Stopping drug cartels key issue in El Salvador election

• Drug trafficking has skyrocketed in Central America%2C bringing violence and corruption with it
• Presidential election in El Salvador could determine how hard the government fights to stop cartels
• The U.S. government has poured more money into training police and judicial officials in the region

MIAMI — When Salvadorans go to the polls on Sunday to choose their next president, they will also be betting on which candidate can put a stop to the flood of drugs flowing through their country and the region.

The United States has been helping Latin American governments fight a drug war on two fronts. It is trying to eradicate drug production at its source in South American countries like Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, while trying to slow down drug shipments headed through Mexico's northern border.

That has left many drug cartels redirecting their shipments through Central America, bringing with them a staggering level of violence and political corruption. While the United States used to focus primarily on the political ideologies of those countries - whether they're aligning with anti-American governments in Cuba and Venezuela, for example - the increased influence of cartels has changed that way of thinking.

"The amount of drug money that flows through Central America is about seven times more than what all the Central American countries combined spend on policing and on defense," said Marc Wachtenheim, an international consultant who was in El Salvador last month to observe the first round of their presidential elections. "A lot of money combined with fragile institutions is a recipe for narcos and gangs influencing politics in these countries."

Drug cartels bribing political, police and judicial officials is nothing new. But Wachtenheim said the increased volume, combined with cartels starting to run their own candidates for political offices, has led to cartels gaining a stronger foothold in countries like Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador.

Honduras has becoming a key transit hub for drug producers. The U.S. government estimates that up to 87% of cocaine-smuggling flights departing from South America first land in Honduras. That has resulted in Honduras becoming one of the most violent countries in the world, with a murder rate of 79 per 100,000 residents last year, the highest in the world.

Guatemala's former president, Alfonso Portillo, is in the U.S. awaiting trial on charges that he embezzled tens of millions of dollars. In 2012, the Guatemalan government seized 4.7 metric tons of cocaine. And they've confiscated so many chemical ingredients that go into making cocaine that the State Department deemed the stockpile "an environment and health hazard" and has been helping Guatemalan officials to safely store and destroy it.

In El Salvador, the homegrown Mara Salvatrucha gang, known as MS-13, has become so violent and expanded to such lengths (it's active in 40 U.S. states) that the U.S. Department of Treasury labeled it a "transnational criminal organization." That designation expands the ability of the U.S. government to seize the gang's assets and pursue its members in different ways.

The combination of increased drug activity throughout Central America can also be seen along the U.S. border with Mexico. In 2011, U.S. Border Patrol agents in the Rio Grande sector of eastern Texas - a common smuggling route for drug runners coming from Central America - apprehended 20,890 people coming from places other than Mexico. By 2013, that number had risen to 96,829.

The United States government has responded by trying to help Central American governments. From police and judicial training to youth crime prevention initiatives, organized by the Department of Defense, the State Department and other agencies, the U.S has become more engaged in helping those countries get a handle on their rising drug problems.

Funding from U.S. agencies to help Central American countries control their crime has increased from about $120 million in 2008 to $152 in 2012, according to data compiled by the Washington Office of Latin America.

"In this budgetary environment, that's a huge chunk of change," said Frank Mora, the deputy assistant secretary of Defense for the Western Hemisphere from 2009 to 2013. "We were desperately looking for a million here and a million there. That's an indication of how important the U.S. government believes Central America is from that perspective."

And now, El Salvador finds itself at a critical moment in its attempts to fight off the cartels and their corruption.

Roger Noriega, a former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, said presidential candidate Salvador Sánchez Cerén of the left-leaning FMLN party has deep ties with international narcotraffickers, as well as MS-13. A victory for Sánchez Cerén, he said, would give cartels broader powers in El Salvador and threaten to bolster the MS-13 street gangs operating from California to Florida to Virginia.

"(Those ties are) something that the American people ought to care about on a lot of different levels," said Noriega, now a fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute.

Others feel that Sánchez Cerén would be no more likely to assist cartels than his opponent, Norman Quijano of the right-leaning ARENA party.

Jose Miguel Cruz, a Salvadoran and director of research at the Latin American and Caribbean Center at Florida International University in Miami, said the ARENA party was in power when MS-13 rose to international prominence and has also had close ties with cartels. In Cruz's view, that means either candidate represents a gamble.

"I don't think that we'll have more of a narco state than the one we have now," Cruz said.

Geoff Thale, a Central American analyst at the Washington Office on Latin America, said the true test of the winner will come in the months after the election. That's when it will become clear whether they take real efforts to eliminate the cartel-induced corruption that has been increasing "exponentially" in the region in the past few years.

He said the U.S. government has become more interested in that question as they continue their struggle to control the flow of drugs pouring into the country.

"We've succeeded pushing it around. We never really succeeded in stopping it," Thale said. "Whoever wins, who are they going to put in place anti-corruption mechanisms? From the point of view of the international community, that's really the question."