Drug Trafficking and Crime Challenges Facing Central America

Introduction

Central America is a culturally and ecologically diverse world region that also is an important corridor for trade and travel. However, the seven Central American nation-states face, to varying degrees, issues of drug trafficking and high murder rates. This essay, after providing historical context, explores recent trends of drug trafficking and violent crime in the region. The main body describes “neoliberal recycling”, or the pervasive, cyclical, and failing methods socio-political-economic elites use that create and perpetuate these crises. Actions of elites (and the gangs these actions largely created) have designated marginalized people in Central America into spaces of criminality, and these low-income people often are induced into supporting policies that exacerbate problems. This essay concludes with the argument that “solutions” of drug liberalization will only prove effective alongside wide structural changes acknowledging the experiences and values of marginalized communities.

History

Central America’s recent history has often been violent. Guatemala faced a civil war relating to indigenous identity between 1960-1996, while El Salvador’s 1980-1992 civil war was a rebellion of poor agricultural workers (Rodgers, 2009, p. 955). The Sandinistas’ rise and the Sandinista-Contra War in Nicaragua from 1978-1990 spread to Costa Rica and had elements of peasant rebellion (Marcy, 2014, p. 9 and Rodgers, 2009, pp. 951-952). US intervention in the region during this period included military support of the Contras (Walker, 2015, p. 91) and the invasion of Panama (Operation Just Cause) in 1989. Allegations of authoritarianism and association with drug trafficking against Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega sparked the invasion (Marcy, 2014, p. 3, 13). Honduras struggled with poverty, militarization, and drug trafficking during this period, despite not facing civil war (Marcy, 2014, pp, 9, 11).

Two major shifts occurred in Central America during the 1990s: the epicenters of violence in the region moved from rural to urban areas, and the US began to take broad, instead of targeted, actions. With the Sandinista-Contra War over in Nicaragua, some young combatants joined pandillas (youth gangs) and ravaged cities with violence and other illicit activities: “By 1999, the Nicaraguan police estimated that there were 110 gangs in Managua, incorporating 8,500 youths” (Rodgers, 2009, p. 954). Youth gangs called maras grew in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as wars in the former two nations wound down. The sweeping US Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), under which “between 1998 and 2005 the US deported almost 46,000 convicts to Central America...”, was a major cause of these gangs’ rise. Central American undocumented immigrants who were excluded from citizenship and acceptance within US society, despite often having arrived as young children, joined gangs which they replicated the structure of upon deportation (Marcy, 2014, p. 18 and Rodgers, 2009, p. 956). In 2007, the Mérida Initiative between the US, Mexico, and Central America was launched with the stated goal of multilaterally coordinating anti-crime and anti-drug trafficking measures: it has since been rebranded as Mérida II, with sub-program CARSI focussed on Central America (Walker, 2015, p. 89).

Conceptual Framework

This essay argues that the current management plans of the United States and Central America regarding drug trafficking and violence are profoundly neoliberal practices that perpetuate, or “recycle”, the problems they claim to address. The term “neoliberal recycling” comes from University of California sociology professor Tanya Golash-Boza, who states: “Neoliberal reforms are aimed at opening up local economies to global markets and reducing state spending on social welfare. It involves cuts to government funding, with the notable exception of the military and law enforcement.” (2015). Economic liberalization and securitization-militarization programs are intrinsic to elite strategies in fighting drug trafficking and crime. Golash-Boza argues that neoliberal policies cyclically (re)produce one another and global inequality: this paper extends her argument to state that neoliberal policies perpetuate intrastate economic inequality and situations of insecurity and violence among low-income people.

The processes of border-work, strategic facades and procedural illusions, and prohibitionism are fundamental neoliberal techniques that lead to the recycling of inequality and crime in low-income spaces of Central America.

University of Amsterdam professor Luiza Bialasiewicz describes border-work, which includes, among other components: “increasing use of military technologies for border enforcement” and “‘layered’ border inspection/policing approaches that move customs and immigration inspection activities away from the actual territorial border” She states that the US has used border-work since 9/11 (2012, p. 844).

