Screening Off Activities
While traffickers have had to attend to all such business exigencies, the illegal nature of these transnational ventures has required layers of complexity well beyond those found in legitimate commercial undertakings. To hinder law enforcement, functions have routinely been compartmentalized so that conspirators know little about activities other than their own tasks.225 Then, to keep their assets from being seized as the fruits of crime, trafficking organizations have constantly worked to hide the true source of their wealth. Implementing elaborate money-laundering schemes has been one cost of doing business. And, while Panama has served as the epicenter of financial operations for drug organizations, the cleansing of assets that could be traced to drug transactions has come to concern authorities across Central America. Indeed, couriers have regularly flown from the United States into all the Central American states, transporting extraordinary quantities of cash.
While criminal enterprises have often used profits to buy cars, planes, furniture, jewelry, and real estate, they have also frequently deposited drug profits in bank accounts, which, to hinder investigators, have usually been numbered or placed in the name of mistresses, relatives, or fictional or shell companies. The funds have then typically been transferred electronically through multiple accounts in multiple banks, often in different countries.226 At length, many of these funds have landed in some legitimate investment that would bring a return to the kingpins not obviously related to drug transactions. Trafficking organizations needing to camouflage large sums of drug profits have been particularly attracted to commercial undertakings with high cash flows: hotels, restaurants, flea markets, art dealerships, construction companies, car-and-boat dealerships, casinos, internet-betting operations, and currency-exchange and investment houses. Drug earnings have thus been unobtrusively merged into legitimate businesses operating in the region.227
In laundering money, multiplying their earnings, and further entrenching themselves in society as apparently legitimate business executives, major traffickers have had to interact with the global economic system. While often in dire need of expert counsel, rather then maintaining the in-house professionals routinely employed by legitimate corporations, they have preferred to subcontract for white-collar matters.228 And, given their wealth, traffickers have had few difficulties in finding eager assistance. Bankers and accountants within Central America have looked after business interests, while financiers and real estate agents have assisted with investment strategies. Lawyers, too, have played a vital part in ongoing operations. While primarily serving as defense counsel for imprisoned conspirators, attorneys have also frequently facilitated the business affairs of drug organizations. They have helped traffickers to buy legitimate enterprises, create shell companies, defeat asset-seizure laws, and handle underlings and inquiring officials alike.229
In detailing how leading foreign drug rings have recruited local attorneys, one former defense lawyer reported, “I was asked by someone who was to appear before the [Legislative] Drug Commission [of Costa Rica] to represent him. Ask for any amount of money, he said, and it will be on your desk. Just ask; just name a price. And if you don’t want it delivered to your desk, it can go to a bank account in the United States or Switzerland or Panama. He said to me, ‘I’m not asking you to do anything wrong, just appear with me, and it can all be yours: money, five-star hotels, travel, entertainment.’”230 Recognizing that traffickers have sometimes trapped attorneys by paying excessively for legal work but then later demanding help in illegal ventures, this attorney chose to turn down the offer. But, other lawyers have failed to reject extralucrative enticement, and some have later found that they lacked the willpower to resist demands for unlawful behavior, particularly when those were paired with threats or blackmail. Certain lawyers have turned to assisting criminal syndicates with activities well removed from the practice of law. Attempts to curry favor with wealthy clients have entwined lawyers in other criminal activity, occasionally through “fee” arrangements. Some attorneys have been convicted of directly trafficking drugs, and for a period the so-called lawyers’ cartel took a prominent role in the drug trade in central Honduras.231 The occasional report has even surfaced of a lawyer acting as a hit man for a drug ring.232
Much more frequently, lawyers have been used as bagmen and messengers delivering threats. From their headquarters in Cali, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers used noted U.S. and Colombian defense lawyers to “encourage” captured associates not to reveal operations to authorities and certainly not to implicate the kingpins.233 A carrot-and-stick approach helped to maintain a rigid code of silence. The cartel would cover the expenses of arrested employees, including supporting their families and paying their attorneys, as long as they refused to divulge information on its activities. Yet it would threaten to murder them and family members should cooperation with the authorities occur.234 The cartel called on its attorneys to deliver cash payments to imprisoned associates and their families and to visit arrested employees in jail, reminding them of the code of silence and its strict enforcement.235
U.S. Policy Responses vis-à-vis the Bridge States
The U.S. government has employed vigorous diplomatic-political tactics to try to coerce bridge-state governments judged to be insufficiently vigilant or enthusiastic toward more effective antidrug efforts.236 In particular, in the 1980s the United States began to link U.S. aid, loans, and trade preferences to counternarcotics assistance by foreign governments.237 Under §490 of the Foreign Assistance Act, the U.S. Congress has required presidents to certify annually that states are fully cooperating with U.S. counternarcotics efforts aimed at curbing drug production, trafficking, and consumption.238 While humanitarian and drug-control assistance would not be affected, a decertified state would ordinarily be ineligible for most U.S. military and development aid. Congress has also mandated that the U.S. government vote no on loan applications by decertified countries appealing to multilateral development banks.
This apparently strict regimen, however, has been tempered somewhat in practice. U.S. representatives have lacked the authority to veto proposed development-bank projects, and U.S. diplomats have not, traditionally, lobbied other governments to block loans on account of U.S. decertification.239 Furthermore,