While the Central American republics are most commonly referred to as bridge states, an alternative metaphor conceives of the Latin American drug trade as a pipeline, with much of the product originating in South America, particularly in Colombia.36 This image, however, also needs to be qualified and further elaborated. Some Central American countries have produced drugs for export, most notably, opium in Guatemala and marijuana in Belize and Panama. These drugs might be envisioned as entering the pipeline along its course, adding to the main flow from South America. Moreover, most drugs passing through the pipeline have been directed to Mexico, and Mexican traffickers have then transported the drugs across the border into the United States.37 Hence, the Central American portion of the pipeline has not necessarily emptied into a market country, though it sometimes has. Instead, it has often deposited the drugs into what might be envisioned as the key reservoir state, where supplies have been pooled before being smuggled into the U.S. market.
One might wonder, then, why we chose to confine our case studies to Central America, rather than extend them to Mexico. Unlike the Central American republics, Mexico is not a prototypical transshipment country. Not only does it include a large and growing market of millions of drug consumers but over the past four decades it has housed numerous leading drug syndicates and has thus served as the headquarters for many trafficking ventures. In contrast, although important traffickers and organizations have flourished across Central America, these drug rings have never rivaled, much less overshadowed, Colombian groups, as their Mexican counterparts have grown to do. A quintessential bridge country has one paramount role—to provide passage to market for drugs. Mexico is thus not an archetype of a bridge state but is instead a special case, worthy of separate studies to analyze its various functions in the international drug trade.
In clarifying our terms, we come next to the problematic term cartel. While an economic cartel is an arrangement among businesses to avoid free competition in a particular market by regulating prices and output, the word has been used differently with respect to the drug trade. Popular use of cartel in the drug context dates to 1983, when U.S. authorities had traced the cocaine in dozens of seizures to Medellín kingpin Jorge Luis Ochoa. It appeared that Ochoa and other prominent Medellín traffickers had engaged in some joint decision making and division of tasks. While the phrase export cooperative might have been more accurate, the DEA and various federal prosecutors began to use cartel to describe the thick web of interconnections that appeared to link Ochoa with other leading Colombian traffickers headquartered in Medellín.38
The word cartel thus came to signify mostly Colombian and Mexican, even occasionally Bolivian, criminal organizations that over an extended period procured considerable supplies of cocaine, oversaw their transport to market, and reaped significant profits. Certainly, this description makes for an imprecise definition. Determining whether a drug ring of some magnitude has attained cartel status is an inexact science. Nevertheless, the use of cartel has become deeply entrenched in discourse about the Latin American drug trade, frequently employed by journalists, politicians, counternarcotics officials, prosecutors and judges, and many, though not all, scholars.
Given how often cartel appears, we adopt its usage as well, though we hasten to add certain clarifications. First, the term does not necessarily imply an ability to thoroughly control the supply of a drug or to form a monopoly or even an oligopoly that so diminishes competition as to permit price fixing.39 Most drug cartels could not make a strong claim to such activities. In using the word cartel, we also do not mean to imply that these are especially monolithic organizations, that is, ones marked by uniformity, solidarity, and pyramidal hierarchies. The Medellín cartel, for instance, has been shown to have been not nearly so centralized and unified as popularly portrayed.40 Nor has any cartel ever swept a drug-trafficking field of rivals. Given the low barriers to entry, new drug rings have tended to spring up over time. Often, these have drawn on experienced freelancers and the remnants of groups previously taken down by authorities, as well as profit-hungry newcomers, who often have relevant criminal experience outside the drug trade.41 At times serving as junior partners or paying transit route taxes, smaller organizations have coexisted, and sometimes conflicted, with much larger ones, though only a few have evolved into cartels themselves.
Indeed, perhaps the principal reason that no cartel has monopolized the cocaine trade is that the potential profits for producers, intermediaries, transshippers, and dealers have been so lucrative as to encourage entrepreneurs.42 In an era when U.S. dealers might sell a kilo of cocaine wholesale for $32,000, and their European counterparts for as much as $42,000, yet coca leaves might bring farmers $650 per kilo in Peru, any start-up organization could turn a quick substantial profit.43 And law-enforcement pressure on leading organizations has increased opportunities for competitors to gain market share. Indeed, an internal dynamic within the drug trade favors smaller organizations, because they are less likely to come to the attention of rivals and law enforcement.44
Furthermore, those relatively infrequent occasions when interdiction has succeeded in raising prices have increased the incentive to ship more of the drug.45 In addition, the closer to the source country interdiction has occurred, the less costly has it been for the traffickers to replace the lost load.46 Since market-state law enforcement has posed the greatest risk for a drug shipment, much of the value added has come after the cocaine has transited through the bridge countries. This, too, has encouraged entrepreneurs who lack retail distribution abilities but can still sell the drugs wholesale in a market country.47 Thus, although drug rings have created barriers to entry through violence aimed at maintaining or expanding their market share, even lesser networks prepared to cooperate with cartels, or with sufficient muscle and fortitude to withstand them, have soon accumulated considerable earnings.48
Groups of traffickers at work in Central America have sometimes been cells of foreign drug organizations, perhaps with a trusted representative planted in a particular zone to supervise a number of drug ventures.49 At other times, such groups have been independent, or quasi-independent, entities. For instance, a Belizean network might undertake a service such as refueling cocaine planes for multiple foreign organizations. In parts of Spanish-speaking Central America, such native transshipment networks have been referred to as cartelitos, or “mini-cartels.” For example, during the 1990s a number of cartelitos developed in Guatemala, each specializing in particular routes and methods and each with its own contacts within the larger Colombian and Mexican organizations.
In this way, Central American groups have contributed to the compartmentalizing of drug operations, enabling organizations to outsource key transportation functions, which has posed even more difficult challenges