Strategic facades and procedural illusions are described by University of Louisville professor Margath Walker, who describes them as tactics under systems propagating one-dimensionality (an idea of critical theorist Herbert Marcuse). Walker describes one-dimensionality as “a description of social structures and behaviors incapable of perceiving alternatives to existing realities” (2015, pg. 84), and strategic facades and procedural illusions as “Websites, policy documents, political commentary, and think-tank memos...repeatedly refer[ing] to a ‘new paradigm’ meant to espouse a fundamental shift in tackling joint issues” that hides policy that is status-quo in actuality. Walker explains that the Mérida Initiative is illusorily marketed as multilateral, but is truely US-centric strategically and procedurally (2015, pp. 90-91).

Canterbury Christ Church University professor Shane Blackman states that American War on Drugs policy “can be described sociologically as ‘governing through prohibition.’” He states that this War on Drugs, supported by the UN and other national governments, promotes the strategic facade of lessening drug-induced human suffering while actually being a tool of political capital (Blackman, 2010, pg. 41). Surface-level language of “morality” and “ethical leadership” induces public support for prohibitionism and has, for over 100 years, hidden the xenophobic, corrupt, pro-militarization motives for prohibitionist policy: prohibitionist policies also reinforce elite Western monopolies on the drug trade (Blackman, 2010, pp. 846-848). The War on Drugs continues despite “new social movements” stating that “within drug prevention, harm reduction is defined as against prohibition” (Blackman, 2010, p. 843). Heavy-handed US-led prohibitionism applies to the construction of criminality in addition to drug policy.

Analysis

The previously-described example of the IIRIRA’s connection to the growth of the mara gangs is a clear example of how neoliberal recycling works. By deporting gang members (who often turned to violence because of exclusionary policy) to Central America in 1996, the US placed the burden of border-work on countries facing gross inequality and recovery from civil wars that had ended only years before. The Act had a strategic facade of fighting crime, but in truth just changed the geographic spaces where crime occurred from low-income California neighborhoods to low-income Central American neighborhoods (Rodgers, 2009, pp. 955, 957, 965). The Act also exemplifies prohibitionism: in the name of fighting crime, but really as a way to gain political capital for xenophobia, it prohibited some foreign-born criminals who were legal US residents or even citizens from staying in the USA (Rodgers, 2009, p. 956).

Border work is prioritized throughout Central America. The USA has outsourced some border-control infrastructure to Mexico: “$14.5 million of biometric equipment has been installed” at the Talisman checkpoint between Mexico and Guatemala. Although this infrastructure was built under an anti-crime facade, it has largely ignored illegal crossings. It has slightly hampered the movement of Guatemalan agricultural workers, however, during downturns in the coffee market (Walker, 2015, pp. 84-85): perhaps border-work reminds workers of state and corporate power, pressuring them to be more productive and avoid fighting for better conditions and pay. The US does not let Mexico control border-work regarding Guatemala: “In August 2012, approximately 200 US Marines were deployed to the Mexico–Guatemala border under Operation Martillo...a military plan aimed at disrupting cocaine trafficking...US Marines have been granted immunity for property destruction and the death of civilians” (Walker, 2015, p. 93). The US granting the Marines immunity shows an expectation that they would escalate the drug war, causing civilians to fear traffickers more and support prohibitionist policy.

Perhaps the most striking examples of neoliberal recycling in Central America led by elites are prohibitionist anti-gang laws and strategic facades regarding cities.

The anti-gang laws, called Mano Dura (Iron Fist) in El Salvador, Cero Tolerancia (Zero Tolerance) in Honduras and Plan Escoba (Operation Broomsweep) in Guatemala, were implemented in 2003 and 2004. The Salvadoran and Guatemalan laws prohibited signs of gang membership, including tattoos, and applied prison sentences to minors (and adults) who were suspected gang members. The Honduran laws, inspired by mayor Rudy Giuliani of New York City, implemented 30-year prison sentences for gang membership (Rodgers, 2009, p. 967 and Marcy, 2014, p. 22). The results of these laws included rising prison populations, outcry from human rights organizations, and, most strikingly, gangs “toughening their entry requirements, adopting a more conventional look and using heavier weaponry, such as AK-47s and hand grenades” (Marcy, 2014, pp. 22-23). The very policies that had the illusion of stopping gangs made them harder to identify and more violent. Possibly, elites knew this would occur, but also that these results would lead to support for policies that maintain their hegemony.

