Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation. Julie Marie Bunck

      Introduction

      Exploring Central American Drug Trafficking

      This book explores one distinctly understudied aspect of the international drug trade: the experiences of “bridge countries,” that is, states that may neither consume nor produce sizable amounts of illegal drugs but that lie on favored paths carved out between centers of production and key consumer markets. In the 1980s the Central American republics became critically important to the international drug trade and have remained so ever since, with illegal drugs continually transiting en route to North American, European, and various emerging markets. Central America is particularly well suited for one of the first comparative studies of bridge-state trafficking, because its trade in drugs has long been emphatically multipolar.1 Significant drug transit has occurred not only across the territories but in the skies above each state and through offshore Pacific and Caribbean waters. By studying Central American drug trafficking, we offer a first examination of social, political, and economic phenomena of extraordinary importance to an often overlooked region of the world.

      Certainly, by the 1990s massive inflows and outflows of cocaine had come to affect profoundly each small republic. Nevertheless, no sound empirical foundation has yet been compiled, much less have theoretical explanations been offered, to illuminate the manner in which drug traffickers and law enforcement have contended with one another in Central America.2 One leading authority on drugs has written, “The topic of transnational smuggling attracts a good deal of rhetoric but not much that could be called research.” Another recent work declares, “Although studies of drug use are numerous and our understanding of local drug markets is growing, our understanding of the multimillion-dollar business of international drug smuggling is considerably less well developed.”3 This book thus aims to fill a gap in the literature by using extensive primary and secondary research to elucidate the dynamics of the Central American drug trade.

      The Case Studies Selected

      We organized our research around five case studies: Belize, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama.4 Each has served as an important staging point in international drug transit throughout the last decades of the twentieth century and the first of the twenty-first. Although as early as the 1980s transshipment also occurred via El Salvador and Nicaragua, their high levels of instability and violence kept some traffickers at bay and greatly hampered antidrug activities.5 Throughout that decade, data are scarce, since their authorities were seldom seizing narcotics and even more rarely breaking up significant drug rings.6 Furthermore, the Nicaraguan and Salvadoran civil wars hampered the U.S. drug investigations usually critically important for seizures and arrests anywhere in the region. The Sandinista government was not prepared to cooperate with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), and U.S. national security officials reportedly squelched DEA inquiries that involved trafficking related to the Salvadoran military, its bases, and its role in supporting the Nicaraguan contras.7

      In later chronicling how drug problems had long been ignored, the U.S. State Department reported that El Salvador had seized a single kilogram of cocaine in 1989 and a mere 26 kilos in 1990.8 Even as late as 1998, of 31.6 metric tons of cocaine seized in Central America, Salvadoran authorities accounted for a mere 41 kilos.9 Similarly, in Nicaragua neither the right nor the left did much to stem drug passage in the 1980s.10 Indeed, before 1990 the country had never seized a Colombian cocaine plane.11 Instead, individuals on both sides of the Nicaraguan civil war trafficked narcotics for their own profit or to finance their causes. Thus, although drug transit eventually reached substantial levels in Nicaragua and El Salvador, and each enters our account in relation to trafficking in its neighbors, we chose to examine the five Central American countries in which the most data are available over the longest time frame.12

      Our research soon revealed that the many transnational criminal organizations active in Central America were putting into effect varied, numerous, and often quite creative drug-smuggling schemes.13 These aimed to tap the enormous potential profits inherent in the drug trade while avoiding interdiction, that is, the interception and seizure by law-enforcement officials of drugs and traffickers traveling from source to market countries, as well as of the back flow of drug profits.14 Criminal efforts to establish efficient smuggling routes and methods, followed by official attempts to counter them, have caused the drug trade to evolve, state by state and organization by organization, as traffickers and police have tried to adapt to each other’s actions.15

      In the chapters that follow we explore where, when, and why smugglers have periodically changed their routes and modi operandi to avoid detection. We detail the growing magnitude of the regional trade, and we identify key traffickers in Central America and their organizations. Although the bridge states have shared many experiences, we draw special attention to the aspects of Central American trafficking operations that have varied by drug and by country. In analyzing state efforts to curb the trade, we examine what was typical and what was singular about the historical development of key institutions and how this affected antidrug initiatives.

      Although in many respects we have disaggregated the Central American societies, we have also focused on the ways in which this activity is regional as well as national. As we shall show, traffickers, routes, and law-enforcement efforts have often involved more than a single bridge state. For an accurate picture of the Central American drug trade, a panorama must be created, in which developments in the different republics can be set next to one another and compared and contrasted. When approached from that perspective, the challenges of the Central American drug trade have underscored grave deficiencies in countering organized crime in more authoritarian societies and more democratic ones, in civil law and common law judicial systems, in postcolonial and long-independent states, and in countries at very different levels of development.

      Empirical and Theoretical Contributions

      In examining the complex workings of the Central American drug trade, our book has empirical and theoretical dimensions.16 One scholar wrote, “Like plants in nature, theories and explanations grow out of the dirt of observations of reality. . . . Getting your hands dirty with the nitty-gritty details . . . is a good way to test the abstractions of theory, and perhaps to develop alternate theory, or modifications of theories.”17 In that spirit we have aimed to write an empirical book that sets forth and illuminates important data regarding the Central American drug trade, while using inductive observations to provide the first detailed, comparative account of drugs and the law in this region.

      Exploring