This is the US Coast Guard intercepting a shipment of cocaine.
Here's the same crew intercepting another one... and another one.
This was all in the summer of 2018. They seized more than 9,000 kilos of cocaine that
was headed to the US.
That may sound like a lot but it's just the tip of the iceberg.
In 2017 the Coast Guard intercepted almost 227,000 kilos of cocaine, here.
Along the eastern Pacific.
That's because the US is the largest cocaine consumer in the world. And to get to the
US, most of that cocaine has to travel this way, through Central America and
Mexico.
With that comes violence and today Guatemala and Honduras are some of the most violent places in the world.
It's a big reason why so many people are traveling north to seek asylum at the
US-Mexico border.
But the story of Central America's crisis isn't just about America's demand for drugs.
Another big part of it...is America's war on drugs.
Cocaine is produced in South America
along the Andes mountain range that stretches from Bolivia to Colombia.
Starting in the mid 1970s most of the world's cocaine came from here;
distributed by groups like the Medellin Cartel led by Pablo Escobar.
But they needed to get their product, here, to the US. Where by the late 80s Americans were
spending tens of billions of dollars on cocaine annually.
And they did it this way: Cartels sent boats and planes loaded
with cocaine through the Caribbean to South Florida. For example Escobar's
cartel primarily flew cocaine from Medellin to the Bahamas and then over to
Miami.
"Miami is one of the principal branch offices for what can be called cocaine Inc. It's got to be four or five
times as much cocaine as we've ever seen before... The drug has killed at least 34 people
just in South Florida so far this year." So the US cracked down on the Caribbean route.
"To stop those drugs on the way to America I propose that we
Spend more than a billion and a half dollars on interdiction.
They started
catching shipments along the coast line. Like this speedboat called a go-fast
boat that was intercepted by the Coast Guard. And they worked with the Colombian
government to destroy coca and fight the cartels in Colombia.
The Caribbean route was dismantled but the cocaine industry kept going.
Cartels just needed a new route to the US, and they found it in Mexico.
Mexican cartels already had ways to get drugs over their border and into the u.s.
So, Colombian cartels shipped their cocaine to Mexico but their boats and planes had
to stop somewhere along the way to avoid detection and to refuel. And the ideal
place to stop was Central America, especially Honduras and Guatemala.
Not only were these countries directly south of Mexico, but they had just been through
decades of civil wars and foreign interventions. Their governments were
weak and easily bought off and criminal organizations had power. It was an easy
place for the cartels to turn to.
Back in Mexico, the new cocaine routes turned lucrative, fast.
The Mexican cartels got bigger and
more powerful and started controlling more territory. And the government
responded... "It's a war! 10,000 federal troops and police to Juarez.
Mexico cracked down with the help of the US.
"He will not allow his country to be taken
over by narco traffickers" This crackdown was largely a failure.
It caused chaos and violence spiked. But it did make it more difficult to send cocaine directly
to Mexico. So cartels started shipping cocaine to Central America, to landing
points along the coasts, and would move it into Mexico overland.
Central America wasn't just a stop along the way anymore.
Suddenly it found itself at the center of cocaine trafficking.
And all the things that made Central American countries ideal as refueling stops made
them vulnerable to the violence that comes with drug routes.
Criminal organizations, already powerful in their countries, started forming alliances with
Mexican cartels. In Guatemala, this group aligned with the Zetas while these went
with the rival Sinaloa cartel. Violence surged here: along the northern
Honduran coast where cocaine shipments arrived and at the border where the
cocaine is transported north by land. With violence on the rise
it was now Central America's turn to crackdown throughout the region...
Governments embraced harsh policies to combat not just drug traffickers but all
organized crime. A policy, backed again, by the US: "To find ways in which we can
come up with more aggressive action plans to improve security. We have a
shared responsibility when it comes to dealing with drug trafficking."
Newly militarized police forces arrested thousands, prisons filled up, but the
violence didn't stop. And that's where we are today. Honduras and Guatemala have
violent death rates on par with active war zones.
And thousands of migrants are taking dangerous routes through Mexico
to the US to escape the instability and
violence. For decades the US has tried to stop drugs from coming in but it's only
really succeeded in changing how those drugs come in. And Central America might
be the place that's feeling those changes the hardest.
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