NARCO STATES IN THE CARIBBEAN.

Analysts warn of Mexican drug cartels’ next target, Caribbean

Posted on January 31, 2012By Carlos SanchezJustice

As international pressure continues to ramp up against Mexican drug cartels, the response by U.S. officials will almost certainly be to

A police officer prepares seized packages of cocaine to be burned in Panama City, Wednesday Jan. 18, 2012. According to police, they destroyed 4,471 kilograms (9,856 pounds) of cocaine, 422 kilograms (930 pounds) of marihuana and 17 kilograms (37 pounds) of heroin, seized nationwide in Dec. 2011 and Jan. 2012. (AP Photo/Arnulfo Franco)

As international pressure continues to ramp up against Mexican drug cartels, the response by U.S. officials will almost certainly be to evaluate and reprise Caribbean drug trafficking routes that were popular in the 1980s, said analysts to a Congressional committee.

“We see this crisis coming. We even have some sense as to when it will arrive,” said William Brownfield, an assistant U.S. Secretary of State in charge of international narcotics and law enforcement affairs.

The crisis is being fueled by Mexican drug cartels who are responding to increased police pressure along their northern border with the United States. But there is also an element of state-supported help as countries antagonistic to the United States, such as Venezuela, work closer with drug cartels, the analysts warned.
These sentiments were underscored during a Dec. 15 hearing in front of a U.S. Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on drug trafficking, by Sen. Robert Menendez, D-NJ, who said there seems to be a lack of urgency as violence continues to grow in the Caribbean basin.
The problem is becoming so dire in the Dominican Republic, Menendez said, that a presidential candidate in that country recently warned that his country is close to becoming “a narco-state.”
“He said that the government is incapable of stopping drug traffickers,” Menendez said.

Analysts with the state department, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), the U.S. Agency for International Development, as well as independent analysts, warned the committee that signs on several fronts suggest that drug cartels are increasingly using Caribbean countries as trans-shipment points for drugs headed to the United States and Europe.

These routes were highly popular during the 1980s when Colombian cartels made Miami and southern Florida hugely popular entry points for illicit cocaine shipments, the analysts said.
“I have observed with great concern the security situation in this region,” said Liliana Ayalde, deputy administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development and a former U.S. ambassador to Paraguay.
“Over the last ten years, there’s been an alarming escalation of homicides in the region,” she said.
In the 1980s law enforcement began choking off maritime trafficking at the same time that Colombian cartels were being dismantled because of international pressure, according to analysts.
Brownfield said this served to shift major drug trafficking activity to Mexico where home-grown cartels used age-old smuggling routes along the porous overland border. But the explosion of violence over the last six years in Mexico has drawn international pressure on the cartels, who are shifting operations further south in neighboring Latin American countries.
He predicted that recent intervention efforts targeting Central America will begin to take hold this year, at which time the cartels are predicted to shift the smuggling routes into the waters of the Caribbean where tiny island nations are vulnerable and not equipped to deal the volume of money and violence that the cartels bring with them.

“I am neither satisfied with the progress being made on the ground nor the news and information I am receiving from the region,” Menendez said. He noted that in the Bahamas, the murder of 104 people last year set a new homicide record for that island nation that had been set only a year earlier.

“But that pales in comparison to Jamaica, which has become the murder capital of the Caribbean,” Menendez said, with more than 1,400 people murdered last year.
Early signs support Brownfield’s prediction.Rodney Benson, an assistant administrator with the DEA, described an operation last July in which the DEA helped the Dominican Republic arrest of a member of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, who had been coordinating cocaine shipments by air from Venezuela to the Dominican Republic.
And while the arrest was counted as a successful operation, Benson said, the Dominican Republic was unprepared for the ensuing violence of reprisal that wracked the country.
Menendez said that despite this spike in violence, there are troubling signs of the drug cartels staying one step ahead of law enforcement. One example is the amount of money the U.S. government is allotting to this fight. While the focus and the funds are on Mexico and Central America, Menendez noted that funding for anti-drug efforts in the Caribbean are actually expected to drop to $73 million from $77 million a year earlier.
“If we don’t pay attention to the Caribbean,” Menendez warned, “we’re going to repeat history.”

This story was reposted from the site shown below and the author is crtedited in the caption above. This article offers well documneted proof of a highly organized sophisticated thrust by Narco Cartels, out of Mexico in Collusion with Colombians and other South American countries and most recently Caribbean islands, like Belize,Venezuela,the Dominican Republic and others as transshipment point for drugs destined for Europe and America.