Source and Transit Countries

Drug trafficking organizations have muscled their way into Central America, opening a new chapter in the drug prohibition war that almost certainly will exact further cost on U.S. taxpayers as American authorities confront these organizations on a new frontier. The extent of the infiltration is breathtaking. Drug trafficking organizations now control large parts of the countries of Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America. They've bought off politicians and police, moved cocaine processing laboratories up from the Andes, and are obtaining rockets and other heavy armament that make them more than a match for Central America's weak militaries.

Walid Makled says he had top Venezuelan generals and government officials on his payroll. He says that five or six plane-loads of cocaine take off everyday from San Fernandeo de Apure, in south-western Venezuela, bound for the US, via Honduras and Mexico. "It’s an everyday thing. Not every other day, it’s every day. Between FARC and the Venezuelan Army, we’re talking about four or five planes leaving Apure every day."

For decades, Colombian drug trafficking organization have pursued their trade with amazingly professional ingenuity, staying a step ahead of authorities by coming up with one innovation after another. When false-paneled pickups and tractor-trailers began drawing suspicion at US checkpoints, the traffickers and their Mexican partners built air-conditioned tunnels under the border. When border agents started rounding up too many human mules, one group of Colombian smugglers surgically implanted heroin into purebred puppies. But the drug runners’ most persistently effective method has also been one of the crudest — semi-submersible vessels that cruise or are towed just below the ocean’s surface and can hold a ton or more of cocaine.

It has long been known inside Afghanistan that heroin dealers in high positions benefit from the United States and Afghan governments' counternarcotics policies. Now the American public can get a glimpse. US embassy cables published recently by WikiLeaks expose the insider opinion that Afghan officials are using poppy eradication teams to weed out the competitors of major traffickers with whom they are linked.

Colombia's largest rebel group FARC may benefit from the recent killing of neo-paramilitary drug lord "Cuchillo," newspaper El Espectador reports. According to the newspaper, the death of Pedro Oliveiro Guerrero, alias Cuchillo, late last month brought an end to the paramilitary rule of the underworld of Colombia's eastern plains that started when the AUC took control of the region in the 1990s. A police investigator told El Espectador that members of Cuchillo's organization ERPAC have been meeting to assure a continuation of the drug trade, but have not been able to appoint a successor of their slain leader.

Jonathan Glennie, a research fellow in the Center for Aid and Public Expenditure (CAPE) at Overseas Development Institute (ODI), opines that since drug prohibition deeply affects some of the world's poorest people, the development community must back legalization calls.