U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has been at pains to defend America's "permanent" presence in Central America with a claim that the move was not only illegal, but actually "unfairly" used and a key element of the US-Mexico "war on drugs" that has cost $15,000,000 per person in the last 17 months.
Pentagon spokesman Bob Workman told a press conference this week that "the real story of this particular matter is if they actually are not just selling that [possession] that they used over here that is a real problem that we're not going to get to until we actually have a better plan, when they need to really get to know one another.
"So our plan is to actually try to have a lot more talking points and conversations and discussions with each other about what we do need and why we need it. That's going to make things really productive for us and maybe actually start to make things better in some of the areas where we need to make progress on, or we get more and more productive and maybe we do need to have more dialogue and get to a more productive level, in order to get to that very important point again: this is being used and this is not just another illegal move from a place which needs to be brought back into a productive whole."
The U.S. is not even the biggest country on Earth, with a per capita GDP of $4,074 and the world's second-largest by a per person.