The antidrug laws that have passed, the antidrug policies that have been implemented, and the antidrug resources that have been marshaled against drug networks have by no means been insignificant. In the bridge states considerable seizures have occurred. Many midrange and low-level associates and a few kingpins have been captured. Authorities have disrupted one organization after another, and even the largest and most powerful drug syndicates have failed to become permanent fixtures on the Central American scene. However, the relentless demand for illegal drugs and the consequent enormous profits to be made in their supply have continued to entice individuals into the drug trade. While the U.S. government has offered compensation for useful information via authorized payments by DEA agents or initiatives such as the State Department’s Narcotics Rewards Program, those cooperating with traffickers, rather than authorities, might earn even more considerable sums, with less risk.240 When drug rings have detected an informant, they have often acted brutally, torturing and murdering the individual and sometimes exacting further vengeance on relatives.
Thus, even though the U.S. government proclaimed a War on Drugs and has devoted hundreds of millions of dollars to it, the overall drug supply has remained ample. Indeed, despite hundreds of tons that have been routed to Europe, and despite increasingly impressive annual seizures in the United States and in producer and transit countries, market prices have rarely spiked upward.241 In 1997 U.S. counternarcotics authorities conceded that there had been “little discernible effect on price or availability,” even after the seizure of a hundred tons of cocaine that year.242 For all of the money devoted to antidrug activities, for all of the crops eradicated, shipments seized, traffickers taken down, and networks dismantled, drug organizations have succeeded in sending plentiful quantities of drugs through Central America every year from the mid-1980s to the present. For consumers the price of these drugs has remained relatively stable and in some cases has actually decreased, even as drug purity has risen.
The North American and European Markets
A final noteworthy dimension of bridge-state trafficking involves the consumers to whom the drugs have been directed. The size of drug markets has largely determined the quantities of drugs that have passed through Central America, and the manner in which drugs have finally entered those markets has been the ultimate stage of the transshipment schemes that so often featured the bridge states. Of course, the United States has always been the leading market for Latin American illegal drugs. By the 1980s millions of Americans had tried marijuana and cocaine, and more than half a million had used heroin. In the following decades, however, drug use climbed significantly in neighboring countries as well. While a cocaine market developed more slowly in Canada, by the mid-1990s an estimated 250,000 Canadians used cocaine annually and 35,000–40,000 were on heroin, with Health Canada reporting in 2003 that approximately 1 million Canadians consumed illegal drugs.243 That same year, 3.5 million Mexicans were thought to be on drugs, a figure that increased by another million before the decade had elapsed. Indeed, between 2003 and 2009 the estimated number of Mexican drug addicts nearly doubled to 307,000.244 Thus, by the twenty-first century, marijuana, heroin, and cocaine traffickers were targeting all of the North American countries.
Despite extended efforts over three decades, the Central American bridge-state governments, even with the aid of the United States and other interested developed countries, have been unable to overwhelm the capabilities of the many organizations smuggling drugs through the region. Clear evidence of this has been the abundant supply of high-quality narcotics in the markets at the end of the drug pipelines. Between 1981 and 1996 the prices of cocaine and heroin in the United States fell by about two-thirds, while purity rose by 44 percent and 83 percent, respectively.245 A clearer testament to the overall success of traffickers in getting their product from its point of origin to market is difficult to imagine. Furthermore, drug production has been sufficiently large that even the seizure by authorities of enormous shipments has failed to diminish perceptibly the availability of drugs. At most, successful interdiction might cause very occasional temporary price increases, but drug users, undergirded by those who are addicts, make for a demand curve that remains largely unresponsive to modestly higher prices, particularly those of short duration.246
The U. S. Market
While U.S. demand for illegal drugs is not as high as it once was, large numbers continue to use drugs, and the most recent statistics indicate that use is once again rising.247 The U.S. market is well supplied because consumers have the money to buy drugs, which can enter the United States from many directions and through many methods. Indeed, with boundaries stretching almost ninety thousand miles in circumference and the world’s largest economy, the United States has been an exceedingly inviting target for traffickers. As early as the mid-1980s the U.S. Customs Service estimated that 682,000 commercial flights and 4 million shipping containers entered the country annually. By 1998, 86 million cars and 4 million trucks crossed the Mexico-U.S. border each year, as did 278 million people. Drug smugglers have long been able to either evade inspection or simply merge into the private and commercial traffic and get drugs past the DEA, customs, the border patrol, local police, and other authorities.248
Initially, the most popular method to smuggle drugs into the United States was on board light planes. In the mid-1980s officials estimated that some eighteen thousand unauthorized flights penetrated U.S. borders annually. Through most of the 1980s, drugs primarily arrived in the United States through Florida, as much as 70–80 percent of the cocaine, according to official estimates. As Central American transshipment increased, more flights were directed to remote airstrips across the U.S. border neighboring Mexico or flanking the Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, as authorities caught on to simple aerial-import schemes, drug syndicates adapted with more sophisticated tactics, such as having drug planes evade radar by flying just above the water’s surface or dodging into the regular path of helicopter flights coming ashore from offshore oil operations. A technique known as “mating” involves two small planes flying so close to one another that they show up on radar screens as a single blip. One pilot in a clean plane would then land legally at a major airport, while the other would abruptly split off and drop a drug load elsewhere.249
Fig. 1.7 Estimated marijuana users in the United States, 1979–2009
Sources: DHHS, Household Survey, 1979, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.
Note: Given the large number of marijuana consumers, we have used a scale of 80 million, as opposed to 20 million for heroin and cocaine users. Data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health from 1979, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, and 2005 were obtained from the Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR) and compiled using SPSS to find the estimated number of drug users in the United States in the listed years. These findings, however, are estimates and do not represent