Drug-trafficking cartels fly cocaine narco jets through Guatemala’s Laguna del Tigre park

LAGUNA DEL TIGRE NATIONAL PARK, Guatemala — The makeshift airstrips are sliced into the jungle, clearings carved out of the oaks and palms wide enough to land jets full of cocaine.

The planes arrive in the middle of the night, their lights off, guided by drones, unsteady under the weight of the drugs. They descend over Mayan ruins, over camps of jaguar researchers and ornithologists, over illegal settlers and ranchers.

The cat-and-mouse game between the United States and the leaders of Latin America’s drug trade has shifted to this wild stretch of Guatemala, one of the most inhospitable landscapes in the Western Hemisphere. Jets can carry more than $100 million worth of cocaine, to be ferried swiftly out of the jungle, through Mexico and on to the United States.

Over the 50-year U.S. drug war, one truth has prevailed: When one trafficking route closes, another emerges to take its place.

Not long ago, cartels moved more drugs in submarines and fishing boats through the Pacific Ocean. U.S. Coast Guard vessels narrowed that route. Cocaine-filled jets once flew mainly to Mexico and Honduras, until those countries developed aerial interdiction teams.

But Guatemala’s northern border remains a no man’s land, a wildlife reserve that has become a criminal playground. This newest route runs through the largest rainforest in Central America, an expanse the size of Delaware that was once the cradle of the Mayan civilization.

Narcotraffickers are burning airstrips into the jungle at Laguna del Tigre National Park, Guatemala, to land planes from South America carrying cocaine bound for the United States.

Laguna del Tigre

National Park

Sources: OpenStreetMap and Google Earth

Meghan Kelly for THE WASHINGTON POSt

Narcotraffickers are burning airstrips into the jungle at Laguna del Tigre National Park, Guatemala, to land planes from South America carrying cocaine bound for the United States.

Laguna del Tigre

National Park

Sources: OpenStreetMap and Google Earth

Meghan Kelly for THE WASHINGTON POSt

Narcotraffickers are burning airstrips into the jungle at Laguna del Tigre National Park, Guatemala, to land planes from South America carrying cocaine bound for the United States.

Laguna del Tigre

National Park

Meghan Kelly for THE WASHINGTON POSt

Sources: OpenStreetMap and Google Earth

Narcotraffickers are burning airstrips into the jungle at Laguna del Tigre National Park, Guatemala, to land planes from South America carrying cocaine bound for the United States.

Laguna del Tigre

National Park

Meghan Kelly for THE WASHINGTON POSt

Sources: OpenStreetMap and Google Earth

Guatemalan security forces found 50 abandoned narco jets in the country last year. Dozens more landed and then flew away, authorities say. Ninety percent of the cocaine now consumed in the United States transits through Guatemala.

The coronavirus pandemic has had a mixed impact on drug trafficking in the Americas. The increased difficulty of moving the product across locked-down borders has crashed the price of coca leaf in South America. But cocaine seizures in the United States have been largely flat.

In this undefended stretch of Guatemala, authorities here say, the planes have kept coming. A slick twin turboprop was found in a clearing in the jungle on June 21. The burned remains of a jet, apparently set on fire by traffickers after the drugs were removed, were found June 19. Another crashed south of the Laguna del Tigre National Park in April, scattering thousands of pounds of cocaine in tightly wrapped bricks throughout the brush.

[The coronavirus has gutted the price of coca. It could reshape the cocaine trade.]

In recent months, the park has been ravaged by more than a dozen large-scale fires, many set by drug traffickers who are burning tracts of jungle to build “illicit landing strips for the transportation of drugs,” President Alejandro Giammattei said in an address to the nation this spring. A team of firefighters was captured in the park this month by a group of armed men.

But even as Guatemalan officials acknowledge the transformation of this protected land into a drug trafficking corridor, its security forces say they are outmatched by the far better resourced cartels. On a flight over Laguna del Tigre earlier this year, a Washington Post journalist counted more than a dozen landing strips across the park — and several jets sitting on them.

