Lush Jungle, mayan ruins and narco Jets full of cocaine
The makeshift airstrips are sliced into the jungle, clearings carved out of the oaks and palms wide enough to land jets full of cocaine.
The planes arrive in the middle of the night, their lights off, guided by drones, unsteady under the weight of the drugs. They descend over Mayan ruins, over camps of jaguar researchers and ornithologists, over illegal settlers and ranchers.
The cat-and-mouse game between the united States and the leaders of Latin America’s drug trade has shifted to this wild stretch of Guatemala, one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the Western Hemisphere. Jets can carry more than us$100 million worth of cocaine, to be ferried swiftly out of the jungle, through Mexico and on to the united States.
Over the 50-year u.s. drug war, one truth has prevailed: When one trafficking route closes, another emerges to take its place.
Not long ago, cartels moved more drugs in submarines and fishing boats through the Pacific Ocean. u.s. Coast Guard vessels narrowed that route. Cocaine-filled jets once flew mainly to Mexico and Honduras, until those countries developed aerial interdiction teams.
But Guatemala’s northern border remains a no man’s land, a wildlife reserve that has become a criminal playground. This newest route runs through the largest rainforest in Central America, an expanse the size of delaware that was once the cradle of Mayan civilization.
Guatemalan security forces last year found 50 abandoned narco jets in the country. dozens more landed and then flew away, authorities say. Ninety per cent of the cocaine now consumed in the united States transits through Guatemala.
The coronavirus pandemic has had a mixed impact on drug trafficking in the Americas. The increased difficulty of moving the product across locked-down borders has crashed the price of coca leaf in South America. But cocaine seizures in the united States have been largely flat.
In this undefended stretch of Guatemala, authorities here say, the planes have kept coming. A slick twin turboprop was found in a clearing in the jungle on June 21. The burned remains of a jet, apparently set on fire by traffickers after the drugs were removed, were found June 19. Another crashed south of the Laguna del Tigre National Park in April, scattering thousands of pounds of cocaine in tightly wrapped bricks throughout the brush.
In recent months, the park has been ravaged by more than a dozen largescale fires, many set by drug traffickers who are burning tracts of jungle to build “illicit landing strips for the transportation of drugs,” President Alejandro Giammattei said in an address to the nation this spring. A team of firefighters was captured in the park this month by a group of armed men.
But even as Guatemalan officials acknowledge the transformation of this protected land into a drug trafficking corridor, its security forces say they are outmatched by the far better resourced cartels. On a flight over Laguna del Tigre earlier this year, a Washington Post journalist counted more than a dozen landing strips across the park — and several jets sitting on them.
“We are talking about an industry that has enough money to abandon million-dollar planes in the jungle,” Guatemalan Army Col. Juan de la Paz said. “Their resources are infinite, and we are just trying to keep up.”
Many of the jets come from Venezuela. Between 2012 and 2017, cocaine moving through the country rose by 57 per cent, according to the u.s. government’s consolidated counterdrug database; the Justice department this year charged President Nicolás Maduro with narcoterrorism. Still more cocaine comes from Colombia and ecuador.
“Colombian and Venezuelan drug trafficking organizations often partner with Mexican cartels for significant cocaine shipments,” said Michael Miller, a spokesman for the u.s. drug enforcement Agency. “The cocaine shipment is most often destined for Guatemala.”
The Pentagon sent Navy and Coast Guard ships to the Caribbean this year in its largest ever deployment to confront the drug trade there. But Attorney General William Barr has acknowledged: “Our pressure has led to an attempt for an air route out of Central America.”
That air route has proved more difficult to block.
“Guatemalan smuggling groups control a vast array of clandestine airstrips, and they can adjust or redirect landings as needed,” Miller said. “It does not appear that one cartel controls one airstrip.”
The united States, worried about the threat of aerial trafficking, donated six helicopters to Guatemala’s “air interdiction fleet” in 2013. By 2016, they were grounded due to poor maintenance, a State department inspector general reported. That left
Guatemala without the ability to confront the narco jets, even when the united States was tracking them.
The 15,000-square-mile department of Petén is protected by a brigade of 1,200 soldiers with no air support, de La Paz said. By the time soldiers bushwhack through the jungle, the planes have departed or been destroyed.
“It’s an impossible task,” said one soldier, who was not authorized to speak to journalists. “We hear the planes fly in and we just say, ‘There goes another one.’ “
Two millennia before Laguna del Tigre came under the control of drug traffickers, it was the cradle of the Mayan civilization, home to a road network that linked hundreds of Mayan cities in a jungle metropolis.
“This was New york City at the time of Jesus Christ,” said Roan Mcnab, the Guatemala program director for the New york-based Wildlife Conservation Society, as he flew over the jungle. Below him was the Mirador basin, where archaeologists are uncovering signs of one of the world’s most sophisticated pre-modern civilizations. A pyramid swelled in the jungle, larger than the egyptian pyramid of Giza.
With u.s. funding, Mcnab and his organization have worked for years to protect the park and its wildlife. One biologist studies the park’s jaguar population. Another incubates eggs of the imperilled scarlet macaw. Another helps train the park’s rangers.
Those rangers have focused on preserving one 143,000-acre tract of the park, about a sixth of its total area, because they don’t have the resources to protect more. Criminal organizations have razed much of the land outside that area.
“demand for cocaine in the Northern Hemisphere leaves a trail of wreckage across the Americas,” Mcnab said. “The ecological devastation of Laguna del Tigre is just one example. Farther south, other Mesoamerican protected areas face similar challenges.”
At nearby el Mirador, a towering Mayan ruin deep in the jungle, archaeologist Richard Hansen has hired a 28 private armed guards to fend off traffickers. Much of his funding comes from private donors, including actors Mel Gibson and Morgan Freeman. u.s. Senators James Inhofe, Tom udall and James Risch introduced a bill last year that would devote us$72 million to fund “archaeological research, law enforcement, and sustainable tourism” around the ruins.
Hansen envisions trains full of tourists winding through the jungle to the remote site.
“We have to outsmart the narcos,” he said.
The drug trade has had a devastating environmental impact, a phenomenon Science Magazine dubbed “narco-deforestation.” Laguna del Tigre has lost more than a fifth of its tree cover since 2000.
Mcnab thinks often about the Mayan empire. It collapsed in part because it overused the forest’s resources. After that collapse, the forest slowly returned to life.
“Maybe that’s what happens here again,” Mcnab said. “The jungle returns to life after mankind is forced to leave.”