A Miami Herald editorial this morning warns of a "crisis coming as Caribbean drug-running heats up:"
The fight against drug trafficking is heating up on South Florida’s doorstep. Drugs are coming in our direction again, and Puerto Rico, U.S. territories and the island nations of the Caribbean are once more caught in the middle.
“There’s increasing concern that as the pressure increases in the Central American corridors, the balloon will expand back into the Caribbean zone,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Miami said during a Senate hearing in December.
Echoing that concern, the U.N.’s International Narcotics Control Board last week noted that pressure on drug gangsters in Mexico and Central America is diverting cocaine operations to less difficult routes through the Caribbean.
A report in January observed that Mexican cartels are shifting their smuggling routes back to the Caribbean:
“We see this crisis coming. We even have some sense as to when it will arrive,” said William Brownfield, an assistant U.S. Secretary of State in charge of international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. These routes were highly popular during the 1980s when Colombian cartels made Miami and southern Florida hugely popular entry points for illicit cocaine shipments, the analysts said.
Violence is again exploding in the Caribbean basin:
The problem is becoming so dire in the Dominican Republic, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) said, that a presidential candidate in that country recently warned that his country is close to becoming “a narco-state.” He noted that in the Bahamas, the murder of 104 people last year set a new homicide record for that island nation that had been set only a year earlier. “But that pales in comparison to Jamaica, which has become the murder capital of the Caribbean,” Menendez said, with more than 1,400 people murdered last year. “If we don’t pay attention to the Caribbean,” Menendez warned, “we’re going to repeat history.”