Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

For fifteen years, beginning around 2004, a laboratory on the border of Colombia and Venezuela churned out cocaine at a clip that eventually reached between three hundred and five hundred kilograms per month. The product was 99 percent pure, and it was costly—ten thousand dollars per kilogram. Packages went out regularly by planes, high-speed motorboats, and, on one occasion, a submarine. Some of the routes led to a ranch in Copán, Honduras, near the ruins of a ninth-century Maya acropolis with stone temples and the remnants of two pyramids. From there, traffickers fanned out into Guatemala and Mexico, where the Sinaloa cartel took control of the shipments, eventually smuggling them into the United States. The cocaine was packed in bulky rectangles that looked like bulging white bricks. On each block of tightly wrapped product were the two interlocking initials of its proprietor: “TH.” The letters corresponded to the first and last name of Tony Hernández, a Honduran national congressman and a brother of the president. In the