The PoliBlog
Collective


Information
The Collective
ARCHIVES
Monday, January 29, 2024
By Dr. Steven Taylor

Here’s a little geopolitics (or, perhaps, geopolitical economy) via Reuters: Cocaine is king on Nicaragua’s Caribbean coast:

In the past four years, Mora said, his force had seized 11 tons (tonnes) of cocaine and 40 northbound speedboats. There are no estimates of how many managed to complete the trip but as a rule of thumb, narcotics experts say that for every vessel intercepted, at least four get through.

According to the U.S. government’s latest International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, most of the cocaine that ends up in the United States is shipped by speedboats, each capable of carrying 1.5 to 2 tons of cocaine, through the Western Caribbean, a route described as a “natural conduit for illicit drug trafficking organizations.”

The report estimated that several hundred “go-fast vessels” leave the northern Colombian coast each year and added: “A go-fast boat is by far the hardest target to find and collectively they represent our greatest maritime threat.”

The smugglers’ craft of choice is a fiberglass vessel powered by three 250 horsepower motors for a top speed of 70 miles per hour (110 kmh) — faster than the obsolescent patrol boats of Nicaragua’s Atlantic Command.

And not only is the Miskito Coast strategically located for such activities, the poverty in the area means that recruiting workers is quite easy:

What the U.S. sees as a threat, many of the impoverished inhabitants of the area see as an opportunity. Apart from steady incomes for those providing logistics support, many harbor hopes of winning the cocaine equivalent of the lottery — finding 25-kilogram (55-pound) waterproof parcels of cocaine floating in the sea after being dumped by smugglers pursued by the navy or spilled in accidents.

One parcel would be worth around $75,000 here, a huge sum in the poorest region of the second-poorest country in the Western Hemisphere (after Haiti). Half of Nicaragua’s 5.5 million people live on less than a dollar a day.

Rags-to-riches tales involving seaborne cocaine have become part of the local lore on the coast, and the islet of Sandy Bay is spoken of frequently. A Miskito-speaking community of a few hundred people, it has changed from wooden shacks and transistor radios to solid homes built of stone and sprouting satellite dishes.

“Somebody who fishes out a cocaine parcel would see it as a blessing from God, not a reason to alert the authorities,” said Capt. Jose Echeverria, head of the port authority in Bluefields. “Take poverty and joblessness, add easy money and you get a bad mix.”

Sphere: Related Content

Filed under: Latin America, War on Drugs | |

No Comments

  • el
  • pt
  • No comments yet.

    RSS feed for comments on this post.

    The trackback url for this post is: http://poliblogger.com/wp-trackback-poliblog.html?p=11384

    NOTE: I will delete any TrackBacks that do not actually link and refer to this post.

    Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.




    Visitors Since 2/15/03
    Blogroll

    ---


    Advertisement

    Advertisement


    Powered by WordPress