Guatemalan soldiers stand on an illegally claimed lot east of the park. The army patrols against illegal settlers and ranchers, who officials say are linked to narcotrafficking.

Soldiers travel in the back of a pickup truck. (Photos by Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

“We are talking about an industry that has enough money to abandon million-dollar planes in the jungle,” Guatemalan Army Col. Juan de la Paz said. “Their resources are infinite, and we are just trying to keep up.”

Many of the jets come from Venezuela. Between 2012 and 2017, cocaine flows through the country rose by 57 percent, according to the U.S. government’s consolidated counterdrug database; the Justice Department this year charged President Nicolás Maduro with narcoterrorism. Still more cocaine comes from Colombia and Ecuador.

“Colombian and Venezuelan drug trafficking organizations often partner with Mexican cartels for significant cocaine shipments,” said Michael Miller, a spokesman for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. “The cocaine shipment is most often destined for Guatemala.”

[New Honduran law targets ‘narco jets’ carrying cocaine from Venezuela]

The Pentagon sent Navy and Coast Guard ships to the Caribbean this year in its largest ever deployment to confront the drug trade there. But Attorney General William P. Barr has acknowledged: “Our pressure has led to an attempt for an air route out of Central America.”

That air route has proved more difficult to block. Enforcement in Guatemala’s remote corners is almost nonexistent and access to Mexico’s porous southern border is unobstructed.

“Guatemalan smuggling groups control a vast array of clandestine airstrips, and they can adjust or redirect landings as needed,” Miller said. “It does not appear that one cartel controls one airstrip.”

The United States, worried about the threat of aerial trafficking, donated six helicopters to Guatemala’s “air interdiction fleet” in 2013. By 2016, they were grounded due to poor maintenance, a State Department inspector general reported. That left Guatemala without the ability to confront the narco jets, even when the United States was tracking them.

The 15,000-square-mile department of Petén is protected by a brigade of 1,200 soldiers with no air support, De La Paz said. By the time soldiers bushwhack through the jungle, the planes have departed or been destroyed.

“It’s an impossible task,” said one soldier, who was not authorized to speak to journalists. “We hear the planes fly in and we just say, ‘There goes another one.’ ”

In one rare case in January, in the village of Las Cruces, just south of the park, Guatemalan soldiers managed to confront the traffickers while they were still unloading their drugs. A shootout ensued. The traffickers had seven vehicles and more than a dozen assault rifles, de la Paz said. They eventually sped off toward Mexico.

No one was arrested. But the incident offered Guatemalan forces a rare view into the operation. The soldiers cautiously approached the plane, a Hawker Siddeley 125, marketed as a “midsized business jet.” It was pristine, with green and blue stripes beneath its wing.

The troops climbed the stairs and found 1,700 individually wrapped kilos — roughly 3,700 pounds — of pure cocaine. It would be worth roughly $160 million in the United States.

The Guatemalan military recovers a jet with 1,700 kilos of drugs in Laguna del Tigre National Park in January. (Guatemala Military)

1,700 kilos of cocaine confiscated from a narco jet in Laguna del Tigre National Park in January is catalogued by Guatemalan authorities. (Guatemalan Justice Department)

Planes arrive in the middle of the night

A joint force of 30 soldiers, police and park rangers set out one morning in February to patrol the outskirts of a village called La Florida.

By 8 a.m., it was almost 100 degrees. The men moved slowly through the tall grass. They weren’t looking for traffickers — they didn’t have the equipment or the mandate. Their mission was to catch illegal ranchers.

But they knew the line between illegal ranching and the drug trade was blurry. The illicit airstrips are built alongside massive ranches carved into the jungle. Drug profits are often laundered through the purchase of cattle sold across the border in Mexico.

“The narcos use the fincas to justify their presence,” de la Paz said.

The unit had been patrolling for less than an hour when they saw a man in a green shirt on horseback, riding on a narrow path in the jungle. The nearest illicit airstrip was just a few miles away.

“Did you see that guy?” one soldier said.

“He took off,” said another.

One soldier tried to take a picture with his phone, but the man soon disappeared from view.

