...the Caribbean routes used to ship cocaine and other drugs in the 1970s and 1980s are the most logical for drug traffickers

'Drug traffic may return to Caribbean'

tribune242 editorial


ALTHOUGH the Bahamas has not been named, a top US State Department official said Tuesday that drug traffickers may return to old Caribbean smuggling routes as law enforcement pressure builds against them in Mexico and Central America.

According to an interview by Curt Anderson of the Associated Press in Miami, William Brownfield, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement, said the Caribbean routes used to ship cocaine and other drugs in the 1970s and 1980s are the most logical for traffickers.

Those routes led most often to South Florida but also to other Southern US states.

During those years the Bahamas was an important transshipment port for the drug cartel, especially Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel, which got a foothold in the Bahamas through Carlos "Joe" Lehder of Norman's Cay notoriety. Norman's Cay became a refuelling base for the last leg of the cartel's journey from Colombia to the US.

Escobar was hunted down and killed by the Colombian police after a long series of battles. Lehder, extradited to the US, is still serving time in an American federal prison.

"I do not see it right now, but simple logic and common sense tells you that you probably are going to see it in the next two or three years," Brownfield said in the AP interview. "They are going to look for alternative routes."

Right now, less than 3 per cent of cocaine and other illegal drugs is smuggled into the US through ocean routes, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration. Traffickers most commonly bring the drugs produced in Colombia, Peru, Bolivia and elsewhere north through Central America, or off its coasts, into Mexico and then over land into the US.

But Brownfield said the cartels are "in the process of being chased out of Mexico" and are beginning to eye Central American countries as an alternative base of operations. And that, he said, would make the Caribbean once again a more attractive option than moving drugs through South America or up the eastern Pacific coast.

Brownfield was in Miami this week for meetings at the US Southern Command headquarters between US ambassadors in Latin America and their counterparts at the State Department in Washington. Among the topics being discussed are regional security plans for both Central America and the Caribbean aimed at disrupting criminal organisations, securing borders and increasing cooperation.

Attacking drug organizations takes a comprehensive approach, said Brownfield, who was previously ambassador to both Colombia and Venezuela.

"You cannot just do eradication, just do interdiction, just do laboratory takedowns ... You must address all aspects of the problem, and we cannot do it alone," he said.

One emerging threat is the increasing use of submarines and semi-submersible vessels to transport large amounts of cocaine up the Central American coastline. The Coast Guard and US Customs and Border Protection earlier this year detected a true submarine in the Caribbean near the Honduras-Nicaragua border that sank but had more than seven tons of cocaine aboard.

"The first ones looked like something kids would put together in the backyard. Now what we are seeing is pretty sophisticated stuff," Brownfield said. "I don't see this yet as a crisis, because we don't see the numbers. But it is their ability to transport anything that should cause us some concern."

November 09, 2011

tribune242 editorial

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