Old Caribbean Route Regains Popularity With Drug Gangs

WASHINGTON, D.C. CMC – United States officials say an old Caribbean route is regaining popularity with drug gangs from Central and South America.

William Brownfield, the United States Department of State’s senior anti-drugs official, said that 16 percent of cocaine imports into the US came through the Caribbean islands last year.

That is up from 4 percent in 2011, according to the Economist. For European cocaine imports, the proportions are even higher, it said.

“The rising volume of drugs coming through the Caribbean is an example of what drugs wonks call the ‘balloon effect’, the idea that increased pressure on one drug route produces a bulge elsewhere,” said the news magazine.

Until recently, it said the favoured northbound route for cocaine from South America—principally via Venezuela, after Colombia’s interdiction efforts in the 1990s—was by small aircraft to Honduras.

The Economist said planes fly a dogleg path—first north, then west—to avoid Colombian airspace; the drugs then move by land or other means via Central America and Mexico.

Last year, Honduras stepped up its counter-narcotics pressure. Drug flights to Central America dropped by a third and traffickers were pushed east to the Caribbean islands, the Economist said.

“That brings a chunk of the drug trade full circle, back to the 1980s when the likes of Pablo Escobar, a Colombian kingpin, used the islands as their route to market,” it said.

Last month, Brownfield told a group of Caribbean police commissioners that the drug situation in the Caribbean is “likely to get worse before it gets better”.

The Economist said traffickers often work with small packages, moving them in several jumps.

It said some embark directly from the Venezuelan coast; others go overland through sparsely populated rainforest in Guyana and Suriname, where borders are virtually uncontrolled and small aircraft can land on remote roads or interior airstrips.

The busiest route is due north to the Dominican Republic and there are also well-established trails up the eastern Caribbean island chain and westward via Jamaica.

For the next leg of the journey, the Economist said another option is to use drug mules and swallowers of cocaine-filled condoms.

It said a steady stream of yachts and pleasure craft ply the blue waters between the islands; a few cross the Atlantic, where European controls on arriving yachts are lax; and a few sail north.