Disposable Air Travel

Lost in the argument over immigration is a question that Bill Maher asked to Univision anchorman Jorge Ramos last week on Real Time. Why is there so little opportunity for work back home? Ramos didn't have an answer to it, and I don't think I've ever heard a good explanation of why so many people from Mexico and Central America lack opportunity at home. But I think this article on the efforts to combat cocaine smuggling in Guatemala may have some of the answers.

Huddled together aboard two vintage tanks, 40 soldiers plow through dense jungle on a four-hour journey into a little-known battlefield of the drug war. Their mission, here in Guatemala's wild north: to blow up dozens of clandestine airstrips used by planes laden with Colombian cocaine.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates 70 percent of the cocaine that ends up in the United States passes through Central America.

It's hard to estimate exactly how much revenue is generated in Guatemala - as drug shipments tend to change hands several times along its journey into the United States - each stop raising the price more and more. But what's very clear is that the profits were high enough so that the country's top anti-drug officials were arrested in November for using an anti-drug conference in Washington as a way to figure out how to better smuggle drugs into the U.S. Here's how it's done today:

It's an efficient operation, say army officials in Guatemala's Interinstitutional Northern Task Force; a crew of 20 to 30 traffickers marks each airstrip with lights. The pilot is whisked out of the plane, along with any revealing flight documents, is ferried away toward Guatemala City, and flies back to Colombia on false papers.

Meanwhile the cocaine is loaded onto four-wheel-drive trucks that race to the nearest usable road, where other trucks wait to drive the load across the Mexican border, a half-hour away.

It's too risky to fly the plane back, so it's set on fire to destroy evidence - a small price to pay against the millions made with each shipment. The entire operation takes a half-hour at most, officials say.

So, in a poor country where many of America's illegal immigrants hail from, the drug smugglers are making enough money so that airplanes are as expendable as Post-it notes. Is it any wonder that the government tries to get in on that action? And should anyone be surprised that when we decide to crack down on the drug trade by just destroying the infrastructure and resources that exist as a result of this trade, that the opportunity for real work in a place like Guatemala dwindles? Where would you go?

"There is one airstrip that has 31 burned-out airplanes," said Col. Mark Wilkins, the senior U.S. military official based in Guatemala. "We thought the situation was bad, but statistics like that make us reflect on just how well established the drug traffickers are in Peten."

And it makes me wonder what opportunities would exist for the average Guatemalan if they still had 31 functioning airplanes and runways without craters in them.