PUEBLOS INDÍGENAS U ORIGINARIOS A SER CONSULTADOS

Within days in April 2014, investigators on the island of Puerto Rico intercepted two boats, each with millions of dollars of cocaine stashed onboard. In the first instance, law enforcement uncovered 1,774 kilograms of cocaine; in the second, agents uncovered 1,530 kilograms.108 _{The rising frequency of such interdictions in Puerto Rico has}

attracted national attention, resulting in a New York Times profile recounting one such interception:

With its navigation lights off, the 35-foot speedboat raced north toward Puerto Rico one night this month, its two large engines at full throttle. Above, a Coast Guard helicopter chased it and then let loose a few warning shots. But the boat roared ahead. Then, thwack, the crew on the copter shot out one of [the] engines. By dawn, the frenzied scramble had come to an end and 1,280 kilograms of cocaine—worth about $37 million on the street—were in federal hands, much of it scooped from the

Caribbean Sea, where the smugglers had tossed the bales.109

Dramatic scenes such as this are a staple of life in counter-narcotics; hardly a week passes without one agency announcing a significant arrest or interdiction. And such are increasingly familiar sights on American soil.

The jewel in the Caribbean trafficking crown is Puerto Rico. The reason is readily apparent; “once cocaine successfully reaches Puerto Rico, it has reached the U.S.

homeland.”110 Yet, Puerto Rico is only one stop on a long journey. Traditionally, the island of Hispaniola has served as a midway point in this trip. In 2013 SOUTHCOM Commander Kelly noted an increase of three percent (to thirty-two metric tons) of known cocaine passing through the island.111 Haiti, on the western end of Hispaniola, is an obvious target because of its endemic struggle with inadequate and corrupt

governance.112 _{Yet, it is the island’s larger eastern state, the Dominican Republic, which}

may be the Caribbean’s largest island transshipment hub. As the “first point of contact for Puerto Rican operators,” the Dominican Republic plays a central role in the “US/New York/Miami/Puerto Rico/Dominican Republic axis” that moves narcotics throughout the transit zone.113 In 2013, the U.S. military predicted that a full six percent of all U.S.-

bound cocaine would transit through the Dominican Republic.114 That is nearly half of all the cocaine passing through the Central and Eastern Caribbean (around fourteen percent of total interdictions in 2013),115 indicating that a plurality (perhaps even a majority) of cocaine trafficked via Caribbean islands passes between the Hispaniola–Puerto Rico corridor.

Dominicans make up a considerable portion of the immigrant population on the East Coast of the United States, particularly in New York. The number of Dominican immigrants in New York is so large that “Dominicans have created truly binational societies between the US and the Dominican Republic.”116 _{Better standards of living in} the United States also mean that New York-based Dominicans contribute heavily to the Dominican economy through remittances. As David Kilcullen explored in Out of the Mountains, remittance networks are one of the many ways communities remain

interconnected (a ‘megatrend’) with the wider world.117 Kilcullen demonstrates this effect through Jamaican posses, which extort Jamaica’s massive remittance system to fund illicit ventures and their rule of garrison districts.118 International ties like remittances also contribute to trafficking, concealing illicit flows embedded within licit traffic. In much the same way, the heavy exchange of remittances, people, and goods between Dominican binational communities forms the basis for many Dominican smuggling routes. And this fundamental infrastructure of smuggling is a commodity in its own right. Such networks are by nature highly adaptable and can be easily co-opted by other actors or for the transport of alternative products. Thus, the existence of Dominican smugglers operating between the Caribbean and the United States has attracted attention from more than just law enforcement. The Drug Enforcement Administration believes that

“Colombians are directly organising groups and routes in the Dominican Republic”119 in an effort to capitalize on this preexisting infrastructure. Whether organized by external forces or internally connected by ethnic ties, the centrality of the Dominican–Puerto Rican drug route now pervades Dominican language and culture. Dominican immigrants living in the United States are sometimes called “Dominicanyorks and are resented in the Dominican Republic, in major part because they have been stereotyped as being drug dealers.”120

