U.S. covert wars seeded gangs that now supply its drug markets

Evidence

These refugees typically ended up in the poor neighborhoods of cities like Los Angeles. Once there, many impoverished boys and young men (and, to a lesser extent, girls and young women) found themselves joining U.S.-born-and-bred gangs. In addition to terrorizing U.S. neighborhoods, these refugee gang members were often arrested and deported back to their home countries, where they soon established new branches of their U.S.-based gangs. In turn, these gangs became centrally involved in the growth in drug trafficking in Central America—which the Contras helped kick-start—as drug traffickers took advantage of the region’s poverty and instability to create a new transshipment hub between South American producers and North American points of sale. The main result of the U.S. drug war has been merely to shift transportation routes while increasing violence and doing little to affect consumption. Squeezing trafficking in one place has created a “balloon effect,” pushing the trade from the Caribbean to Honduras and other parts of Central America. Today, an estimated 90 percent of the cocaine shipped from Colombia and Venezuela to the United States goes through Central America, with more than one third of that total going through Honduras. — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 313

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains the ‘balloon effect’ of drug-war enforcement pushing trafficking routes rather than reducing trade.
• QUESTION: The deportation dynamic (U.S. gangs transplanted to Central America via deportation) is a powerful, specific mechanism worth tracing further in MS-13 reporting.
• XREF: Echoes the argumentative structure of ‘blowback’ claims in earlier chapters and connects to DREAMer/migration debates and the drug-war-policy literature. — connects to: Drug-transit wealth funds armed gangs capable of eroding democracy
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — David Vine, Base Nation_ How U.S. Military Bases…, 313