Bahamas
The Bahamas served as a refueling stop for cocaine flights moving from South America to the eastern United States, with drug cartels establishing island bases for their smuggling operations.
The Bahamas served as a refueling stop for cocaine flights moving from South America to the eastern United States, with drug cartels establishing island bases for their smuggling operations. The island nation's location between Colombia and Florida made it a natural waypoint on the Caribbean drug corridor.1
Cartel Operations
Pablo Escobar's associate Carlos Lehder set up shop in the Bahamas, buying an island where drug planes coming out of Colombia could land, refuel, and wait for the right moment to fly into the United States. A 1990 DEA report stated that the Blandón-Meneses ring operated internationally "from Colombia and Bolivia, through the Bahamas, Costa Rica, or Nicaragua to the United States." Noriega's pilots flew drugs along two routes: one through Mexico for the West Coast market, and the other through the Bahamas for the East Coast's cocaine buyers.2
Sources
Hidden connections 1
Entities named in this page's prose without an explicit wikilink — surfaced by scanning for known titles and aliases.
Local network
Bahamas's direct connections. Click any node to navigate, drag to pan, scroll (or pinch) to zoom. + 2‑hop expands the neighborhood one level further.