Trends rarely persist in the cat-and-mouse game of narcotics smuggling. As Puerto Rico grows as an attractive destination for Caribbean smuggling operations, efforts to evade detection and simplify shipment routes have resulted in increased

attempts to bypass Hispaniola entirely.121 According to a Puerto Rico-based Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent, Angel Melendez, “cocaine is increasingly

trafficked in larger amounts directly north from Venezuela on boats that refuel at sea during the roughly two-day voyage.”122 With the stronghold the Dominican Republic has on transshipment, and the strategic placement of ethnic and familial ties in New York, it is unlikely that Hispaniola will disappear from the trade. Nevertheless, as history proves, the drug market is highly adaptable. While squeezing the balloon at one end (i.e. the Dominican Republic) may decrease cocaine traffic through the island, experience suggests that the excess ‘air’ will simply find a place elsewhere.

One such ‘elsewhere’ is Jamaica, which originally made its mark in drug trafficking through marijuana. Alongside Belize (and a few smaller islands), Jamaica grows and exports marijuana for regional consumption, mostly in the Bahamas, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Eastern Caribbean.123 Inevitably, with the dramatic rise in

Framing Littoral Maritime Security Through the Lens of the Broken Windows Theory

sale price to American consumers, Jamaican marijuana eventually made its way into the United States as well. Jamaica remains the largest Caribbean supplier of marijuana to the United States.124 Yet, as we noted with Dominican smuggling networks, the infrastructure of trafficking is easily co-opted, and illicit marijuana distribution provided an avenue for more expansive smuggling operations. A similar trajectory took place in St. Kitts and Nevis. There, marijuana production attracted smugglers who sought to co-opt “the clandestine links already established by the locals”125 to develop alternative cocaine trafficking routes. Some Jamaicans, especially those who make their living on the coast, are made uneasy by the prospect of similar infiltration migrating into their towns:

Anxiety is expressed by a few residents of the tiny fishing village of Forum, on Jamaica’s southern coast, where the main road leads past rickety wooden shacks to a rocky shoreline lined with small boats. ‘If the drugs take over, this place will never be the same. It will be bad, bad,’ fisherman Oneal Burke said as he scaled fresh red snapper.126

And in much of Jamaica, that anxiety has long since been validated. The central

Caribbean region has reemerged as a route of favor for traffickers,127 and Jamaica appears to play a significant role in that nexus. The scene along parts of Jamaica’s southern coast already threatens hamlets like Burke’s:

Assault rifles at the ready, police in a speedboat scan the coastline as they slice through the slate-gray water, aware that the rocky shorelines and fishing villages that line parts of southern Jamaica are not always very sleepy these days.128

In the first half of 2013, cocaine seizures in Jamaica doubled over the previous year.129 Yet, that doubled figure only came to 354 kilograms,130 paltry when compared to individual hauls of over 1,000 kilograms in Puerto Rico and elsewhere. Thus, while Jamaica is widely suspected of being an increasingly popular transshipment point for northward bound cocaine, it does not rank highly on the list of Caribbean seizures by volume.131 _{The U.S. government nevertheless} maintains that Jamaica is a “major drug-transit country.”132 While interdiction rates lag, tight-knit island communities also exhibit prescient concerns. The corrosive impact of the trade has made itself felt throughout the social fabric of the country, as expressed by the fishermen of Forum. The national security minister, in a speech to the Jamaican parliament a decade earlier in 2002, stated “the illegal drug trade has become the taproot for crime and violence in our country today.”133 _{While poor interdiction numbers offer little empirical support} for claims of Jamaica’s rise in the drug trade, sensitive popular sentiments such as these do. Drug abuse serves as yet another indirect indicator of drug trafficking, and only serves to fuel social tension. Payment in kind, instead of in cash, is a common financing alternative for drug networks. This invariably breeds drug addiction growth within communities, and Jamaica is one such victim of this phenomenon. The country now “harbors thriving cocaine and marijuana markets,” which are still further evidence of the island’s heavy use as a transshipment

point.134 Yet, while the Eastern and Central Caribbean may be growing in popularity among criminal organizations, these routes still pale in comparison to the sheer size of the trade along the Western Caribbean littoral.

