The most salient point is that, rather than deterring many traffickers, interdiction created a dynamic that encouraged additional production of cocaine, more ingenious smuggling methods, and the use of numerous drug routes through different bridge states. As this occurred, shipment size steadily increased. Indeed, within a span of about a dozen years, cocaine-trafficking organizations had shifted from typical loads of less than five kilos to those of hundreds of kilos with the occasional shipment of multiton quantities.132 While authorities within Central America have made numerous significant drug seizures, the sheer quantities of drugs being exported have overwhelmed the capacity of law enforcement. After reviewing the profusion of ways in which drugs can be effectively moved—couriers, planes, vehicles, and vessels, one observer declared, “These varied forms of travel have created a byzantine maze of air, land, and water routes, making it virtually impossible for a significant portion of their shipments to be intercepted.”133
Central American Drug Traffickers
As the cocaine trade developed into an illicit commercial enterprise that earned billions of dollars a year, it came to involve a host of criminal enterprises. Some groups have focused on only a single type of drug, but many have capitalized on available opportunities to become polydrug organizations. As early as 1985 DEA charted several hundred drug-trafficking rings in Mexico and Colombia alone that could together move tons of cocaine and marijuana per month.134 Certainly, the fortunes of individual enterprises within the Latin American drug business have constantly waxed and waned. Yet considerable demand coupled with high profit margins have ensured that new criminal groups could make the quick earnings needed to branch off from established drug organizations or to spring up in place of those the authorities had disrupted.135 Thus, as particular groups have fallen on hard times, entrepreneurial successors have quickly replaced them, forming a virtually seamless web of traffickers intent on moving drugs to market as effectively as possible.
Although a range of foreign and domestic criminal organizations—some large, others small—have moved drugs through Central America, Colombian and Mexican enterprises have played the most critically important roles. Active for many years, these organizations have moved the largest shipments and fostered a good deal of the drug-related corruption and violence. Kingpins have sometimes used a bridge state, most often Panama or Costa Rica, to meet with others to arrange the details of drug deals.136 They and their closest associates have made key decisions regarding which bridge states to use and how frequently, which routes to employ and for how long, and which smuggling methods to rely on and when to alter them.137
Colombian and Mexican traffickers have sometimes created local cells within the bridge states to assist in their operations, that is, permanent or semipermanent representatives stationed in that country working on transshipment. Alternatively, to transport drugs as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible, they have sometimes outsourced jobs to existing Central American networks that might do business with multiple foreign drug rings. Because the fingerprints of leading Colombian and Mexican traffickers are evident in numerous drug-transshipment schemes in the bridge states, we turn next to an overview of the principal cartels active in Central America.
Drug Enterprises Within Central America
Even the largest and most profitable foreign drug organizations at work in Central America have had relatively few permanent employees, as compared to legitimate businesses. The degree to which a drug organization was vertically integrated varied from one group to another and from one period to another, but none was like a multinational corporation with a dense, hierarchically organized, Weberian bureaucracy at its headquarters.138 Rather, drug organizations tended to be lean, decentralized, and highly compartmentalized criminal groups. Kingpins, advised by family members and other inner-circle associates, might determine business strategy and make key decisions regarding routes and methods, which tasks ought to be handled in-house and which ought to be delegated to subcontractors, and when to employ violence, intimidation, and bribery. Associates would procure drug supplies and oversee bridge-country transit, market distribution, security, and money laundering.
To ensure business efficiency, drug smuggling has often functioned as a “fronted-goods business.” That is, as one trafficker put it, “A small amount of money is paid up front, but everyone does not get paid in full till the money flows back down from the ultimate user. That means everyone has a stake in the success of the mission.”139 Beyond this, at home, in the bridge countries, and in markets, drug rings have used the “stick” of violence against those who let them down and the “carrot” of extraordinary compensation for jobs well done. Family members of even low-level, expendable employees have stood as collateral, readily killed by the organization if the employee were to try to cheat it or reveal its secrets to competitors or the authorities.140 Drug groups have also used bribes, bullets, and threats to suborn, dispense with, or intimidate judges, police officers, politicians, prosecutors, customs officials, prison wardens, and a host of others who might stand in their way. Consequently, one DEA agent declared of the Medellín traffickers at the height of their power, “There isn’t a cop that will arrest them; there isn’t a judge that will try them; there isn’t a jail that will hold them.”141
The Era of Medellín Cartel Preeminence
Through much of the 1980s the world’s leading cocaine smugglers were from Medellín, accounting for as much as 80 percent of the cocaine entering the United States.142 While organizations headquartered in Bogotá, in Pereira, along the north coast of Colombia, and especially in Cali also held shares of the cocaine trade, Medellín was preeminent, and the loose links among its traffickers solidified to some extent over time.143 Specifically, the principals cooperated in moving drugs and shielding their operations from law enforcement. By pooling the resources of different producers and refiners, they were able to provide a regular cocaine supply. They also minimized risk by coinsuring or cofinancing transportation, partnering to send shipments to market that contained cocaine from multiple groups.144 By using an array of pathways and avoiding putting too much of any one trafficker’s cocaine in any single load, even allowing for losing one or more shipments, a considerable overall annual profit might still be registered.
As between Medellín traffickers and their Cali counterparts, these criminal enterprises sometimes acted cooperatively, and sometimes competitively.