Drug Wars Push Deeper Into Costa Rica

Traffickers have used Central America as a stopover point since at least the 1970s. But the aggressive crackdowns on criminal organizations in Mexico and Colombia, coupled with strides in limiting smuggling across the Caribbean, have increasingly brought the powerful syndicates here, pushing the drug scourge deeper into small Central American countries incapable of combating it.

Most of the known cocaine shipments moving north, 84 percent of them, crossed through Central America last year, according to radar tracking data from American authorities — a sharp increase from 44 percent in 2008 and only 23 percent in 2006, the year President Felipe Calderónof Mexico took office and began his assault against the drug gangs in his country.

Responding to the pressure — and opportunity — the cartels have spread out quickly. Five of Central America’s seven countries are now on the United States’ list of 20 “major illicit drug transit or major illicit drug producing countries.” Three of those, Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Honduras, were added just last year.

At the same time, management has changed. Mexican cartels have taken over from Colombians in recent years, recruiting local gangs to help bolster shipments, increasing consumption by paying with drugs and expanding extortion and kidnapping networks to round out their enterprise.

“This is David versus Goliath,” said Marlon Pascua, Honduras’s defense secretary. “And we are David fighting the giant.”

The issue took center stage when President Obama, during a visit to El Salvador on Tuesday and Wednesday, announced a plan to fight organized crime in the region by strengthening civilian institutions and providing training for local authorities, weapons and equipment.

But such promises have been made before, and many Central American leaders are frustrated by the wait. Of the $1.6 billion in law enforcement support promised under the antidrug Merida initiative announced in 2007, $258 million was assigned to Central America. Yet only $20 million of it had actually been spent by April of last year, according to the Government Accountability Office.

Meanwhile, the problem continues to metastasize. American officials say the 2009 coup in Honduras kicked open the door to cartels, and this month the authorities there made a troubling find: a major cocaine processing lab, suggesting that the region was becoming not just a way station for drugs, but also a manufacturer.

Even once peaceful corners like Costa Rica are struggling with addiction, gangs and drug-money corruption. Without immediate help, said José María Tijerino Pacheco, Costa Rica’s minister of public security, “the region is going to degenerate into another Mexico.”

Overmatched Defenses

The American military’s map of suspected drug plane and boat traffic heading from South America to Central America last year shows scores of lines running north. On the Atlantic side is a pistol-shaped arc of flights: the handle is the Venezuela-Colombia border and the barrel is pointed at Honduras’s Caribbean coast. On the Pacific side, the tracks show mostly boats — with dozens of lines heading from Colombia to an area of Costa Rica famous for fishing.

Both routes are increasingly popular: suspected drug flights to Honduras spiked to 82 last year, up from only 6 in 2006; in Costa Rica, there were 100 “maritime events,” up from just 12 five years ago.

The patterns reveal how drug traffickers exploit the region’s geographic, political and economic vulnerabilities. In Honduras, the coast northeast of San Pedro Sula offers a remote, largely uninhabited rainforest that is perfect for the single-engine planes traffickers use, then hide or burn to destroy the evidence.

One former smuggler said he had little trouble moving cocaine loads for years. He said he collected pound after pound from planes and then drove it by boat or car to the Guatemala border, without once being caught.

“We always got it through,” he said, withholding his full name for fear of reprisals.

Honduran officials hardly dispute such claims, saying the radar system they would need to closely track the planes would cost $30 million, and even then, they would need helicopters and other equipment to quickly intervene. The coup only made matters worse, because the Honduran military was diverted to containing street protests and American officials suspended anti-narcotics aid in response to the political crisis.