“We’ll send a report to the justice department,” a ranger said.

Asked if he thought the report would prompt any action, the ranger laughed.

“Not a chance.”

About once a week, soldiers and rangers said, they heard drones fly over their jungle base. Then, often in the middle of the night, the planes arrived.

Some appeared to be almost new. Guatemalan officials say pilots are paid up to $500,000 per flight — a wage that appeared to take the risk into account. De la Paz said Guatemalan forces last year recovered the bodies of 10 pilots killed in crashes. One crashed into the getaway vehicle waiting next to the airstrip.

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Cattle graze on a makeshift airstrip in the park.

Guatemalan authorities say narcotraffickers launder drug profits through the sale of cattle raised in the park. (Photos by Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

In Flores, the capital of Petén, the United States helped start Guatemala’s first environmental court. It was meant to pursue ranchers destroying protected land to graze cattle and hunters who trafficked wildlife in the biosphere. But officials quickly came to realize that environmental crimes in Laguna del Tigre were inextricably linked to drug trafficking.

Judge Karla Hernández was held hostage for three days in 2018. She’s been assigned two bodyguards.

In 2018, Hernández sentenced Lester Ovidio Gallegos Mayorga to four years in prison for illegal cattle grazing in Laguna del Tigre. The next year, police charged him with transporting 70 kilos of cocaine through the park in a pickup.

Other cases have exposed links between drug trafficking and influential families.

One ranch in Laguna del Tigre was long registered to Waldemar Lorenzana, a well-known recipient of government contracts, even as he ran one of the country’s largest cocaine trafficking organizations. Extradited to the United States in 2014, he was eventually convicted of drug trafficking and sentenced this year to 23 years in federal prison.

U.S. authorities said Lorenzana’s organization worked with traffickers in Colombia and Mexico to transport cocaine by boat and airplane to El Salvador and Guatemala for distribution in United States. The Justice Department said Lorenzana had “significant ties” to the Sinaloa Cartel, once led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.

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Dozens of airstrips identified by the Guatemalan military remain active, fueling suspicions of government complicity or participation in the trafficking. In some cases, the military has refused to destroy the airstrips until it receives dynamite from the Guatemalan Justice Department.

“Guatemalan forces disabled 16 suspected clandestine airfields in 2019, though many returned to operational use within days or weeks,” the State Department reported this year. The DEA has found that air traffic controllers have been bought off by drug traffickers.

“It’s a combination of official corruption and a lack of institutional capacity,” said Stephen McFarland, a former U.S. ambassador to Guatemala. “There’s money to do more, but there’s not a political will.”

As ambassador from 2008 to 2011, he said, he passed intelligence on drug trafficking targets on to Guatemalan security forces.

“While they made some significant seizures, they would often come back and say, ‘We wanted to, but we didn’t have the fuel. Or ‘We couldn’t reach the naval base commander to get permission.’

“There was never a good answer.”

A makeshift airstrip seen from a small plane.

Abandoned fuel barrels rust along an airstrip.

Police and soldiers destroyed an airstrip that was used by narcotraffickers. (Photos by Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

TOP: A makeshift airstrip seen from a small plane. BOTTOM LEFT: Abandoned fuel barrels rust along an airstrip. BOTTOM RIGHT: Police and soldiers destroyed an airstrip that was used by narcotraffickers. (Photos by Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

Demand for cocaine ‘leaves a trail of environmental wreckage’

Two millennia before Laguna del Tigre came under the control of drug traffickers, it was the cradle of the Mayan civilization, home to a road network that linked hundreds of Mayan cities in an ancient jungle metropolis.

“This was New York City at the time of Jesus Christ,” said Roan McNab, the Guatemala program director for the New York-based Wildlife Conservation Society, as he flew over the jungle. Below him was the Mirador basin, where archaeologists are uncovering signs of one of the world’s most sophisticated pre-modern civilizations. A pyramid swelled in the jungle, larger than the Egyptian pyramid of Giza.

With U.S. funding, McNab and his organization have worked for years to protect the park and its wildlife. One biologist studies the park’s jaguar population. Another incubates eggs of the imperiled scarlet macaw. Another helps train the park’s rangers.