Dennis Rodgers of the London School of Economics describes how elites have consolidated their exclusive hold on power in Central American cities. He explains that “widespread purposeful processes of spatial segregation...have occurred in Central American cities.” In Nicaragua’s capital Managua, the homes, workplaces, leisure spaces, and airport of the elite are funded by unregulated enterprise or the state, connected by high-speed roads, and protected by private security. As a result “urban violence is now mainly restricted to the city’s slums and poor neighbourhoods, to the extent that the government actually promotes Nicaragua as ‘the safest country in Latin America’” (Rodgers, 2009, pp. 965-966). The strategic facade of safety, marketed for elite tourists, hides the intense fear and suffering many low-income residents of Central America’s cities face. Luis Hernández, a resident of a Managua low-income neighborhood, or barrio, stated in 1997: “People are scared, everybody lives barricaded in their homes because it’s so dangerous . . . . You can get killed for almost anything. . . It’s like this everywhere, in all the poor neighbourhoods” (Rodgers, 2009, p. 958).

Conditions throughout Central America’s low-income communities have become so unbearable that migration from home has become an appealing option. Gang violence in El Salvador’s marginalized neighborhoods has forced residents to flee at higher rates than during the country’s civil war: on average, 61,942 people fled each year between 2000 and 2010 (Goodfriend, 2016). Life-and-death situations are often what is fled: one Salvadoran man left the country after gang members beat up his son, made sexual advances on his daughter, and threatened to kill him if he did not turn his children over to them. People migrate to the USA despite the country’s restrictive immigration policies (Semple, 2016). It is common for residents who stay to support heavy-handed policies on drugs and crime out of fear of gangs: a 2017 study showed that only 28.6% of Costa Ricans and 13.8% of Salvadorans support legalizing cannabis (Mendiburo-Seguel et al., p. 11), and the Mano Dura, Cero Tolerancia, and Plan Escoba policies all had widespread popular backing (Rodgers, 2009, p. 967).

Data collected backs up this picture of illicit activity. Homicide rates in 2018 ranged from 9.6 to 51 per 100,000 people, and were highest in northern Central America (Dalby, 2019). A 2009 World Bank map shows extensive cocaine and cannabis trafficking routes in the region (“Crime and Violence”, 2011, p. 13), but it is important to note that pandillas and maras are local distributors who usually do not run large-scale drug trafficking operations (Rodgers, 2009, p. 958). In fact, Colombian and Mexican cartels arrange deals for moving drugs across Central America (Marcy, 2014, p. 6).

Conclusion

The neoliberal practices of border-work, strategic facades and procedural illusions, and prohibitionism are recycled in Central America to entrench the monopoly on profit and power of elites: these processes result in deep suffering for many residents of Central American low-income communities. Rodgers writes of the firmness of the elites’ hold: “Central American slum-dwellers have in fact lost the war, with most of the region’s current violence best characterized as internecine civil conflicts for survival between the poor inhabitants” (2009, p. 971).

However, alternative imaginings of drug and crime policy in the region could be explored. In Portugal, drug decriminalization led to “dramatic drops in...HIV and hepatitis infection rates, overdose deaths, drug-related crime and incarceration rates” (Ferraia, 2017), but similar policies in Costa Rica struggle due to a failure to address structural socioeconomic inequality and cartel-led drug trafficking (Tierney, 2017). Pandillas in Nicaragua provided support for their communities before heavy-handed policies forced them to focus on profit alone (Rodgers, 2009, p. 969). The input of Central Americans affected by gang violence must be taken into account through community forums and activism: Nevertheless, regulated legalization that takes the drug trade out of the underground, alongside policy such as Ecuador’s that turns gangs into legal cultural organizations provided with social support (Sigal, 2019), may be beneficial to the region. And the voices of progressive, anti-interventionist US politicians give hope that the prohibitionist, profit-over-people drug war might soon come to a close.

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