Cocaine Confidential Read Free Page B

northern Mexico. The cocaine is then broken down into smaller loads for smuggling in land vehicles across the US/Mexico border. Sixty-five per cent of cocaine enters the United States through Mexico, and the vast majority of the remainder enters via Florida.
    The infamous Sinaloa and Zetas cartels, operating out of the north of Mexico, have something close to a stranglehold over the international cocaine trade as it passes through their territory. They exert ruthless control while at the same time outsourcing more routine tasks such as transportation, killings and vendettas to smaller local gangs, including the mafia-like families known as Maras. Their dominance, and the epic violence that has accompanied it, is believed to be another indirect result of America’s attacks on Colombian traffickers and their Caribbean air and sea routes. In otherwords, Mexico has been turned into the main hub for South American cocaine through no fault of its own.
    Cocaine traffickers from Colombia and Mexico have now rebuilt and re-established an additional labyrinth of new smuggling routes throughout the Caribbean, the Bahamas island chain and South Florida. They often hire smugglers from Mexico or Central American countries to transport the drug. The traffickers use a variety of smuggling techniques to ensure cocaine gets to those lucrative US markets. These include airdrops in the Bahamas or off the coast of places like Puerto Rico, mid-ocean boat-to-boat transfers, and the commercial shipment of tons of cocaine through the port of Miami.
    Bulk cargo ships are also often used to smuggle cocaine to staging sites in the western Caribbean/Gulf of Mexico area. These vessels are typically 150–250-foot coastal freighters, carrying an average cocaine load of approximately 2.5 tons. Commercial fishing vessels are also used for these smuggling operations. In other sea-lanes with a high volume of recreational traffic, smugglers use pleasure vessels, such as go-fast boats, identical to those used by the local population.
    One recent development has been the use of sophisticated ‘narco-submarines’ to bring cocaine north from Colombia and Peru. Originally, such vessels were viewed as a quirky sideshow in the drug war. But now they’ve become faster, more seaworthy, and capable of carrying bigger loads of drugs than earlier models, according to narcotics enforcement officers in South and Central America.
    Across the Atlantic, increasingly large shipments of cocaine continue to surge through Europe and the former Soviet Union as it emerges as the drug of choice for tens of millions.
    Today cocaine not only generates luxurious houses, expensive cars and large property portfolios for criminals, it also fuels the construction industry, financial groups and other businesses that provide perfect cover for money laundering, which in turn encourages economic power to buy political influence and threaten democratic institutions.
    But who are these shady underworld characters inhabiting the world of
Cocaine Confidential
?
    Read on and you will find out …

PART ONE

FARMERS, PRODUCERS, WHOLESALERS – CENTRAL AMERICA

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    Cocaine’s traditional connections to South America have been well documented, but my research for this book has uncovered an area of Central America that has been secretly developed by Latin American gangsters who are plotting for it to eventually become a major producer of cocaine.
    Central America is already the world’s latest cocaine transit hot-spot: up to 90 per cent of the South American coke bound for the US now passes through the region, predominantly the ‘northern triangle’ of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, before ending up in Mexico. These small, weak republics, many struggling with rocketing murder rates, endemic corruption and the baleful legacy of years of civil war, have been further destabilised as the powerful Mexican cartels have moved into vast amounts of territory