried small amounts of drugs to market in their luggage or on their persons.98 In addition to the few duped into transporting drugs, mules ranged from poor individuals to students to wealthy elites, all enticed by promises of “easy money.” Over time, courier techniques became more elaborate, with some couriers even carrying drugs in their stomachs or body cavities.99 Trafficking organizations naturally came to favor those least likely to arouse the suspicion of customs authorities, such as diplomats or members of ship or plane crews. Members of groups such as the elderly or pregnant women have had the added bonus of being able to avoid x-ray screenings at many security checkpoints.100 A popular variant on air couriers has had underlings driving cars or pickups outfitted with hidden compartments. The steady march of small quantities of drugs via Central America came to be termed “ant traffic,” and the carriers, while insignificant singly, have together carried considerable amounts of drugs, especially cocaine and heroin.101
Air Transport
Although drug networks, particularly minor ones, have continued to rely on these time-tested courier methods, the principal organizations, intent on moving larger quantities, soon turned to the widespread use of propeller planes.102 By 1977 Colombian traffickers had started to transship a significant percentage of cocaine exports by air, and by the mid-1980s authorities estimated that 80–90 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply arrived aboard aircraft.103 Smugglers outfitted fleets of small planes with extra fuel tanks, long-range navigation systems, and sophisticated communications technology, and aerial shipments of four hundred to eight hundred kilos of drugs soon became commonplace.104
Although a light plane with additional fuel bladders can fly from Colombia to the United States directly, such a route is much more vulnerable to being tracked on radar and intercepted.105 The smaller the aircraft, the more difficult it is for authorities to follow its course, but the more heavily loaded, the slower it will fly and the shorter the distance it can travel before refueling. Thus, to evade radar and maximize payload, traffickers might load a Cessna 310 with perhaps five hundred kilos of cargo and fly it at low altitudes for up to eight hours at 240–360 miles per hour, then refuel.106 By incorporating a bridge-state pit stop, drug rings have been able to transport larger quantities more successfully than by using direct flights. But this method requires advance arrangements for logistical support en route. Planes that carry drugs north might return empty, or, to repatriate profits, they might carry weapons, merchandise, or cash.
Interim stops in the different Central American countries thus became a vital ingredient in the successful transit of drugs. While some flights headed from Central America to the United States, more commonly their destination was northern Mexico. By the mid-1980s U.S. Customs agents knew of five hundred Mexican airstrips and 132 stash houses within a hundred miles of the U.S. border.107 The Medellín cartel alone regularly employed eight different named routes, while sometimes experimenting with new flight plans and also combining portions of existing, well-tested ones. In looking back over the decade of Medellín preeminence, one cartel insider declared, “At the beginning there were maybe two or three flights a week, but by the end airplanes were almost continually taking off and returning with cash.”108
When interdiction during refueling has threatened, aerial smugglers have moved to touch-and-go landings or to airdrops, in which a plane would descend to a couple hundred feet and parachute duffel bags of cocaine to boats or waiting ground crews. They have also frequently combined tactics, as when vacuum-sealed and waterproof packages have been tossed into the sea to be picked up by speedboats and eventually moved along by truck, boat, or plane. Over time, to increase efficiency and payoffs, drug organizations have sometimes employed large jets able to fly from Colombia to North America and even Europe.109 During flights from Panama to Mexico in 2006, drug planes were reported to have refueled while airborne for the first time.110
Maritime Transport
During the late 1980s rivals in Cali began to supplant the Medellín traffickers who had pioneered cocaine smuggling by air, and their specialty came to be maritime drug transport. In 1985 the U.S. Coast Guard had first started to seize shipments amounting to thousands of kilos of cocaine, and by the end of the decade aerial cocaine transit had decreased to an estimated 40 percent of the total.111 Colombian cocaine has often been exported by sea from the country’s five principal ports: Santa Marta, Barranquilla, Cartagena, and Turbo, on the Caribbean, and Buenaventura on the Pacific. Maritime-trafficking schemes have employed an array of vessels—yachts, speedboats, fishing and coastal-supply boats, ocean-going freighters, and eventually even semisubmersibles and submarines—with some ventures combining motorboat transit with that by fishing vessel or container ship.112 Of these, the most important method over the decades has been to send drugs on commercial ships, with smugglers taking advantage of the millions of containers that enter the United States annually with at best abbreviated customs inspections of the goods inside.