According to Vice Admiral Charles Michel, “The Mexico/Central American corridor, which includes the waters of the Eastern Pacific and the Western Caribbean, is the primary threat vector toward the United States, accounting for more than 90 percent of total documented cocaine movement.”135 Eighty percent of this traffic makes first landfall in Central America, with the remainder heading directly for Mexico.136 About thirty-five percent of all outward-bound cocaine makes landfall in Honduras alone.137

Moving primarily in go-fast boats—“open hulled boats anywhere from 20 to 50 feet in length with one to four powerful outboard engines”—traffickers move as much as three and a half metric tons of cocaine as they ferry between Honduras (principally) and Colombia.138 Of the 568 go-fast events documented by JIATF-South’s Consolidated Counter Drug Database in 2011—which carried 490 metric tons of cocaine—ninety-four percent “were along the Central American isthmus into Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.”139 Increasingly, narco submarines are also being used, and the DEA estimates as much as thirty percent of the maritime movement of drugs in this corridor is now undertaken by these vessels.140

This traffic, between South America and Central America, is the primary instance of maritime conveyance for most cocaine exiting the source zone. Here, between Central America and Colombia and Venezuela, eighty percent of U.S.-bound cocaine first moves by water.141 _{Once in Central America, much of the onward smuggling takes place}

overland. Of those shipments that do progress on water, many embark along the Western Caribbean shoreline, using the Bay Islands as a point of departure.142 The Bay Islands are within reach of the small Colombian islands of San Andrés and Providencia, and the modern inhabitants of the island trace their lineage to English-speaking immigrants from Belize, Jamaica, and other British Caribbean possessions.143 Thus, Bay Islanders

frequently share ethnic and economic similarities with English-speaking Caribbean communities across the Basin, as well as a shared history of “small-scale smuggling.”144

The geographical position at the crossroads of Central America, South America, the Western Caribbean, and Mexico, alongside the historical and linguistic ties to varying parts of the Basin, all converge to make Honduras and its islands a predictable victim of the narcotics trade.

The United States regards all seven of the Central American states—Belize, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama—as “major drug transit countries.”145 And while they persist as actors in the trade, their individual roles are constantly in flux. As traffickers diversify their product lines to include designer drugs like methamphetamine, the littoral states of Central America are now playing a greater role in the trafficking of precursor chemicals. Multiple tons have been seized in Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras.146 Given the lack of climate and soil requirements for the production of synthetic drugs, the passage of precursor chemicals through Central America and the Caribbean may portend a geographical expansion of methamphetamine and ecstasy production.147 In Guatemala, this production is already an issue of increasing significance.*148

Framing Littoral Maritime Security Through the Lens of the Broken Windows Theory

2.4 Summary

In the words of former Foreign Policy editor Moises Naim, “borders are a

trafficker’s best friend and an enormous headache for those fighting him. This asymmetry is not new, but it has become more acute.”149 The capacity to transfer an illicit product between jurisdictions is a commodity in its own right. The infrastructure and networks required to facilitate this kind of movement are immense, clandestine in character, and by nature resistant to the efforts of single actors, even large ones. Even the myriad

international partnerships in the Caribbean struggle to overcome the fundamental obstacle of international borders. Yet, the single greatest impediment to combatting narcotics trafficking is the perception that simply catching enough ‘bad guys,’ or interdicting enough cocaine, will solve the problem.* Even in instances of high confidence

intelligence, the Commandant of the Coast Guard concedes, “there aren’t enough ships to catch them all…We’re giving 60 percent of what we know, literally, a free pass.”150 This pertains despite the fact that the war on drugs represents “the largest deployment of money, technology, and personnel that humankind has ever devoted to stopping drugs from moving across borders,”151 costing the United States an estimated $200 billion annually in direct healthcare and enforcement costs related to cocaine alone.152 _{Given the}

scale of the narcotics trade (the DEA estimates $60 billion in illicit proceeds are

laundered through the Caribbean annually),153 even frequent high-quantity interdictions have done little to slow the movement of drugs worldwide. All this suggests that the issue of narcotics trafficking is not one to be solved by sheer scale of investment. The value of drugs entering the United States is simply too high for the U.S. to impart a meaningful enough penalty to deter trafficking.