Those rangers have focused on preserving one 143,000-acre tract of the park, about a sixth of its total area, because they don’t have the resources to protect more. Criminal organizations have razed much of the land outside that area. In the last year, McNab said, man-made fires have swept through tracts roughly twice the size of the District of Columbia.

“Demand for cocaine in the Northern Hemisphere leaves a trail of wreckage across the Americas,” McNab said. “The ecological devastation of Laguna del Tigre is just one example. Farther south, other Mesoamerican protected areas face similar challenges.”

The U.S.-funded Rainforest Alliance offers legal forest concessions to communities just east of Laguna del Tigre. That effort is intended in part to restrict the movement of drug traffickers; in 2015, Guatemalan security forces destroyed several illicit landing strips in the area, under pressure from the United States.

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At nearby El Mirador, a towering Mayan ruin deep in the jungle, archaeologist Richard Hansen has hired a 28 private armed guards to fend off traffickers. Much of his funding comes from private donors, including actors Mel Gibson and Morgan Freeman. Sens. James M. Inhofe (R-Okla.), Tom Udall (D-N.M.) and James E. Risch (R-Idaho) introduced a bill last year that would devote $72 million to fund “archaeological research, law enforcement, and sustainable tourism” around the ruins.

Hansen envisions trains full of tourists winding through the jungle to the remote site.

“We have to outsmart the narcos,” he said.

The drug trade has had a devastating environmental impact, a phenomenon Science Magazine dubbed “narco-deforestation.” Laguna del Tigre has lost more than a fifth of its tree cover since 2000.

Rarely have U.S.-funded conservationists worked so dangerously close to some of the world’s most powerful traffickers.

The unarmed park rangers in Laguna del Tigre come face to face with them regularly. A group of 30 men arrived on horseback in one of the rangers’ camps last month and ordered them to stop patrols, McNab said. Rangers have been kidnapped and beaten. Last week, armed men carjacked a park ranger’s government vehicle and left it torched in the brush.

At least 12,000 people live illegally in the park. Many were displaced during the country’s long civil war. Others came in search of land, rare in a country where vast amounts of property are controlled by a small political and economic elite.

Children play in the Paso Caballo community.

The school courtyard at Paso Caballo.

Schoolteacher Rony DuVon, 38, is a leader of the informal Lagunita village. (Photos by Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

TOP: Children play in the Paso Caballo community. BOTTOM LEFT: The school courtyard at Paso Caballo. BOTTOM RIGHT: Schoolteacher Rony DuVon, 38, is a leader of the informal Lagunita village. (Photos by Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

But many end up working the illegal cattle farms of wealthy landowners, many of them linked to the drug trade. Informal settlements inside the park have grown into small towns, with schools and clinics and convenience stores. Many are close to illicit airstrips. But residents insist that they are poor farmhands, not traffickers.

“We see the planes fly over, but we don’t know who they belong to,” said Rony DuVon, 38, a teacher in the settlement of Lagunita. “We are here because we believe as Guatemalans we have a right to live and farm here, and it’s the conservationists who are against our rights.”

The rangers have a different view. They say Lagunita is a cog in the machinery of the park’s criminal network.

McNab said the traffickers have “considerable economic and coercive capabilities.”

“Absent state and civil society support, the area’s landless poor have few options for support aside from the powers active in the park,” he said.

Guatemalan officials say they are getting another helicopter fleet up and running. The president is pleading for foreign help in putting out the fires. McNab’s group is trying to preserve the part of the reserve that remains intact.

McNab thinks often about the Mayan empire. It collapsed in part because it overused the forest’s resources. But after that collapse, the forest slowly returned to life.

“Maybe that’s what happens here again,” McNab said. “The jungle returns to life after mankind is forced to leave.”

Guatemalan soldiers play soccer during downtime in the Guayacan camp in Laguna del Tigre National Park. (Daniele Volpe for The Washington Post)

Photo editing by Chloe Coleman. Copy-edited by Ryan Romano. Design and development by Tyler Remmel.