Mexican drug cartels making ugly mark on Central America

DULCE NOMBRE DE MARIA, El Salvador — The Mexican drug gangs rapidly infiltrating Central America call El Salvador "El Caminito," the little pathway.

Once an afterthought among drug traffickers, tiny El Salvador is increasingly becoming a favored shipping route for the expanding narco-business.

The cartels have been abetted by ruthless street gangs with roots in Los Angeles and secretive networks from the country's civil war. And with its use of the U.S. dollar as its official currency, El Salvador is a money-launderer's paradise.

When President Obama arrives in El Salvador on Tuesday for talks with President Mauricio Funes, he will be stepping into a region violently transformed by the growing presence of Mexican drug cartels. The regional struggle with security and organized crime will be a major focus of Obama's discussions.

"Mexican organized crime is a threat in all of Central America," the Salvadoran attorney general, Romeo Barahona, said after meetings with his counterparts in Mexico to share intelligence on the mounting crisis.

Weak institutions and corrupt governments made Central America a fertile field, especially for the ruthless Zetas gang, a Mexican paramilitary organization that has spread throughout the region and into the United States.

The gang has taken charge of much of the Guatemalan countryside, and hundreds of people have been killed there, in Honduras and in El Salvador in the past six months. The government of Guatemala declared a state of emergency Dec. 19 in northern Alta Verapaz province bordering Mexico, and deployed the army in a bid to retake cities lost to the Zetas.

In Honduras, officials this month discovered a cocaine-production laboratory, possibly the first evidence that Mexican traffickers are making their own cocaine after years of Colombian monopoly. Even the placid, tourist-mecca country of Costa Rica is complaining that Mexican traffickers are setting up shop.

And here in El Salvador, authorities stumbled upon what they believe to be a Zeta training camp and recently dug up more than $15 million in drug money, buried in plastic barrels and thought to be but a fraction of hidden cash.

Mexican traffickers in El Salvador have been able to easily graft onto existing criminal organizations, most notably street gangs, which dominate neighborhoods in most Salvadoran cities.

Also, networks built on both sides during El Salvador's long civil war that morphed into smuggling operations have proved a godsend to Mexican cartels.

More than 60 percent of all cocaine that reaches the U.S. now passes through Central America, according to the State Department.

Traffickers using go-fast boats and small submarine-type vessels have long carried their merchandise from Colombia past Central America to northern Guatemala or Mexico. But increasingly squeezed by better sea patrols and after losing shipments to competitors in parts of Guatemala, some gangs have shifted an important part of their transport operation to land routes through Central America, including most recently the path across northern El Salvador.

It is a process of more, smaller shipments that "leapfrog" along the route, law-enforcement officials say. Cargo comes in from Honduras and is off-loaded and repackaged near Dulce Nombre de Maria, in El Salvador's northeastern Chalatenango province, and then trucked across Chalatenango and Santa Ana provinces to Guatemala, virtually unhindered.

And in the realm of unintended consequences, the traffickers are benefiting from the U.S.-financed construction of a major roadway across northern El Salvador. It's part of a $461 million project sponsored by the Millennium Challenge Corp., a U.S. government initiative to spur development in poor countries. The new highway widens to three or four lanes in places as it slices through steep hills that had been arduous to cross.