Cocaine trafficking through transit countries remains a critical yet understudied domain of the global drug trade, particularly at the subnational scale. Costa Rica’s strategic location between South America and key consumer markets, coupled with extensive road and maritime infrastructure, has made it a major transit hub for cocaine movement. This study addresses the lack of high-resolution and spatially explicit mapping of trafficking routes by integrating geospatial risk modeling with a maximum flow framework to simulate traffickers’ route selection. We constructed a road network and integrated spatial event-based data from drug-related arrests, cocaine seizures, interviews with intelligence and law enforcement, and media reports to generate risk for road segments. A distance decay function for risk spillover on road segments was incorporated into a three-stage network flow optimization linking Pacific coastal source points, aggregation hubs, and maritime ports and airstrip destinations. The model shows that traffickers concentrate flows toward the ports of Moín and Limón, which together account for 81% of total trafficked volume destined for the transatlantic market. Whereas clandestine airstrips play a secondary role supplying northbound movement. Utilization of major highways, including the Pan-American highway, provides a plausible explanation for how traffickers might prioritize route capacity and concealment within legitimate trade over complete risk avoidance. Our findings show that cocaine trafficking in Costa Rica operates as a rational, high-capacity logistics system that balances risk and profit. This approach not only advances theoretical understanding of cocaine supply chains but also provides plausible, spatially explicit explanations for how critical nodes and routes are connected.
Tanveer et al. (Tue,) studied this question.