Global Ganja Report

US authorities report a record flood of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border, a wave that has been escalating since 2011. About 52,000 have arrived since October, about 112% more than the entire prior year, Alejandro Mayorkas, deputy secretary of the Homeland Security Department, said June 20 in a conference call with reporters. Up to 90,000 are expected to come in 2014, according to the White House—more than twice as many as last year, and three times as many as in 2012. President Barack Obama this month directed the Federal Emergency Management Agency to address the "urgent humanitarian situation," and asked Congress for funding. Courts and social-service agencies have been overwhelmed, and guidelines on processing and detention thrown into disarray, Bloomberg reports. "It's been a humanitarian crisis since long before Obama called it that," said Kimi Jackson, director of the South Texas Pro Bono Asylum Representation Project, which aids children in immigration court.  

Central America's rainforests are being destroyed by drug traffickers who cut roads and airstirps on officially protected lands, according to a paper in the journal Science. The phenomenon, called "narco-deforestation," is occurring across large swaths of Guatemala and Honduras, and perhaps elsewhere. Erik Nielsen, an assistant professor in the School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability at Northern Arizona University, said: "Not only are societies being ripped apart, but forests are being ripped apart." He added that cattle ranches are being established on cleared land as fronts to launder drug money.

As the  Organization of American States (OAS) summit opens under tight security in the historic Guatemalan city of Antigua—some 2,000 army and National Police troops deployed—fighting narco-trafficking is certain to top the agenda. Secretary of State John Kerry will be in attendance, with US Drug Czar Gil Kerlikowske—prepared to oppose initiatives to reconsider the "war on drugs," including from Guatemala's otherwise arch-conservative President Otto Pérez Molina. But it remains to be seen if the summit will take up the iconoclastic recommendations of a draft report on drug policy released by the OAS last month. When the ground-breaking report was issued, OAS Secretary-General José Miguel Insulza asserted, "this is not a conclusion but only the beginning of a long-awaited discussion." As the Guatemala summit opened June 3, he reiterated that the report will not be officially adopted by the international body, but that "it will be only a platform for discussion." This equivocation will doubtless be welcome in Washington, given the report's open dissidence from generations of "drug war" dogma.

Authorities in Honduras on Jan. 7 announced the seizure of a gold-plated, jewel-encrusted AK-47 assault rifle, complete with two silver magazines. The rifle, estimated to be worth more than $50,000, turned up in a raid along with other military equipment at a ranch in Choloma, some 300 kilometers from Tegucigalpa, where two security guards were detained. Authorities said the gold-plated rifle had an engraving associated with the Malverde drug gang, which is allegedly in league with Mexico's notorious Zetas. "It's an exclusive design and a fine carving," said National Police chief Leo­nel Sau­ce­da.

Honduran authorities seized 15 tons of illegal drugs buried beneath a clandestine laboratory in the northern department of Yoro, officials said Nov. 29. "According to what the experts say, the drugs found would amount to some 15 tons of cocaine paste or synthetic drugs," Elvin Guzmán, spokesman for the prosecutor's office in the northern city of San Pedro Sula, told reporters. (This is an ambiguous statement, as the proportion of paste to finished cocaine is approximately 2 to 1, according to a DEA analysis.) The drug lab was found in a village lying between the towns of Santa Rita and El Negrito. National Police and army troops are scouring the area for more labs.

The leaders of Mexico, Belize, Honduras and Costa Rica issued a joint statement Nov. 12 calling for a review of anti-drug strategies, after the US states of Colorado and Washington voted to legalize cannabis.  Mexican President Felipe Calderón, after a meeting with Honduran President Porfirio Lobo, Costa Rican President Laura Chinchilla and Belize Prime Minister Dean Barrow, said that it has become necessary to analyze the implications for public policy and health in our nations, and that cannabis legalization by US states is "a paradigm change on the part of those entities in respect to the current international system." The leaders called for the Organization of American States to study the impact of the Colorado and Washington votes, and said the UN General Assembly should hold a special session on the prohibition of drugs by 2015 at the latest. (Al Jazeera, Nov. 13)

Residents of the villages of Ahuas and Patuca, in the remote Miskito Coast of northeast Honduras, took to the streets May 11 to protest a deadly DEA raid, demanding the US agency leave their territory—and burning down four government offices to make their point. In the incident in the pre-dawn hours that morning on the Río Patuca, four were killed—including two pregnant women—and another four wounded when DEA agents and Honduran National Police agents in a US State Department-contracted helicopter piloted by Guatemalan military men fired on a boat they apparently believed was filled with drug traffickers. Local residents—backed up by the mayor of Ahuas municipality (Gracias a Dios department), Lucio Baquedano—say they were humble villagers who were fishing on the river, and had nothing to do with drug trafficking.

On April 18, the US Coast Guard announced the interception of its 30th semi-submersible cocaine-smuggling vessel in less than six years, pointing to the widespread use of "narco-submarines" by traffickrs making their way up the Central American coast from Colombia. The Coast Guard said that two of its cutters, the Decisive and Pea Island, chased down the sub on March 30 in the western Caribbean, crediting collaboration with the Honduran navy. The Coast Guard released a photo of the sub's bow painted with shark's teeth as it disappeared beneath the waves. The crew scuttled the craft before they were taken into custody, sending their load to the bottom of the sea.