Since the launch of the war on drugs, the United States has constructed an immensely expensive apparatus devoted to counter-drug operations. At the federal level alone, the Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Patrol, the Marshals Services, the Secret Service, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Coast Guard, and countless other national agencies are funded for counter-drug missions at an estimated price of twenty billion dollars annually.154 Yet, despite the colossal size of the counter-drug apparatus, the task of detection and interdiction is exponentially larger. To be sure, there have been a number of successes over the years. Aid money to Colombia helped decapitate the leadership of the Medellin and Cali cartels,155 which helped dismantle large portions of their organizations. Weekly, news reports relay daring arrests and high-profile corruption charges. Yet, such successes come with little reward. Even when transnational organized crime was structured in a more hierarchical format, the death of a kingpin like Pablo Escobar had virtually no impact on cocaine production and distribution.156 _{Later, arrests of top leadership of both}

the Arellano Felix criminal organization and the Gulf Cartel in the early 2000s were similarly met by imperceptible changes in gross narcotics trafficking.157 More

* _{This is in the mold of midcentury American policing, profiled in Chapter One. This strategy of policing}

focuses on catching criminals in the act and responding quickly (via 911 call centers) to crimes in commission. Yet, in both policing and drug interdiction, police rarely respond quickly enough to catch a crime in commission. Instead, they remain apart from the communities they are devoted to serving, over time becoming mistrusted and perhaps even adversarial.

significantly, decapitation of cartels and a focus on interdictions ignore important changes in the structure of trafficking. As we explored above, Colombian organizations began losing dominance when they enabled Mexican TCOs to act as wholesalers. Today, that process has continued to devolve the narcotics trade. Crossing borders adds the greatest value to cocaine as it moves, shifting power and earnings to the “middle of the distribution chain, to the points where the greatest opportunities exist for high-value cross-border transactions, diversification, and strategic partnerships.”158 Opportunistic middlemen constitute networks of shared smuggling infrastructure moving goods in shifting patterns shaped by the demands of the market. The arrest of a distant kingpin in Mexico, or the interdiction of a small shipment in Jamaica, means relatively little to a facilitator in the Dominican Republic or Honduras.

It is not surprising, therefore, that counter-narcotics operations have met limited success, despite being the signature American maritime security task in the Caribbean. As we have seen, the reasons for this failure are born out of two significant misperceptions. First, “we still speak of drug ‘cartels,’ but the drug business today has largely dissolved the heavy organized crime-like operations of the past and works in more nimble, less traceable ways.”159 The perception of transnational organized crime as corporately hierarchical instead of fluidly franchised produces flawed strategies, most notably institutional decapitation. Yet, as we explored in Chapter One, hybrid threats in the modern age are frequently characterized by decentralized actors operating in formations more akin to swarms than coordinated groups. Decapitation of senior leadership makes little impact on the semi-autonomous middlemen and small-scale actors who carry out the drug trade. In the Dominican Republic, for example, in the “absence of a mafia controlled by one or even a few capos…the state fights a Hydra of decentralised and localised gangs without hierarchy or enduring central control.”160 Second, narcotics trafficking is not a conventional security issue. It is too extensive for the Coast Guard to handle on its own, and seen as too unconventional for the Navy to address with any enthusiasm (see Chapter One). JIATF-South’s mission is to deny traffickers the use of over six million square miles of sea and airspace.161 _{Despite accounting for over half of all drug seizures by U.S.}

authorities,162 the Coast Guard (alongside the Navy, CBP, DEA, and others in the Task Force) is fighting a losing battle. With the shifting structure and focus of the Navy, this effort will only become more difficult. The answer, consequently, comes not from budgets or force deployments but—as we explored in Chapter Two—in how we frame the problem.