Drug gangs are beginning to muscle into a new territory: Central America – an action that is likely to cost U.S. taxpayers.

Even by the brazen standards of cocaine cowboys, what happened a few months ago at an air force base here set new levels for audacity: Drug traffickers snuck onto the heavily guarded base and retrieved a confiscated plane.

Confederates at the airbase had already fueled and warmed up the motors of the Beechcraft Super King Air 200, a workhorse of the cocaine trade. Within days, it would be again hauling dope from South America.

The stunt was a black eye for the Honduran military, and just one of many signs that parts of Central America have fallen into the maw of international organized crime, threatening decades of U.S. efforts to stanch the tidal wave of drugs headed to American cities and towns.

Washington has spent billions of dollars to help push drug cartels out of Colombia, and to confront them in Mexico. Now they’ve muscled their way into Central America, opening a new chapter in the drug war that almost certainly will exact further cost on U.S. taxpayers as American authorities confront drug gangs on a new frontier.

The extent of the infiltration is breathtaking. Drug cartels 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.

Air Force Gen. Douglas Fraser, chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, told a March 30 Pentagon news briefing that Central America “has probably become the deadliest zone in the world” outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. Homicide rates in cities such as San Pedro Sula in northern Honduras are soaring, making them as deadly as Mogadishu, Somalia, or the Taliban home base of Kandahar, Afghanistan.

The political influence of the drug gangs is burgeoning. One former member of Honduras’ Council Against Drug Trafficking estimated that fully 10 percent of members of the Honduran congress have links to drug traffickers.

“The overall situation is alarming, definitely,” said Antonio Luigi Mazzitelli, the head of the U.N. office on Drugs and Crime for Mexico and Central America.

The heavy footprint of the traffickers is visible everywhere.

A month ago in San Salvador, police arrested a 30-year-old man with five bags containing $818,840 in $20 bills. In September, Salvadoran authorities found a total of $15.7 million in cash buried at two locations outside the capital, San Salvador. Honduras seized $14.4 million in drug cash last year.

By many accounts, the tide of cocaine through the region has become a sea.

“We have evidence that about 42 percent of all cocaine flights that leave South America for the rest of the world go through Honduras. That’s a pretty staggering number,” U.S. Ambassador to Honduras Hugo Llorens said.

An accused Venezuelan drug lord, Walid Makled, told the Univision Spanish-language television network this month from his prison cell in Colombia that five to six aircraft loaded with cocaine leave Venezuela every day for Honduras.

In some ways, what unfolded after the theft of the twin-engine Beechcraft Super King Air 200 plane from the Armando Escalon air base in San Pedro Sula on the night of Nov. 7 was as instructive as the heist itself. The plane headed toward Venezuela, anti-narcotics officials said. Then it began hauling dope again.

 

Posted in: Drug gangs are beginning to muscle into a new territory: Central America – an action that is likely to cost U.S. taxpayers.