MANAGUA, NICARAGUA — Central America has become a crucial way station in the billiondollar cocaine business, with traffickers shipping hundreds of tons northward from Colombia along the isthmus and increasingly infiltrating police and government agencies, U.S. and regional sources say.
The recent killings of three Salvadoran legislators in Guatemala underscored the shift, intelligence sources say. The lawmakers were shot and their bodies set ablaze last month, allegedly by a group of Guatemalan policemen working on behalf of Mexican drug traffickers.
All sorts of people have been swept up in the drug trade as the smuggling routes have changed, including impoverished fishermen, small-town mayors, legislators and high-ranking police officials. In years past, the favored route was across the Caribbean to the southeastern United States. Now, with greater Mexican cartel involvement, the cocaine often moves up the coasts of Central America and overland through Mexico.
Although it remains unclear whether the dead Salvadorans had ties to traffickers, other lawmakers from the country have been linked to the trade. Guatemalan officials have said the killings point to widespread infiltration of the country's police force by organized crime.
The four police officers charged in the killings, including the head of Guatemala's organized-crime unit, were later slain in their prison cells, in a stunning raid by armed men who may have entered the facility with the aid of guards and prison officials.
An intelligence official working in the region said the slain police officers worked for a Mexican cartel that ships drugs along the Pacific coast of Central America. The officers were enforcers dedicated to "knocking down" rival traffickers, the source said.
"This is a crime that can best be understood as part of the dynamic that sees drugs flow between Mexico and Colombia," said a second intelligence official, referring to the killing of the legislators. The officials asked not to be named, given the sensitive political nature of the crime -- one of the victims was Eduardo Jose D'Aubuisson, the son of the founder of El Salvador's ruling party.
Although drug trafficking has long been common in remote areas of the region, such as the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua, the growing power of Mexican cartels has increased the importance of Central America as a transshipment point.
