Our work also has a theoretical dimension in seeking to go beyond laying out facts to pose conceptual questions about the role of bridge states in the international drug trade and to develop a framework to better understand how states have tried to contend with this aspect of transnational crime. From this standpoint this volume continues our past work on the state. In the mid-1990s we collaborated on our first book exploring the role of state sovereignty in international relations. At a time when many scholars were portraying sovereignty as “perforated, defiled, cornered, eroded, extinct, anachronistic, bothersome, even interrogated,” we struck off on a different course, arguing that, although the implications of sovereignty for international affairs now vary from past eras, the concept has remained at the center of international discourse.18 Other scholars then elaborated on that basic theme, arguing that sovereignty has remained viable, though reflective of “organized hypocrisy,” or subject to occasional revolutions in meaning.19
When the Central American drug trade is viewed through an international relations lens, certain preliminary points stand out. Academics have long agreed that relations between states should no longer be the sole focus of scholarly attention in this field. Furthermore, it is no longer self-evident, as it may once have seemed to be, that states are automatically the chief actors in the international drama with other entities present on the stage but playing bit parts.20 Drug organizations amount to transnational actors that take on far more than minor roles in these bridge states. Indeed, they contend with, challenge, and sometimes overwhelm bridge-state institutions. This book thus aims to further our understanding of the relationships between states and one important class of nonstate actors.
A study of bridge states is also interesting for students of international relations, because the Central American drug trade accelerated just in the period when the cold war era was succeeded by one marked by expanded trade, diminished militaries, enhanced regional integration, and increased globalization. We wondered how these broader phenomena would affect drug trafficking. While the drug trade via Central America has certainly spotlighted the difficulties of mounting an effective multilateral campaign against agile, wealthy, and opportunistic nonstate actors, we believed that in such an era of rapid change, it was particularly important to relate drug smuggling through the Central American bridge states to broader international trends.
As the issues of the post–cold war world have become more sharply defined, we became especially interested in another overlooked and underexplored aspect of the clandestine side of globalization: how exactly have governments tried to contend with the illicit dimensions of the global economy?21 Where in the middle decades of the last century scholars often portrayed states as omnicompetent, if not omnipotent, entities, and international relations was sometimes portrayed in terms that might be likened to leaders moving pieces on a diplomatic-military chessboard, scholarship toward the end of the cold war and throughout the post–cold war era has increasingly focused on the deficiencies and incapacities of states.22 Indeed, in this age many governments have been unable to discharge even their most basic functions: maintaining law and order, promoting a sound economy, defending territory from foreign depredations, and operating a fair and effective legal system.23 Increasingly, governments purport to regulate all kinds of activity that they have no real ability to oversee, and in many societies the notion that the state has a legal monopoly on violence seems like a curious abstraction largely irrelevant to daily life. Again, to us these points seemed directly relevant to bridge-state drug trafficking.
Such observations brought us, in turn, to what has been called the most prominent theoretical debate at the close of the twentieth century and outset of the twenty-first: to what extent are states retreating in light of increasingly global markets and increasingly pervasive transnational actors, some of them quite powerful? When confronted with the illicit global economy, states do not abandon the field so much as they retreat, persist, and reassert themselves in different ways.24 We wondered if this would accurately describe the manner in which Central American bridge states were responding to the transshipment of large quantities of drugs.
In an attempt to explore these more theoretical considerations, while getting our hands dirty with the nitty-gritty details of the subject, we identified a handful of questions regarding bridge-state drug trafficking that have yet to be satisfactorily answered:
• Has the drug trade been confined to particular corners of Central America, or has it blanketed the region? To what extent have early trends, set in the 1980s and before, carried over to the 1990s and the twenty-first century?
• How exactly have wealthy and violent illegal business enterprises chosen to carry out transshipment operations within the Central American bridge states? Which methods have traffickers used, and what routes to market have they blazed?
• Which drug organizations have directed transshipment through Central America and over what time periods? Which Colombian and Mexican cartels have been most active in which countries? What might be concluded of the native drug-trafficking organizations within the bridge states? How have they operated?
• What key characteristics of the Central American states have factored into the drug trade? Have antidrug successes had lasting positive consequences, or have they turned out to be largely ephemeral triumphs?
• How has the drug trade been perceived within the bridge states over time? Have actions matched rhetoric or not? What measures have been adopted to respond to government trafficking? How enthusiastically and how effectively have policies been implemented? How successful have smuggling organizations been in evading or co-opting authorities?
• What has the extraordinary stress test of the passage to market of many millions of dollars worth of drugs meant for government structures—political, judicial, penal, and law enforcement? What has it meant for people, whether nationals or foreigners, traffickers or law-abiding citizens, politicians, police officers, judges, prison wardens, or other officials?
• Finally, what does the record of bridge-state drug trafficking reveal about international relations in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and, in particular, the efforts of governments to contend with the challenges posed by drug organizations and the role they are playing in the illegal global economy?
Our focus on the Central American bridge states steers our contribution to the now voluminous illegal drug literature away from South American production and North American and European dealing and consumption. However, by focusing on trafficking, our work may shed light on why officials have so often been disappointed by the long-term results of interdiction strategies. Although over the years impressive seizure and arrest totals have accumulated, not enough drugs have been intercepted to raise prices so high as to discourage drug use. Prior studies of drug smuggling and interdiction have largely focused on police efforts at the borders of market states. We look instead to the bridge states and show that here interdiction of large percentages of the drugs in transit has failed to occur. However, the subsequent policy issue of just how many government resources ought to be devoted to trying to curtail supply as opposed to attempting to reduce demand is beyond the purview of this study. We have also chosen not to address the related question of whether states should respond to drug abuse