
Title: Climate Change in Central America: The Drug War Connection
In 2010, a drug trafficking group moved into the heart of Hondurasโ Rรญo Plรกtano Biosphere Reserve. At gunpoint, the gang terrorized indigenous Pech and Miskitu residents into giving up their subsistence lands and ancestral rainforests. Within two years, the narcotraffickers had felled 150 hectares, about 280 football fields, and this destruction continues unabated.
Ecological destruction by narcotics traffickers is hardly unusual; similar dynamics are reported across Latin America. It is particularly widespread in Central America, however. There, it is estimated that cocaine-smuggling โnarcosโ have been directly responsible for 30 percent of all recent forest loss in some countries, up to 60 percent of which has been in protected areas. The associated loss of environmental servicesโlike water and soil protectionโis valued at close to $150 million annually, far more than is budgeted for protected area conservation.
Central America does not have a lot of forest left to lose. Forests in Honduras, Nicaragua, and Guatemala are particularly hard-hit. Most susceptible are the highly biodiverse, broadleaved forests of the Caribbean slopesโthe very carbon-storing forests most critical for mitigating climate change. Their loss, in turn, renders the isthmus far more vulnerable to the impacts of climate change that are already being felt there: drought, diseases, and severe storms. Twenty years ago, when Hurricane Mitch slammed into northern Central America, it was already clear that deforested watersheds greatly intensified the floods and mudslides that killed over 11,000 people. Continued forest loss in the decades since ensures that Central Americaโs urban and rural poor will bear the brunt of climate extremes.
Of course, drug traffickers are not the only forces transforming Central Americaโs biodiverse frontiers. Forestlands are being cleared for the expansion of industrial agriculture, often converted first to cattle pasture, then into rapidly-expanding palm oil plantations. As regional governments increasingly pursue extraction-led economic growth models, forests are also felled for foreign-financed mines and related mega-projects, including port expansion, new highways, and hydroelectric dams.
What is seldom recognized, however, is the extent to which the drug trade itself lubricates and accelerates these other forms of frontier transformation, and the ways in which US-led counternarcotic strategies make the situation worse. In short: the drug war exacerbates Central Americaโs contribution and vulnerability to climate change. Here is how.
Like any logistician, cocaine traffickers seek to move drugs along the shortest routes possible. In the late twentieth century, that meant sending South American cocaine exports northward through the Caribbean or directly into Mexico. But US-supported counternarcotic operationsโparticularly Plan Colombia beginning in 2000 and Mexicoโs war on cartels after 2006โmade those routes increasingly inconvenient. So, traffickers began to route more cocaine through Central America; by 2011, about 80 percent of all the cocaine consumed in the United States was transshipped through the region.
To receive all of the cocaine-laden planes and boats landing in Central America, traffickers need remote spacesโoften protected areas, indigenous territories, and landscapes of smallholder agriculture. Once there, they amass land and destroy forests because it makes economic sense to do so. Not only does it allow traffickers to secure land routes from rivals and otherwise enhance the efficiency of transshipment, but rural land is also a lucrative and convenient way to launder dirty cash. Thatโs because traffickers can buy land in remote rural areas cheap, and they can sell it dear to the many actors, legitimate or otherwise, keen to invest in this new speculative land market.
It almost goes without saying that traffickersโ ability to illegally buy and sell โprotectedโ land, and to do so with impunity, relies on the complicity of state actors at every level. That complicity runs deepโforged decades prior with the help of US covert operatives looking to raise cash to overthrow Nicaraguaโs Sandinista government. The relationship between drug traffickers and Central American states has only deepened since, evidenced by the ongoing willingness of military, police, judges, and politicians to look the other way, for a price. Indeed, so entrenched are these relationships that it can be hard to tell state actors apart from traffickers. Recent US government prosecutions make clear, for example, that politicians in Honduras not only benefit from cocaine traffickersโ largesse, but they participate actively in the trade themselves.
These are the same corrupted and interconnected elites that benefit handsomely from the opportunities created when traffickers make frontiers โopen for businessโโthat is, available to entice domestic and foreign investment in agribusiness, mining, and other big projects, including โclimate-friendlyโ hydroelectric dams. These profit-driven enterprises compound Central Americaโs โgrowth without development.โ In other words, they may spur macro-economic indicators of modest growth, but they can undermine social development by aggravating wealth and income inequality, rural dispossession, unemployment, and declining agricultural productivity.
US taxpayers currently spend billions of dollars per year on the governmentโs multi-agency effort to intercept cocaine shipments that typically land first in Central America. The United States spends millions more to encourage, equip, and train โpartner nationsโ to help with this counternarcotic mission. The stated goal is to make cocaine scarce and expensive in the United States. In reality, it does neither, and never has. In Fiscal Year 2018, for example, counternarcotic forces intercepted only 6 percent of all known cocaine shipments in the Caribbean/Central American transshipment corridor, while cocaine production in Colombia has surged to unprecedented levels.
The real consequences of all that drug war spending are often called โunintended,โ but it is more accurate to describe them as both predictable and perverse. For example, chasing the traffickers who are moving cocaine out of northern South America ensures that they stay perpetually agile, penetrating and destroying ever more forests and rural landscapes in Central America and elsewhere. Additionally, the United Statesโ drug war aid to Central American governments will never be enough to compete with traffickersโ bribes. Thus, the same administrations that swear fealty to the US counternarcotic missionโand therefore receive funding, military training, weapons, and other supportโare simultaneously, predictably, and generously corrupted.
The outcomes are hardly surprising. Rather than seriously tackle corruption or trafficking, several crooked administrations have used the United Statesโ diplomatic support and aid to their military and police to violently repress those who criticize them, and to bolster paramilitary and private security forces who protect stolen lands. Citizens who dare to stand up for forests and who stand in the way of extractive projects and elite land grabs are harassed, imprisoned, and killed. It is often hard to know exactly who is responsible for the abuse and murders of indigenous people, campesinos, and environmentalists, as well as those of the lawyers who represent them and the journalists who cover them. Were the rapes and killings ordered by drug traffickers, police, military, mining consortia, energy companies, or rich landowners? Whoever is orchestrating the brutality, several things are clear: the interests of all these groups are deeply aligned, they operate with near impunity, and the outcome is the same: Central America is one of the deadliest places in the world in which to be an environmental defender.
So, the drug war is contributing, directly and indirectly, to the loss of Central Americaโs forests, with dire climate change consequences. Recognizing this linkage helps to illuminate policy options that might otherwise appear unconnected. A crucial place to start is to support legislative efforts in the United Statesโsuch as the stalled Berta Caceres billโthat would suspend police and military aid to governments guilty of egregious human rights abuses. A complementary approach is to finally and seriously re-assess the basic logics of supply side strategies in the drug war. The billions currently wasted each year in the futile effort to keep cocaine out of Central America can instead go towards non-militarized solutions to fight the effects of drug trafficking there. That includes meaningful multilateral anti-corruption initiatives and programs to fight impunity and (re)build the legal institutions required to investigate and prosecute crimes.
These efforts must also go hand-in-glove with sustained, serious, and multilateral support for indigenous and campesino groupsโ varied and courageous efforts to govern their own lands and territories and to shore up their climate resilience. In Central America, mitigating and adapting to climate change requires protecting and supporting those who are already living and dying in defense of the regionโs lands, rivers, and forests.
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Kendra McSweeney is a professor of geography at Ohio State University who has conducted research on relationships between people and forests in Central America since 1992.
Erik Nielsen is a professor of environmental science and policy at the School of Earth & Sustainability of Northern Arizona University