A Drug Smuggler's Paradise
U.S. officials estimate up to three-quarters of the cocaine that enters through the country's southern border passes through Central America, by land or sea.
The corridor has become a smuggler's paradise: under-funded and often corrupt security forces, scant U.S. counter-drug operations, vast stretches of lawless jungle and shoreline, and a compliant population.
In the first of a three-part series, NPR's John Burnett reports that the countries once known as banana republics are fast becoming "cocaine republics."
A U.S. Army CH-47 Chinook helicopter sits on clandestine landing strip in Guatemala's Petén region, the site of a crash-landing by a cocaine-hauling plane from Colombia. U.S. Embassy-Guatemala hide caption