As for maritime trafficking, many shipments of marijuana and cocaine have arrived via the Florida coasts, though with time, U.S. destinations, particularly for marijuana imports, have ranged all along the Gulf of Mexico and up the Atlantic coast to the Carolinas and even to New England. A mother ship might steer for a prearranged rendezvous point twenty to two hundred miles offshore. There, associates could approach in small vessels, and after an all-clear signal, the drugs would be off-loaded. The coastal boats would then scatter, either heading to remote locations along the shore or simply merging into the regular water traffic entering nearby ports. During the summer months, entry along U.S. coasts was particularly easily accomplished because offshore waters were full of pleasure boats, and drug deliveries could blend into offshore boating and sport fishing.250
When hidden cocaine has arrived secreted in a container vessel bound for a major U.S. port, associates might be poised to unpack it upon arrival or wait until it reaches its final destination. As a U.S. Customs official noted, “There are virtually thousands of individuals employed by ocean carriers, . . . as longshoremen, freight forwarders, brokers and in companies working in the importation or transportation industries, who know how, where, and when Customs examines cargo.”251 Thus, drug rings could create or tap into networks closely familiar with the shipping industry to off-load drugs and to provide counterintelligence on customs operations.
For the United States, marijuana has been the least important of the three principal psychoactive drugs trafficked via Central America, although the U.S. cannabis market has been large and stable and far more people have consumed marijuana than any other illicit drug. As fig. 1.7 shows, between 1979 and 2009 the number of U.S. marijuana users varied from just over thirty million to about seventy million.252 In addition, considerable profits have been made supplying the North American market with transshipped Colombian marijuana or high-quality Central American cannabis. However, many countries have produced marijuana; indeed, very large quantities have been grown in North America itself. In the early twenty-first century, to revive and add value to the marijuana trade, Colombian drug rings began to export a potent mixture of marijuana, glue, and additives known as pegón. This rose to become a noteworthy problem in Panama and has concerned officials in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Guatemala as well. Some pegón has even been exported to the United States. Nevertheless, over the last three decades only a modest portion of the international marijuana trade has originated in Central America or been transshipped through it.
Fig. 1.8 Estimated heroin users in the United States, 1979–2009
Sources: DHHS, Household Survey, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.
The morphine in heroin, exceptionally addictive, has resulted in a market with a steep demand curve. Through much of the 1980s and 1990s, U.S. antidrug officials estimated that half a million people were using heroin annually in the United States, but the data shown in fig. 1.8 suggest rather higher numbers: that between 1979 and 2009 a total of 650,000 to about 930,000 users consumed heroin each year.253 At length, U.S. counternarcotics officials came to agree that earlier figures had been flawed, concluding that by 1998 the numbers of heroin users had actually reached at least 980,000 and perhaps 1.2 million, if casual users were included.254
Fig. 1.8 also illustrates that U.S. heroin consumption has remained at significant levels from the 1970s through the first decade of the twenty-first century. Just as the high price of cocaine made that drug a status symbol in the 1980s, so heroin eventually became more of an elite drug than it once was. By the later 1990s the purity of Colombian heroin had climbed from 60 to 95 percent, enhancing its allure, with one Costa Rican counternarcotics official observing, “Its quality is now better than that of the traditional Asian producers, and it’s gaining popularity in the United States, where addicts no longer need to inject it, but can inhale it (cocaine style).” Indeed, once heroin could be sniffed, like cocaine, or smoked, like marijuana, users no longer had to worry about contracting HIV/AIDS through contaminated needles.255
While heroin from Asia, often trafficked by Chinese and Nigerians, long dominated the U.S. market, developments in Latin America radically altered the dynamics of the U.S. heroin trade.256 Between 1995 and 1999 Colombian and Mexican heroin largely displaced Asian heroin across much of the country. Mexican heroin took over markets in the western United States, while heroin consumed east of the Mississippi River was usually Colombian. Some Mexican heroin originated in the poppy fields of Guatemala, and a substantial percentage of Colombian heroin had reached the United States after transshipment via Central American bridge states.257
Fig. 1.9 Estimated cocaine users in the United States, 1979–2009
Sources: DHHS, Household Survey, 1985, 1990, 1995, 2000, 2005.
However, for all of the significance of Central America in the trafficking of other drugs, the chief role of the bridge states in the international drug trade has been to ensure that a plentiful supply of cocaine reaches U.S. and European markets. Over the last several decades the United States has been home to the most significant cocaine consumers (fig. 1.9).258 Inhaling powdered cocaine has appealed to middle- and upper-class users, while those on society’s lower economic rungs have opted for the cheaper smokable variety known as crack, which has proven to be one of the most highly addictive drugs. As the twenty-first century approached, combining drugs gained popularity. For example, heroin was increasingly used “to cushion the ‘crash’ that follows the euphoria of using crack.”
The European Market
As the U.S. cocaine market started to get saturated in the mid-1980s, the wholesale price dropped by 70–80 percent.259 With bloody competitive struggles breaking out among dealers and their suppliers, such leading traffickers as Jorge Luis Ochoa, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, and Juan Ramón Matta Ballesteros spent considerable time investigating European business opportunities and then capitalizing on their new connections to supply cocaine to European markets in Spain and other countries.260 U.S. Customs agent Robert Mazur, working undercover with top Medellín traffickers, reported that by 1987 Colombians had chosen to move decisively into the European market. In fact, the cocaine flow into Europe climbed rapidly at just this time. Between 1986 and 1987, seizures across Europe doubled; nevertheless, between September 1987 and February 1988 wholesale per-kilo profits dropped by two thousand dollars, indicating a rapidly rising cocaine supply.261
The criminal syndicates supplying growing European markets already had well-oiled transshipment operations active in Central American bridge states such as Costa Rica, Guatemala, and Panama. Drug organizations thus started to rely on Central American associates to launch large shipments toward Europe