Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation. Julie Marie Bunck
Here, drug organizations have governments in a bind. Key measures enhancing modern maritime commerce—expedited customs inspections, deregulated shipping industries, and privatized port facilities—have also encouraged smuggling by sea.114 Although the Container Security Initiative program of 2002 has brought U.S. officials into certain foreign ports to work with customs officials to inspect suspicious cargoes, drug shipments have managed to evade the screening process or pass through it undiscovered.
Traffickers have appreciated not only the low interception rates but the sheer bulk of drugs that could be forwarded by ship and soon were moving quite large quantities. Thus, in one six-month period in 1987, U.S. authorities seized sixty-six maritime cargo containers packed with multiple tons of cocaine, including a 3.1-ton seizure in Palm Beach, 2.5 tons in Chicago, and 2 tons in Miami and in San Juan, Puerto Rico. That same year, agents in Port Everglades, Florida, discovered nearly 4 tons of cocaine, transshipped through Honduras, and in 1988 a similar load was interdicted in Tarpon Springs, Florida. In 1989 Mexican authorities made the largest cocaine confiscation ever recorded, seizing a 4.8 ton shipment. Thereafter, as antidrug officials repeatedly eclipsed this record, vessels registered in Central American states were frequently involved. Among the largest busts, in 1995 the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted the Panamanian vessel Nataly I, carrying 12 tons.115 Enormous cocaine seizures at sea continued in the twenty-first century. In 2001 and 2004 authorities stopped two Belize-flagged ships, taking nearly 12 tons from one and more than 11 from the other. And, in the Pacific Ocean U.S. authorities seized nearly 20 tons from a Panamanian vessel in 2007.116
But, to focus on the enormous drug busts alone risks overlooking the constant stream of smaller loads, whose significance, in sum, may well have outweighed even the most immense single shipment. In the summer of 1998, the U.S. Customs Service, operating in Florida’s noncontainerized shipping zone on the Miami River that serves small Caribbean freighters, made a 500-kilo cocaine seizure on a Honduran-registered vessel, another of more than 700 kilos from a Belizean ship, and yet another of almost 2.3 tons from a Panamanian freighter.117 Organizations trafficking drugs by ship have usually secreted them within shipping containers holding such products as wood, crates of hammocks, barrels of butane, and bags of coffee and sesame seeds.118 Perishable items such as flowers, meat, seafood, fruits, and vegetables have often been favored because they can be subject to expedited customs inspection.119 Alternatively, criminal groups have hidden drugs in secret compartments under the decks or inside tanks.120 In one case Costa Rican authorities uncovered a scheme using divers to insert sealed cocaine packets into the outer hulls of ships headed to the United States.121
Whether hidden within a container or inside the ship itself, cocaine has often been brought onto vessels in Central American ports. Alternatively, drugs have sometimes been loaded in South America and have then passed through Central American territorial waters, sometimes transferred from one vessel to another. In addition, drugs have often been carried on ships registered as part of the merchant marines of different Central American states. The region’s ports and free trade zones have thus factored into many transshipment schemes, with the colossal duty-free port at Colón, Panama, the most significant of all.
By the end of the twentieth century, speedboats, often termed cigarette boats or simply go-fasts, were in vogue, carrying cocaine up the Caribbean and Pacific coasts to destinations in Mexico, Guatemala, or Belize. Unlike freighters, fishing vessels, or yachts, which ordinarily fly the flag of a state, go-fasts are not typically registered in that way: a speedboat found in some distant place is very likely engaged in criminal activity. Hence, as stateless vessels, they are subject to U.S. jurisdiction when intercepted far from home. Their low, open hulls and powerful engines make them exceptionally fast and difficult to detect. The speediest boats could outrun most vessels they might meet. While antidrug authorities have confiscated numerous go-fasts, operating them for routine police patrols has often been judged too expensive.122 Thus, criminal enterprises moving cocaine by cigarette boats have had a decided edge, not usually available to those pursuing them. Helicopters or planes have been able to keep tabs on suspicious speedboats, yet these have also been expensive to operate and not always available.
As speedboats have headed north from South America, they have sometimes stayed within the coastal states’ territorial seas, but, particularly in the Pacific, they have at times veered dozens or even hundreds of miles offshore, well into the exclusive economic zones of Central American countries or even into international waters beyond. However, for the traffickers, all of these offshore routes have raised considerable logistical difficulties. Most important, speedboats are gas-guzzlers and need to be periodically resupplied with fuel. Central American associates have often assisted, stockpiling gasoline on fishing boats so that refueling can occur far out at sea.
Whether the drug loads have traveled by container ship, freighter, fishing vessel, speedboat, or even yacht, the cumulative total of small, medium, and large drug transit by sea has certainly been vast. By 1996 the CIA estimated that traffickers were smuggling three times more cocaine by sea than by air. And by 2004 the DEA calculated that drug syndicates were shipping a hundred tons of cocaine through Central American waters annually.123
Ground Transport
Alongside air and sea trafficking, the ground transport of drugs north through Central America has amounted to a third principal transshipment method. Occasionally, cocaine heading to Europe might be brought for a short distance by car or truck to a convenient port or airport, but cocaine being transported overland through multiple countries has normally been headed to the United States.124
Overland drug trafficking has sometimes been used to shift drugs between neighboring bridge states, for instance, from Panama to Costa Rica or from Honduras to Guatemala, prior to export. Ground transport has also been a vitally important method of getting drugs from the bridge states of Belize and Guatemala into Mexico, that key gateway to the U.S. market. And, of course, drugs have often crossed the U.S. border by land. Most significant for the bridge states, drugs have sometimes been trucked, or transported by car, the length of Central America. This approach soared in importance in the 1990s. Before that time the civil wars in Nicaragua, El Salvador, and Guatemala had obstructed long-range ground transit, but the free trade arrangements of the post–cold war era eased it.125
With time, overland drug shipments have grown markedly in size, as leading drug organizations have come to favor tractor trailers rather than pickups or passenger cars. Large quantities of drugs can be hidden behind false walls or within the merchandise inside eighteen-wheelers. As commerce has increased, the legitimate flow of goods has helped drug trucks heading north to escape detection. Only in the late 1990s were certain authorities able to respond with mobile X-ray units to help inspectors find false compartments in vehicles and containers, and there were not enough of these to do more than curb cocaine trucking to some modest extent.
Continuing Interdiction Difficulties
Across the different smuggling methods, the threat of interdiction has caused drug rings to turn to ever more inventive schemes to try to outwit authorities.126 In the later 1980s one group crafted plastic imitation yams and stuffed them full of drugs, another inserted 560 kilos of cocaine in a shipment of antique machine guns, and still another packed dead armadillos with narcotics.127