generalspeaking

Drug Cartels Destroying a Guatemalan National Park

"We are talking about an industry that has enough money to abandon million-dollar planes in the jungle."
"Their resources are infinite, and we are just trying to keep up."
Guatemalan Army Colonel Juan de la Paz

"Colombian and Venezuelan drug trafficking organizations often partner with Mexican cartels for significant cocaine shipments."
"The cocaine shipment is most often destined for Guatemala."
"Guatemalan smuggling groups control a vast array of clandestine airstrips, and they can adjust or redirect landings as needed."
"It does not appear that one cartel controls one airstrip."
Michael Miller, spokesman, U.S.Drug Enforcement Agency

"This [Laguna del Tigre, Mirador Basin] was New York City at the time of Jesus Christ."
"Demand for cocaine in the Northern Hemisphere leaves a trail of wreckage across the Americas. The ecological devastation of Laguna del Tigre is just one example."
"Farther south, other Mesoamerican protected areas face similar challenges."
Roan McNab, Guatemala program director, Wildlife Conservation Society, New York

The Peten jungle is seen in this aerial picture near the border with Belize on Nov. 23, 2007. Credit:   Daniel LeClair /Reuters

Initially, drug cartels used submarines and fishing boats moving through the Pacific Ocean to move their drugs. That route became hazardous as a result of U.S. Coast Guard vessels policing the ocean route. That was also the time when cocaine-loaded jets flew to Mexico and Honduras, no longer feasible since those countries developed their own aerial interdictions. Guatemala's norther border, on the other hand, a no-man's land wildlife reserve, has been transformed with the latest routes now running through Central America's largest rainforest; an area historically the cradle of Mayan civilization.

The country's security forces found fifty abandoned narco jets last year, with dozens more landing, then flying off, according to authorities. Guatemala has become the route-source of ninety percent of the cocaine that Americans crave. Closed borders resulting from the coronavirus pandemic has impacted drug trafficking to a degree, with an increased difficulty in moving product across locked-down borders, impacting the price of coca leaf in South America.

In the Laguna del Tigre National Park of Guatemala, a geographic area largely undefended, planes keep arriving, according to authorities. In a clearing in the jungle a twin turboprop was discovered on June 21. The torched remnants of a jet set on fire by traffickers once the drugs had been removed, discovered on June 19. South of the Laguna del Tigre in April, thousands of pounds of cocaine wrapped in tight bricks were found in the brush, detritus from an April plane crash.

Members of the antidrug squad of Guatemala's Civil National Police, transport at the Air Force base in Guatemala City around a ton of cocaine, seized in Peten, a department on the border with Mexico. AFP PHOTO/Orlando SIERRA (Photo credit   ORLANDO SIERRA/AFP/Getty Images)

Over a dozen large-scale fires have been set by drug traffickers, burning tracts of jungle so they can build "illicit landing strips for the transportation of drugs", as President Alejandro Giammattei put it. A group of armed men captured a team of firefighters in the park this month. While acknowledging the protected land of a National Park was being transformed into a drug trafficking corridor, security forces find themselves mired in a hopeless task.

Invaders in Laguna del Tigre burn the jungle. Photo:Max Radwin/Mongabay

Simply put, the security forces are convinced on the evidence that the criminal drug-trafficking cartels outmatch them in resources, from costly jet planes to technologically advanced armaments. Over a dozen landing strips were counted across the vast area of the National Park, with several jets sitting on their tarmacs, seen on an inspection flight over Laguna del Tigre earlier in the year.

Many of those jets are from Venezuela. Cocaine moving through Guatemala rose by 57 percent between 2012 and 2017, according to the U.S. government's consolidated counterdrug database. Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro was charged by the U.S. Justice Department with narcoterrorism this year, yet nothing stops the cocaine coming from Colombia and Ecuador.

Navy and Coast Guard ships were sent to the Caribbean this year by the Pentagon in a deployment to confront the drug trade. "Our pressure has led to an attempt for an air route out of Central America", as a result, admitted Attorney General William Barr. And it is precisely that air route that has presented the most difficult intervention challenge yet seen in the joint, connected efforts to stall the thriving drug trade.

Firefighter in scorched field, Laguna del Tigre. Photo:Max Radwin/Mongabay.

Its concerns over the threat of aerial trafficking convinced the United States to donate six helicopters to beef up Guatemala's "Air interdiction fleet" in 2013. Three years later the fleet was grounded as a result of poor maintenance, leaving Guatemala unable to confront the narco jets, even while they were being tracked by U.S. intelligence. A brigade of 1,200 soldiers protects the 15,000-square-mile department of Peten, with no air support available to them. Once soldiers manage to bushwhack through the jungle, the planes have long since departed, or have alternately been deliberately destroyed.

"It's an impossible task. We hear the planes fly in and we just say, 'There goes another one'," commented a soldier. Laguna del Tigre was the cradle of the Mayan civilization thousands of years ago where a road network linked hundreds of Mayan cities in a jungle metropolis. Archaeologists with the Wildlife Conservation Society based in New York, are busy uncovering signs of one of the world's most sophisticated ancient civilizations. Where a pyramid larger than the Egyptian pyramid of Giza sits revealed in the jungle.

Mayan ruins of Guatemala