Bribes, Bullets, and Intimidation. Julie Marie Bunck
32. Andreas, Border Games, 145.
33. That unclassified information is readily available does not necessarily mean that it “is automatically available to officials who need it, or in the form they need it.” Betts, Enemies of Intelligence, 5.
34. Although some use the terms trafficker and dealer synonymously—indeed, some provisions in the laws of bridge states have failed to distinguish clearly between them—we use the former with reference to those moving drugs and the latter with reference to those engaged in retail or wholesale drug sales. An individual could be a trafficker and a dealer, and an organization could be engaged in trafficking and dealing, or these functions could be separated.
35. Andreas, Border Games, 17.
36. Chepesiuk, Hard Target, 14.
37. INCSR (1998), 173.
38. A sealed federal indictment in 1986 declared,
“The Medellín cartel . . . consisted of controlling members of major international cocaine and manufacturing and distribution organizations. . . . Through the cartel, major cocaine organizations were able to pool resources, including raw materials, clandestine cocaine conversion laboratories, aircraft, vessels, transportation facilities, distribution networks, and cocaine to facilitate international narcotics trafficking. . . . The cartel members met at ‘brokerage houses’ in Medellín—private estates where drug lords dickered for pilots and lab service. The cartel maintained inventory control, corrupted officials of foreign governments, and carried out murders to ‘protect its business operations and enforce its mandates.’” Gugliotta and Leen, Kings of Cocaine, 278.
39. See Zaitch, Trafficking Cocaine, 59; Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 26; and Thoumi, Political Economy, 142. Although cartels have sometimes been able to influence market prices, supply and demand have remained the main price determinants, because many small organizations provide a significant percentage of the drugs consumed in major markets. Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 27.
40. See, for instance, Kenney, From Pablo to Osama, 88–89.
41. See Zabludoff, “Colombian Narcotics Organizations,” 26, and Thoumi, “Illegal Drug Industry,” 119.
42. For the role of entrepreneurs in the Mexican marijuana industry, see Kamstra, Weed, 75, 105.
43. For DEA statistics and U.S. prices, see Reuter, “Political Economy,” 130, table 7.3. For European prices in this time frame, see “Tica detenida en París con catorce kilos de cocaína,” LN (CR), 20 July 1995, 10A. Some scholars have debated whether (or which) groups trafficking drugs have sufficient hierarchy and cohesion to be properly called organizations at all, as opposed to a term such as networks, which connotes a looser and less vertical structure. Compare Decker and Chapman, Drug Smugglers, 15–17; Zaitch, “Post-Fordist Cocaine,” 150, 170; and Williams, “Transnational Criminal Networks,” 69. We consider all groups of traffickers working together to be organizations, although some are much more tightly and extensively organized than others.
44. Reuter and Haaga, Drug Markets, 41.
45. Cave and Reuter, Interdictor’s Lot, v.
46. In 2010, for instance, a kilo of cocaine that cost $1,750 in Colombia might be purchased for roughly $6,000 in Central America, but multiples of those figures in the market countries. See “Carteles mexicanos del narco toman el continente,” LN (CR), 31 January 2010, 20A.
47. Andreas, Border Games, 82.
48. Thoumi, Political Economy, 134.
49. See “‘Mini carteles’ colombianos operan desde Panamá,” LP (PA), 10 January 2000, 5A.
50. In developing our points on Central American institutional weaknesses, we found particularly useful Levitsky and Murillo, Argentine Democracy.
Central America and the International Trade in Drugs
As drug exports from South America initially gathered momentum in the late 1970s, criminal syndicates favored air and maritime routes through the Caribbean, including transshipment via the Bahamas, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. In the early 1980s, however, responding to bloody struggles among cocaine traffickers contesting market shares, U.S. government initiatives in south Florida aimed to curtail air and sea drug imports.1 At this time, various Caribbean governments, encouraged and pressured by the U.S. government and supported by the U.S. Coast Guard and the DEA, stepped up interdiction. U.S. officials also began to track air traffic headed toward Florida more thoroughly, using military planes equipped with the advanced Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS).2 In this way, oversight improved of Florida’s air and waters—traditionally the chief target for drug smugglers—as well as of three Caribbean straits: the Mona Passage, Windward Passage, and Yucatán Channel.3
With the smooth flow of drugs to market jeopardized, by 1984 significant Colombian traffickers had started to import cocaine across the U.S.-Mexican border. This strategic shift empowered Mexican drug organizations, which brought the Colombians to search for the least risky and most cost-effective routes to transship drugs into Mexico.4 Here, the skies, territories, and offshore waters of Central American countries proved to have real competitive advantages. Most important, intercepting drugs entering or leaving islands is less difficult than doing so in larger countries with porous land borders and long coastal stretches. Central American transit thus began to eclipse Caribbean routes as the leading pathway for South American drugs, and more cocaine began to enter the southwestern United States than Florida.5 Cocaine imports to the United States via Mexico rose to one-third of the total in 1989, to more than half in 1992, and to 80 percent by century’s end.6
Map 1.1
By the early 1980s significant cocaine shipments—fifty to three hundred kilograms for that period—were regularly transiting Central America, and by the 1990s Caribbean routes had been relegated to a secondary, though still quite significant, role.7 Of course, the Central American versus Caribbean choice was not necessarily either/or. A number of routes have involved both regions, as when cocaine has been shipped from Panama to Haiti, flown from Costa Rica to the Bahamas, or sent aboard speedboats from Colombia’s resort island of San Andrés to Belize, Honduras, or Costa Rica. Furthermore,