Conclusion
In the chapters that follow, we explore the particular deficiencies and abilities of people, governments, and drug organizations interacting in the bridge states. Certainly, the international drug trade is very much concerned with individual and collective incapacities. The rise of the marijuana, heroin, and cocaine industries is undergirded by millions of users unwilling or incapable of freeing themselves from drug use and so reducing the steep demand curve that stimulates trafficking. Within Central America, when confronted by the prospect of quick wealth, many individuals have overlooked the potential long-term costs of involvement in the trade. Not only has there been the risk of arrest or violent death for traffickers, but their friends and family members have frequently been drawn into illegal activities to their ultimate detriment. Participation in the drug trade has also turned facilitators, such as bankers, lawyers, and accountants, into white-collar criminals and has disrupted or ended the careers of many judges, politicians, military and police officers, and other government officials.
Our examination of the Central American drug trade also reveals the extraordinary capabilities of transnational criminal organizations to multiply and thrive in the post–cold war era. Drug rings have been able to adopt for their own purposes practices undertaken by legitimate international businesses. Particular kingpins as well as the leaders of Central American cells and cartelitos have become adept at reorienting when challenged by law-enforcement officials. Equally important, they have found ways to exploit an extraordinary variety of weaknesses or opportunities within different bridge states. Thus, while authorities have compiled records of seizures and arrests that are not unimpressive, the illegal drug industry as a whole continues to prosper—moving immense quantities of drugs to major markets in North America and Europe.
To answer the question of why trafficking through Central America so resists being curbed by national efforts, regional cooperation, or extraregional assistance, we would point, in the first instance, to the power of the bribes, bullets, and intimidation that drug organizations have wielded. Huge flows of drugs have headed to market, and enormous profits have returned to bolster and further motivate their organizations. So long as demand for narcotics remains strong, criminal groups will materialize to try to reap the extraordinary profits, and they will suborn, bully, and kill to protect their interests in the illicit global economy.
Institutional weaknesses help explain why traffickers have penetrated particular countries when they did.50 Several cardinal factors have characterized government structures in the region. Virtually all lack the resources needed to carry out their functions effectively. Frequently, weak institutions are insufficiently transparent and lack the oversight necessary to ensure that officials are held accountable. Many do not have in place a formal set of operational rules and procedures adequate to provide guidance to those charged with carrying out assigned tasks or to discipline those who neglect their duties. Finally, weak institutions often have no tradition, no institutional culture, of laws, rules, and procedures generally followed and enforced in a consistent and unbiased manner. Naturally, countries with grave institutional weaknesses provide inviting targets for drug traffickers.
However, even taken together, the relative weakness of institutions in the different bridge states does not itself suffice to explain why, when, and how much drug trafficking occurs in each country. One might ask, if traffickers simply identify and exploit the countries with the weakest formal institutions, then why did the flow of cocaine actually increase through Panama after the downfall of the Noriega regime brought about governments intent on strengthening previously corrupted institutions? If institutional weakness were the sole variable at work, then one would expect trafficking organizations largely to avoid Costa Rica, the country with the strongest institutions. And yet Costa Rica has long been a critically important bridge state.
We have found that drug organizations can successfully operate in the face of the region’s stronger government institutions as well as its weaker ones. Furthermore, institutions are but one factor in determining the extent of bridge-state drug transshipment. We shall see that noninstitutional factors, including geography, also greatly influence trafficking. Moreover, even the stronger and more stable institutions in Central America have often been rigid and inflexible. Institutions that are generally functioning effectively might not have been designed to cope with transnational criminal networks or with the particular stresses imposed by extraordinary drug flows. Their strengths seem not to include the adaptability needed to change to meet drug-trafficking challenges. In the case studies we thus note both the weak institutions and the rigidity of otherwise strong institutions that have helped to determine the extent of the drug trade.
The essence of our argument is that although the Central American bridge states have the power to join with outside powers, and occasionally with one another, to disrupt the operations of any particular criminal group transshipping drugs across their waters, territories, and skies, they have been overwhelmed by the drug trade as a whole. The social, economic, political, and geographic factors that propel this dimension of the illicit global economy—especially the North American and European demand for drugs produced in South America that governments throughout the world have outlawed—are too formidable for these states to counter effectively. When a large array of transnational criminal groups choose to ride these powerful currents toward wealth, Central American states lack the resources needed to stop, or even to dramatically curb, drug transshipment through the region. The balance of forces can thwart the efforts of the strongest countries in the region—newly developed Costa Rica, solidly democratic Belize, and economically dynamic Panama. And it can wreak havoc on the weakest—poverty-stricken Honduras and deeply fractured Guatemala.
The best that these bridge states can do is to try to minimize the bridge-favoring factors that traffickers perceive in sending drugs through their state and to maximize the bridge-disfavoring factors so as to encourage drug rings to shift more of their business to a neighboring state. However, altering certain bridge-favoring factors is impossible. For example, Belize and Guatemala flank Mexico, and Panama borders Colombia, making each of them attractive transshipment sites. Altering other bridge-favoring factors may be possible but also very costly, time-consuming, or uncertain. Consequently, Central American bridge states, even with extraordinary amounts of outside assistance, can devote many resources to countering drug smuggling and yet, despite disrupting many drug rings, can remain incapable of stemming the flow of drugs from South America to North American and European markets.
1. The trail of bridge-state trafficking studies was blazed in Griffith, Drugs and Security, but this work deals almost exclusively with Caribbean, not Central American, drug trafficking. For the multipolarity of early twentieth-century cocaine production, culture, and uses, see Gootenberg, Andean Cocaine, 190, 248.
2. Addressing the paucity of research, one scholar wrote, “Anyone attempting to do research on drug trafficking in Central America will come up against a dearth of information on this subject. Therefore, research . . . will have to begin at the most basic level.” Juhn, “Central America,” 389.
3. Reuter, “Political Economy,” 128; Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 1.
4. Regions rarely “break easily along neatly perforated lines.” Claude, Swords into Plowshares, 113. Some might question including Panama, or even Belize, in Central America and wish to exclude them on geographic, historical, or cultural grounds. Vis-à-vis the drug trade, however, it seems to us that both should properly be considered Central American bridge states.