15. See, for instance, “Just What the Smuggler Ordered,” WP (US), 2 August 1998, A1.
16. The 1878 Posse Comitatus Act, 18 U.S.C. §1385, has generally prohibited the U.S. armed forces from engaging in domestic law enforcement. While the U.S. armed forces still lack arrest powers, the legal regime was loosened in the 1980s, with one important step a 1986 directive from President Ronald Reagan that classified drugs as a national security threat. See U.S. House, Posse Comitatus Act; “Reagan Order Defines Drug Trade as Security Threat, Widens Military Role,” WP (US), 8 June 1986, A26; and Andreas, Border Games, 43.
17. For the seven Central American republics, the total active military forces, including the paramilitary units of Costa Rica, and eventually Panama and Guatemala, rose from 173,410 in 1985 to 210,200 in 1990, and then dropped to 127,050 in 1995, 101,550 in 2000, and 88,250 in 2005, before rising slightly to 96,850 in 2009. See International Institute for Strategic Studies, Military Balance (hereafter cited as MB), 1985–1986, 142–53; MB, 1989–1990, 184–99; MB, 1994–1995, 200–216; MB, 1999–2000, 222–37; MB, 2004–2005, 199–212; and MB, 2009, 65–88.
18. See DOS, Drug Interdiction Agreements.
19. In a representative instance in 1998 a U.S. patrol plane spotted a suspicious speedboat heading north along the Costa Rican coast. A U.S. Navy guided missile carrier, almost two thousand feet in length, in the area intercepted the go-fast, ultimately firing fifteen warning shots in an unsuccessful effort to stop it. However, the vessel fled into Nicaraguan territorial waters and vanished before the U.S. authorities could get Nicaragua’s approval to continue the hot pursuit.
20. Within the Central American republics the U.S. government opened DEA offices as follows: Panama City, Panama, in 1972; San José, Costa Rica, in 1974; Guatemala City, Guatemala, in 1975; Tegucigalpa, Honduras, in 1981; Managua, Nicaragua, in 1989; Belize City, Belize, in 1992; and San Salvador, El Salvador, in 1992. Bartilow and Kihong, “Busting Drugs,” 114. Before DEA offices were opened in various of these countries, the office in a neighboring state sometimes covered their counterdrug activities, such as DEA agents stationed in Guatemala operating in Belize.
21. The complex of authorities tasked with antidrug responsibilities has also occasionally proved counterproductive in the United States and other market societies, though the extent of the problems in Central America would be difficult to match.
22. Astorga, “Mexico,” 98.
23. For a comparison of the administration of justice in Belize and Guatemala, see Fowler and Bunck, “Legal Imperialism.”
24. See Nadelmann, Cops Across Borders, 192–94, 225–35. While Nadelmann focuses on the misgivings of European officials regarding undercover operations, the same hesitations have surfaced in Central America.
25. See “Region Takes Aim at Weapons Traffickers,” TT (CR), 7 December 2001, 5; “The Most Violent Area in the Americas,” TT (CR), 18 August 2000, 8; and Cragin and Hoffman, Arms Trafficking. Between 1979 and 1990 the Nicaraguan government alone distributed 600,000 AK-47 rifles and recovered only 180,000 of them. “Armas sin control en el istmo,” LN (CR), 1 February 1997, 17A.
26. See Cragin and Hoffman, Arms Trafficking, 68.
27. Arms worth $1,200 apiece in Nicaragua could bring $2,000 or more in Colombia, and, rather than pay cash, Colombian fighters preferred to trade kilos of cocaine for weapons. In 2001, after a series of weapons confiscations in Panama and Costa Rica, Panamanian authorities noted that Colombian guerrillas were paying for contraband weapons with cocaine. See “Regional Pact Sought to Bust Illegal Drug Trafficking,” TT (CR), 9 November 2001, 9. In 2004 Panamanian police broke up a barter transaction that apparently was to involve 441 kilos of cocaine for 80.4 kilos of Lodex explosives manufactured in Costa Rica. “Eighty Kilos of Tico Explosives Found in Panama,” TT (CR), 26 March 2004, 3. The following year Honduran authorities arrested FARC collaborators attempting to arrange arms-for-drugs transactions. “Honduras Arrests Two FARC Agents,” TT (CR), 1 April 2005, N-3.
28. “Big Bust Nabs Arms Dealers,” TT (CR), 8 November 2002, 1A.
29. Pérez, “Drugs,” 150.
30. Calvani, Foreword to Island, 1, quoted in Maingot, “Decentralization Imperative.”
31. After noting the dramatic differences in Central American politics, one scholar declared that in the 1980s “it would have been difficult to find anywhere in the world three political systems as different as those of El Salvador, Costa Rica, and Nicaragua.” Paige, Coffee and Power, x, quote on 5.
32. Certain scholars have applied the concepts of competitive advantage and comparative advantage to South American cocaine-producing states. See, for instance, Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 35–37, and Thoumi, Political Economy, 168–75. The latter author, however, hesitates to use the term, because comparative advantage theories are traditionally couched “in terms of the relative endowment of factors of production . . . [—] natural resources, raw and skilled labor, capital and technology”— as opposed to “institutional factors such as corruption, lack of state legitimacy, and . . . inability to control large regions of the country” (177n5). In addition to these concerns, the term advantage may be better employed with respect to states competing against one another for economic primacy, than with the drug trade, which most officials find disadvantageous for their countries. Hence, we have coined the terms bridge-favoring and bridge-disfavoring factors.
33. “Cartels Face an Economic Battle,” WP (US), 7 October 2009, A01. For information on the development of Mexican marijuana in the 1960s and early 1970s, see Kamstra, Weed, 148–50.
34. In the mid-1980s marijuana costing $70 a pound in Colombia might be purchased for $240 a pound wholesale in Miami. Eddy, Sabogal, and Walden, Cocaine Wars, 127–28.
35. Thoumi, Political Economy, 126.
36. Flanking the Caribbean and Gulf of Venezuela, Guajira is a sparsely populated corner of Colombia, isolated by the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, with nearly twenty-thousand-foot peaks and numerous cannabis plantations along its eastern slopes. Riley, Snow Job, 128–29.
37. Shannon, Desperados, 9, 73. One source observed, “The general rule is, the paler the gold, the stronger the grass. The palest weed is grown at the lowest range of the optimum growing altitude, around 500 meters above sea level, where the sun is hottest (any lower and the humidity saps the vital resins in the plant).” Nicholl, Fruit Palace, 9. The naming of different varieties of cannabis has served as a marketing ploy distinguishing the marijuana trade from those in cocaine and heroin. In fact, while many users can distinguish between high- and low-quality cannabis, they are hard-pressed to identify particular strains either by sight or use.
38. U.S.