Drug Trafficking

Insight – Organized Crime in America (Part I of III)

Drug trafficking remains the single most important activity of organized criminal groups in the Americas. This includes trafficking of marijuana, cocaine, heroin, methamphetamines and other synthetic drugs. Illegal drugs are produced, processed, stored and shipped from the region. They are also increasingly consumed. The trafficking and consumption destabilizes nearly every country that forms part of the production and distribution chain.

Some of these countries are facing challenges that are, in some ways, bigger than the fights they had during prolonged civil wars. Without the resources or knowledge, the governments of these nations are succumbing to powerful mega-structures that are able to subordinate poorly paid civil servants and buy off large portions of the state’s security apparatus.

Cocaine

Among these illegal drugs, cocaine is the most lucrative. The United Nations estimates that sales of the drug net $88 billion per year in the retail market alone. U.S. Southern Command says that between 1,250 and 1,500 metric tons of cocaine are produced per year in the region. Most of it is produced in Colombia, where processing labs were established in cities and rural areas beginning in the 1970s.

At the time, the raw material for this cocaine came from Perú and Bolivia where indigenous groups had been harvesting and processing coca for centuries. The indigenous chew the leaves or use it for tea, and Bolivia’s government still legally allows for a certain amount of production to satisfy this historical market. In the 1990s, that production shifted Colombia where larger, well-armed groups began battling for control of the source material and financed their wars against each and the state in the process. Now it appears that coca production is shifting south again.

Cultivating the coca is but the first step in complicated process that requires numerous products, such as gasoline and sulfuric acid, among others, to move the leaf to cocaine hydrochloride (HCL). The coca leaf is usually partially processed on the farmer’s land. The farmer then sells the coca paste or the coca leaves directly to the traffickers or a middleman. The United Nations estimates that the coca farmer makes about 1.5 percent of the total retail value earned from the cocaine sale in the United States. In 2008, that represented $1.1 billion, the UN says.

The middleman or traffickers get the paste to an HCL laboratory. Most of the cocaine labs remain in Colombia, although there have been an increasing number of reports about the proliferation of labs in Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela. These laboratories are much more sophisticated and dangerous operations. They require more specialized personnel such as trained chemists and often armed protection. The best of these labs can produce several tons of cocaine a month, and their mere presence signals that a large organization is at work. Some drug trafficking organizations enter the market at this juncture but many stay away, preferring to pay a price to buy into a shipment at a later stage.

The actual shipments of the HCL are done by individual organizations or in consortium. The difficult nature of moving cocaine requires the participation of many, which has led to the creation of numerous “cartels” over the years. These “cartels” are more loose federations than disciplined, hierarchical structures, which helps explain the constantly shifting nature of their organizations. And most shipments of cocaine involve numerous parts of these federations. While the largest federations were once Colombian, now it appears they are Mexican. The UN estimates that two-thirds of the cocaine that left the Andean region going to the United States in 2008 wound up in the hands of Mexican cartels.

Mixed into these deals are the transporters. They move the HCL from the labs to the embarkation point where the cartel or another set of transport groups takes control of the drugs. They move it by sea, air or land, or a combination of all three. Go-fast boats, fishing vessels, single-engine aircraft, semi-submersibles and human “mules” can all participate in a single shipment. These transporters use their existing infrastructure, such as their own transport companies to camouflage the cocaine. They buy their way past authorities or simply play the odds, especially along crowded highways in places like Central America and Mexico where the increasingly liberalized and open borders that have come from the free trade agreements have facilitated their work.

Where the Mexican cartels take control of the drugs depends on their reach and the particular load in question. Some operate in Colombia, Perú and possibly Bolivia, buying the HCL wholesale from the source itself. Others pick up the cocaine en route, often in Central America. Others receive it in Mexico. From there it is moved via land, either using commercial trucks, individual vehicles, human mules or through tunnels dug specifically to move drugs and humans into the United States.

Cocaine is also increasingly shipped to Europe, a burgeoning market where the price of cocaine on the street often double prices in the United States. The key embarkation point appears to be Venezuela. The UN estimates that over 50 percent of the drug that departed by water left from Venezuela. Most of these drugs were en route to Europe. Drugs to Europe also leave from the Caribbean, Argentina and Brazil by boat or commercial aircraft.

These cargoes enter through Spain, Portugal in the south or the Netherlands and Belgium in the north. Many traffickers also use West Africa as a depot and staging area to get their drugs into Europe. As it is in Central America, where poor countries and corrupt, ill-equipped government forces cannot handle the richer, better armed and more sophisticated cartels, West African countries such as Guinea-Bissau are struggling to deal with the influx of organized crime.