Panama Geography Hides Drug-Runners

Thousands of secluded inlets and small tropical islands along about 1,700 miles of coastline have made Panama a smuggler’s paradise for centuries.

Now some experts suggest that no matter how tough Panama’s government gets, geography could frustrate attempts to control drugs shipments by land, sea and air.

“It’s an impossible coastline to effectively police in the best of circumstances, much less with one Coast Guard cutter,” said one Western analyst in describing Panama’s paltry defense against an army of high-tech drug runners.

Like 16th- and 17th-Century English pirates who saw Panama as a place to stash loot between raids, traffickers use its waters and its jungle-shrouded border with Colombia as a key transshipment point for drugs bound for the United States and Europe.

President Guillermo Endara’s government argues that it is doing all it can to stop traffickers, and that drug seizures are up almost threefold since 1989.

But Endara, complains that a $4-billion foreign debt and other pressing problems inherited from former strongman Manuel Noriega are draining limited funds that could be used for tighter policing.

With only a handful of vehicles, boats and radios, Panamanian drug enforcement officials say they have less than 10% of the technical ability of the drug traffickers.

“There’s a lot of reporting of drug seizures, and we’re very proud of that. But we can’t eliminate it all because we simply don’t have the resources,” said Louis Martinez, an aide to Endara.

Even if Panama were to strengthen its anti-drug units, some analysts say authorities would still be hard pressed to eliminate the country’s traffickers.

“Probably the geography of Panama makes it much more susceptible to drug trafficking and therefore creates a need for a much higher level of technology and hardware than, for example, southern Florida,” said one expert.

“And look how much stuff goes through southern Florida, where they’ve got a tremendous amount of U.S. military capability observing the area.”

The role of the U.S. military in Panama is strictly advisory and U.S. authorities have no authority to interdict drug traffickers there.

Authorities say increased U.S. radar coverage of the Caribbean has made it more risky for planes flying cocaine out of Colombia to land in neighboring countries. So traffickers drop more loads from planes to waiting speedboats.

Panama’s proximity to Colombia and its long Atlantic and Pacific coasts make it one of the safest spots to carry out drops from aircraft, authorities say.

Heavy maritime traffic through the Panama Canal and at the duty-free zone in the Atlantic port city of Colon also provides cover for drug-carrying ships that might appear suspicious in other countries.

Such obstacles, the government says, are not fully understood by critics who blame Panamanian inaction for alleged increased drug flows since the ouster of Noriega, now being tried in Miami on drug charges.

Endara, growing increasingly sensitive to such criticism, recently told reporters that U.S. drug agents were leaking exaggerated reports to the foreign press as part of an “intimidation campaign” against his country.

Most Panamanian and U.S. officials agree that there is no way to know the volume of drugs that passed through the country under Noriega and how much gets through now.

Some critics charge that the seizure of larger cargoes of drugs, increased consumption and declining prices in Panama show that more drugs are getting through.

But after Noriega’s ouster, officials say, most controls over large drug shipments through Panama disappeared, opening the way for small-time free-lancers. While this might lead to more seizures and the appearance of more drugs, they say, it does not necessarily indicate an increase in volume.

Without further U.S. assistance, such as the donation of a radar-equipped Coast Guard cutter in September, Panama will remain at a considerable disadvantage in its battle to control the drug trade, Martinez said.