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The Nicaraguan Firewall: How the Narco Gangs Have Breached It

Nicaraguan military and police leaders insist they've created a "firewall" against the western hemisphere's more than $40 billion drug trade and the ultra-violent narco-gangs pushing in from both the north and the south.

the country is a leader in drug busts and has managed to reduce its homicide rate to the second-lowest in the region behind Costa Rica.

As the sun sinks just below the horizon, Jorge Sandoval strolls across a dusty street. He's a small man in his 50s, who runs volunteer patrols. The neighborhood is poor. The houses are cobbled together out of leftover wood and pieces of metal. Two years ago, Sandoval says, these streets used to be desolate and controlled by gangs. Parallels Nicaragua Follows Its Own Path In Dealing With Drug Traffickers "They would shoot at each other at all hours," Sandoval says. "Suddenly you'd find someone injured, someone innocent, because they just didn't care."

The Dimitrov neighborhood in the capital of Nicaragua used to be one of the most dangerous in the country.

It was so dangerous that its 10 or so square blocks accounted for 20 percent of all the crime of Managua, a city of 1.2 million people.

Alec MacGillis shines a light on US gun trafficking to Central America, making the argument that our loose gun regulations are contributing to these countries’ gang violence problem:

Of the $3.7 billion requested by the administration for dealing with the child migrant crisis, a very small percentage of it, about $295 million, goes to addressing root causes of the violence

There’s been a focus in the US and elsewhere in the region on capturing drug kingpins, but I think a lot of people who have looked at this, given the weakness of institutions, including police and law enforcement, including the judiciary, have said that a better approach is to try to reduce the violence connected with local illegal markets, and focus on providing citizen security to the general population. You can’t abandon the attempt to capture major traffickers, but you cannot do that without providing for safer communities and creating greater resilience at the individual and the community level.

Over the past decade, Trinidad's murder rate has risen nearly 400 percent; last year, the rate in the capital city of Port of Spain rivaled those in Johannesburg and Baghdad. Proliferating gangs, mostly composed of impoverished young men, are behind many of the killings, centered in the dense suburbs of Port of Spain

What has emboldened the gangs and caused the violence? Mostly, drugs. According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Trinidad and Tobago has become a major transshipment point for illegal substances heading north from South America. Traffickers send cocaine and small arms from Venezuela, just 7 miles off the coast of Trinidad, via fast boat. The drugs are then shipped out on container ships, planes, and private yachts.

he country's annual per capita GDP has risen from about $11,000 to $18,800 in the past decade due to strong exports of natural gas and steel. Still, unemployment remains high, and to create jobs, the government spends about $400 million per year on make-work projects. The bulk of this money is ultimately funneled to gang leaders, who administer "grants" and distribute "salaries." Indeed, corruption -- always a problem in the country -- is reaching new heights. According to several security analysts, a damning unofficial study carried out by the government in 2009 suggested that almost 90 percent of police officers were regularly involved in illegal activities. Those pursuits ranged from running and selling drugs, to colluding with gangs by renting out weapons to criminals, to performing extralegal killings.

Human rights workers have criticized the investigation from the start, faulting federal authorities for initially keeping a distance from the case and leaving much of the forensic work to ill-equipped state authorities. It took 10 days for federal authorities to take over the case and begin their investigation, precious time lost, in the view of independent observers.“He reacted late and poorly,” José Miguel Vivanco, director for the Americas for Human Rights Watch, said of Mr. Peña Nieto on Thursday after meeting prosecutors.“The rule of Mexico is impunity,” he said. “It is not a nation of laws.”

the huge effect of the truces on public safety highlights the imbalance of power between the mobs and Central America’s weak states. “People say what good news it is,” says María Silvia Guillén of FESPAD, a think-tank. “But [the gangs] are the ones who will decide at what point people get to live in peace.”

more than 80 percent of the primary flow of the cocaine trafficked to the United States first transited through the Central American corridor in 2012.

Guatemala’s weak public institutions, pervasive corruption, and porous ports and borders to move illicit products, persons, and bulk cash.

Improved law enforcement efforts in Colombia and Mexico, among other factors, led to an increasing volume of precursor chemicals transiting Guatemala.

President Enrique Peña Nieto said Wednesday that he would disclose details of his assets, a day after his wife promised to give up an opulent new home in one of this city’s most expensive neighborhoods.

On Tuesday night, Mexico’s first lady, Angélica Rivera, a former soap opera star, attempted to put to rest suspicions about how she had financed the purchase of her sumptuous home. She said she earned $10 million in 2010, the year her contract with the Mexican television network Televisa ended — more than enough to pay for the property.

Ms. Rivera failed to address a possible conflict of interest at the center of the criticism. She signed a contract to buy the 15,000-square-foot house from a subsidiary of a company that won multimillion-dollar contracts from the State of Mexico, the populous state surrounding the capital, while Mr. Peña Nieto was its governor.

Nicaragua continued to be a major drug transshipment point for South American cocaine flowing to the United States in 2011. Nicaragua‘s limited law enforcement capabilities and sparsely populated regions provide an enabling environment for drug

Drug consumption in Nicaragua rose in 2011, particularly on the Atlantic coast where the transshipment of drugs is highest.

U.S. assistance in Nicaragua is focused on enhancing the abilities of government law enforcement agencies to detect and intercept shipments, detain traffickers, stop the laundering of illegal profits from the drug industry, and support preventative programs to protect youth from drugs and recruitment into gangs.

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Gun crime and gang violence are on a sharp rise among Antigua's young, linked to a global trade in guns and marijuana, crack and other cocaine, a traffic that has put the island and its neighbours at a vital crossroads between the narcotics producers of South America and the eager consumers of the US and Europe. These drugs seep into the population, payment in kind for dealers, or simply an impossible lure at prices that are a fraction of the street prices in the developed world, sometimes as low as US$1 (50p) for a rock of crack cocaine.

Eric Clapton, the guitarist, was so shocked by the effects that crack and other drugs were having on the population that he set up the Crossroads rehab centre in Antigua in 1998.

Kim Martin, the admissions director at Crossroads, says: "Crack cocaine is the number-one substance of abuse for our Antiguan clients, followed by alcohol. It was the influx of crack that caused members of the community to approach Clapton in the first place and it is still very visible, particularly in some parts of the island, which is leading to crime."

The dual-island state serves as a transit point in the international drugs trade and is home to criminal networks operating human trafficking rings.

Antigua and Barbuda was designated by the US State Department in 2013 as being a “Country of Primary Concern” with regards to money laundering. The country’s significant offshore financial sector makes it highly susceptible to the laundering of illicit proceeds from drug trafficking and financial crimes, the State Department noted.

The Royal Antigua and Barbuda Police Force (RABPF) is the primary body responsible for domestic law enforcement and numbers around 600 personnel. It is housed under the Ministry of National Security and Labour.