Most Colombian cocaine entering the U.S. comes through Mexico, with
cartels infiltrating security forces and government agencies
Mexican drug traffickers
dressed in military uniforms
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA (By Hιctor Tobar, LATimes) March 4, 2007
Mexico has become a crucial way station in the billion dollar cocaine
business, with traffickers shipping hundreds of tons northward from Colombia
along the isthmus, through Mexico and increasingly infiltrating police and government
agencies, U.S. and regional sources say.
The recent killings of three Salvadoran legislators in Guatemala underscored
the shift, intelligence sources say. The lawmakers were shot and their
bodies set ablaze last month, allegedly by a group of Guatemalan policemen
working on behalf of Mexican drug traffickers.
All sorts of people have been swept up in the drug trade as the smuggling
routes have changed, including impoverished fishermen, small-town mayors,
legislators and high-ranking police officials. In years past, the favored
route was across the Caribbean to the southeastern United States. Now, with
greater Mexican cartel involvement, the cocaine often moves up the coasts of
Central America and overland through Mexico.
Although it remains unclear whether the dead Salvadorans had ties to
traffickers, other lawmakers from the country have been linked to the trade.
Guatemalan officials have said the killings point to widespread infiltration
of the country's police force by organized crime.
The four police officers charged in the killings, including the head of
Guatemala's organized-crime unit, were later slain in their prison cells, in
a stunning raid by armed men who may have entered the facility with the aid
of guards and prison officials.
An intelligence official working in the region said the slain police
officers worked for a Mexican cartel that ships drugs along the Pacific
coast of Central America. The officers were enforcers dedicated to "knocking
down" rival traffickers, the source said.
"This is a crime that can best be understood as part of the dynamic that
sees drugs flow between Mexico and Colombia," said a second intelligence
official, referring to the killing of the legislators. The officials asked
not to be named, given the sensitive political nature of the crime one of
the victims was Eduardo Jose D'Aubuisson, the son of the founder of El
Salvador's ruling party.
Although drug trafficking has long been common in remote areas of the
region, such as the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, the growing power of
Mexican cartels has increased the importance of Central America as a
transshipment point.
Smuggling routes across the Caribbean have largely fallen into disuse thanks
to U.S. interdiction efforts there, and Colombian drug producers have ceded
the bulk of the transportation business to Mexicans.
About 90% of the estimated 780 tons of cocaine entering the United States
each year passes through the hands of Mexican drug traffickers, according to
U.S. studies. Mexican traffickers see Central America as a natural hub
between their Colombian suppliers and the smuggling routes the Mexicans
control on the U.S. border.
The "Mexico-Central America corridor is
the predominant transit route for
cocaine destined for the United States," U.S. officials wrote in the 2007
National Drug Threat Assessment.
Michael A. Braun, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, said in a 2005 congressional hearing that "the corrupting
power of illicit drug trafficking organizations on the governmental
institutions of Central America significantly increases the difficulty of
successful drug interdiction efforts."
Central America will remain the primary transit zone for U.S.-bound drugs
"for the foreseeable future," Braun added.
The growing trade has reached areas of Central America where drug
trafficking was rare just a few years ago. Police and military forces there
are often undermanned and outgunned.
Nicaragua's small navy, for example, only has enough boats to patrol its
coastline 12 days a month, officials say, a fact that helps shape the
traffickers' strategy. "They know what our limitations are," said Capt.
Roger Gonzalez Diaz of the Nicaraguan navy.
On the Pacific coast, the Nicaraguan navy has no craft larger than
40-foot-long "go fast" boats with outboard motors, vessels nearly identical
to those the drug traffickers use. In fact, many of the navy's boats are
vessels that were discarded by smugglers, Gonzalez Diaz said.
Operatives of Mexico's Sinaloa cartel arrived on the Pacific coast two years
ago, officials with Nicaragua's National Police said.
With their Mexican accents, the men stood out. They were eager to buy old,
abandoned farms along the beach. They didn't look like farmers, but they
bought several tractors. They collected boats, too, but they didn't look
like fishermen.
