With the wholesale price of marijuana falling – driven in part by decriminalization in sections of the U.S. – Mexican drug farmers are turning away from cannabis and filling their fields with opium poppies.
Park guards and coast guard officials say Costa Rica’s Isla del Coco National Park sits within a known drug-trafficking corridor that stretches from Colombia to Mexico.
Dwindling defense budgets have been a boon to drug trafficking networks in Latin America as U.S. intelligence and interdiction assets in the Caribbean have been pared down, the top U.S. commander responsible for the region said Thursday.
An estimated 86 percent of the cocaine trafficked into the United States passes through Central America, according to the United States State Department’s 2014 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report. The firehose of cocaine passing through the isthmus has led the State Department to name Costa Rica and its Central American neighbors as major drug producing and drug-transit countries.
From the beginning, the U.S. government's decade-long crackdown on abuse of prescription drugs has run an unsettling risk: that arresting doctors and shuttering "pill mills" would inadvertently fuel a new epidemic of heroin use.
Costa Rica's Judicial Investigation Police arrested six suspects Thursday morning for allegedly growing and distributing marijuana and synthetic drugs at high-flying high school parties.
BOGOTÁ, Colombia – The interception in Colombia of a plane carrying almost half a metric ton of coca paste bound for Mexico is a sign Mexican drug cartels are switching from importers to manufacturers, according to Colombian police.
Drug Control Police seized 1,631 lbs. of cocaine hidden under 58 boxes of scrap metal in a truck attempting to leave Costa Rica at the Peñas Blacnas border crossing Thursday evening.