"The tractors were to build new airstrips and also to rehabilitate old
ones," said a Nicaraguan police officer who specializes in drug
intelligence.
One of the men was Samuel "Sammy" Gutierrez, a Colombian with Mexican
identity documents, police said. He and two brothers from Mazatlan, Jorge
and Roberto Garcia Villasenor, were air and sea "transportation
specialists," police said.
The drug cartel operatives soon found themselves in a cat-and-mouse game
with police leading to a plane crash on a rural highway and the arrest of a
Mexican couple with nearly $300,000 in cash at a Managua airport.
"We confiscated three tons of cocaine," said an intelligence official with
Nicaragua's national police. "We hit them hard."
Nearly all of the cocaine that enters the United States is produced in
Colombia, according to U.S. studies. Most of it enters the U.S. through a
two-stage process in which it is offloaded and stored at least once in
Mexico or Central America.
Cocaine is shipped out of Colombia by sea and air, usually in amounts of a
ton or more, through what U.S. officials call "the transit zone" the
stretch of ocean between Colombia and Mexico. Sometimes the traffickers
hopscotch up the coast from Colombia to Panama, Costa Rica and other
countries in the "go fast" boats.
Or they may take a more circuitous route in a larger ship that will travel
around the Galapagos Islands in the Pacific southwest and later offload to
smaller vessels.
Once in Mexico, the drug traffickers benefit from well-traveled smuggling
routes protected by corrupt state and local officials, as they move their
shipments northward overland to the U.S. border. A war among competing
cartels to control those routes, known as "plazas" in Mexico, led to more
than 2,000 killings last year.
The various routes through the "transit zone" pass through the beaches of
Belize, seaside villages in Honduras and ports along the Pacific coast of
Mexico and many other places, according to data from the U.S. government's
Joint Interagency Task Force South, based in Florida.
In 2005, U.S. officials discovered, via satellite imagery, an "aircraft
graveyard" in the Peten jungle of Guatemala where drug traffickers had
disposed of light aircraft that brought shipments from South America. The
drugs were eventually smuggled overland into Mexico.
U.S. officials said that Central American organized-crime groups, working
with the Mexican and Colombian cartels under a subcontracting system, are
reaping huge profits. That money, in turn, is fueling a crime wave,
especially in Guatemala and El Salvador.
In El Salvador, sources pointed to a key killing that went largely unnoticed
in the local media: the 2005 shooting death of Jose "El Cranky" Cortes
outside a San Salvador nightclub.
According to a Salvadoran academic who has studied the drug trade, Cortes
controlled the retail drug trade in an urban region of El Salvador and was
assassinated for trying to make connections with Colombian suppliers without
the permission of other gang leaders.
It was the first time officials had documented contacts between high-level
Salvadoran gang leaders and Colombian traffickers, the source said.
Along the impoverished Pacific coast of El Salvador and Guatemala, mayors
and other low-level officials in seaside towns find that the sums of money
offered by the traffickers are often too tempting to resist.
"This guy tells you that you can make $60,000 easily, very quietly," said
one intelligence official who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The same networks that smuggle drugs northward are responsible for shipping
several billion dollars in cash southward, usually in $20 bills, DEA
officials said. So vast is the money flow that it is routine to arrest
couriers carrying $1 million in cash or more in Central America.
The huge sums of money involved in the drug trade have already ensnared top
officials in El Salvador.
Last year, William Eliu Martinez, a former Salvadoran congressman, received
a 29-year prison sentence from a U.S. judge in Washington after being
convicted of smuggling more than 30 tons of cocaine into the United States.
If the privileged can be drawn into the drug trade, then what hope is there
that a poorly paid policeman, soldier or sailor can resist the temptation?
Capt. Gonzalez Diaz of the Nicaraguan navy asks himself that question often.
"It's a constant struggle with our personnel," he said. "We tell them,
'Anyone would be tempted if they offered you $500 or $5,000. But for that,
you're disgraced
. And if you owe them anything, they'll come after you or
your wife and kids.' "
