The Global Connection

TO many Paraguayans, Auguste Joseph Ricord, a short, balding French Corsican with an avuncular manner, was merely the proprietor of the Paris-Nice motel and cafe near Paraguay's somnolent capital city of Asuncion. To various international law-enforcement agencies, however, Ricord was much better known as the owner of a string of aliases (Mr. Andre, Lucien Darguelles, "El Comandante") and a police record that includes a bust for theft in prewar Marseille, a 1950 French conviction as a "dangerous" wartime Gestapo agent, and links in more recent years with prostitution in Argentina and Venezuela. Not long ago, Ricord picked up a new moniker: among U.S. narcotics agents, he began to be known simply as the "Latin Connection."

For 16 months, Ricord has been sitting in an Asuncion prison cell, at the center of a diplomatic tug of war between the Nixon Administration and Paraguayan President Alfredo Stroessner's military dictatorship. Since October 1970, when federal agents seized five couriers with a shipment of 97.5 lbs. of heroin (worth about $12 million on the street) in Miami and succeeded in tracing it back to Ricord, the U.S. has been seeking to extradite him on conspiracy charges, alleging that he is the kingpin of a syndicate that piped more than 11,000 lbs. of heroin ($1.2 billion) through Paraguay to the U.S. over a five-year period. A Paraguayan court--perhaps reflecting the country's reverence for smuggling (it is the leading industry) and the kind of influence any big-time operator can buy in a nation of 2.4 million people--said nothing doing. Ricord remained comfortably ensconced in jail, where he was allowed visits by a daughter and niece, who brought his meals. Paraguayans speculated that he was also continuing to control his syndicate from the cell.

The U.S. answered by closing down U.S. lines of credit to Paraguay amounting to some $5,000,000. Last week, ruling that Ricord's extradition would be "desirable" after all, a Paraguayan appeals court overturned the first court's decision. If there are no further snags, Ricord--who is one of the biggest drug traffickers ever snared by the U.S.--will soon face trial in New York.

Even so, the U.S. antidrug effort has not been notably successful. Shortly before President Nixon announced his all-out war on drugs a year ago, an estimated 315,000 Americans were addicted to heroin, which is the most profitable item in the international narcotics trade. Recent estimates have put the addict population at around 560,000 persons, though the jump in the figures reflects some zags in statistics taking as well as real growth in addiction.

No Lack. As if there had been any question about it, a report released by the Administration last week confirmed that the war on drugs is turning out to be more complex and difficult than Washington had at first imagined. The 111-page report, prepared by Nixon's five-man Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, concedes that despite greatly increased surveillance, the U.S. was able to seize only "a small fraction" (roughly 8%) of the estimated ten tons of heroin that reaches the U.S. each year. There was no reason to believe, the report continued gloomily, that the international drug traffickers will lack "adequate supplies" in the future.

Washington's opponents in its drug war are what the report describes as a number of slippery and slickly professional narcotics "cartels." Most of the heroin reaching the U.S. is funneled through Western Europe, where the lucrative U.S.-bound trade has long been dominated by rings of French Corsicans based in Marseille. Processed into morphine base, Turkish opium is easily smuggled to Marseille or, increasingly, through West Germany, most often aboard sealed trucks, which, under European customs agreements, are usually waved past border posts without even a cursory inspection. The morphine base is processed in clandestine laboratories, and the finished heroin reaches wholesalers in the U.S. aboard planes or ships arriving in Montreal or New York. Since 1969, increasing amounts have also been shipped via Corsican and Italian middlemen in Montevideo, Buenos Aires--or Auguste Ricord's Asuncion. The economics of the trade are such that the professional trafficker is usually assured of great profit--and power. Along the various steps from Turkish farm, where enough opium to produce a "key" (kilo) of heroin can be bought for $22, to New York market, the value of a key rises dramatically:

At the labs in Marseille $5,000

On arrival in New York $10,000

On the wholesale market $22,000

On the street $220,000

No Alarm. The Administration's strategy has been to try to pinch off the drug routes before they reach New York, Miami or the Mexican border, the main U.S. entry points. The effort involves long, Le Carre-style work by dozens of globe-ranging narcotics agents, as well as diplomatic pressure on 57 countries that are concerned with the trade in one way or another. But the effort has been frustrating. Many governments are not particularly receptive to U.S. pleas for cooperation and, as the Cabinet Committee report wryly observes, they are "regularly and skillfully exploited by the illicit international trafficker." The report unhappily notes that in Burma, where the annual opium harvest comes to a hefty 400 tons, the narcotics trade is "not viewed with great alarm." Authorities in Pakistan prefer to act as if their country's opium output, which runs as high as 170 tons a year, is really "quite small."

The U.S.'s one big success, Turkey, may turn out to be discouragingly hollow. In return for $35 million in various subsidies, Turkey agreed to curb the cultivation of opium after the 1972 crop was harvested. The Administration felt that it had achieved a "breakthrough" because the 80 tons of illicit opium produced by Turkish farmers last year produced 80% of the heroin entering the U.S. market. But now there are worries that the curb may be ineffective, in view of the large supplies of opium that canny Turkish smugglers are rumored to have begun to stockpile long ago.

Moreover, there is a growing realization that drug traffickers can draw on ample surpluses in the total worldwide illicit production of opium--1,200 tons last year, enough to supply the U.S. market many times over. India, Pakistan and Afghanistan grow some 360 tons of illegal opium each year, most of which at present goes to Iran. The "Golden Triangle" of Burma, Thailand and Laos is the largest single opium-producing area (700 tons a year). Dealers there have been supplying U.S. troops in South Viet Nam, and it is open to question, the report notes, whether they will accept the loss of income brought about by U.S. withdrawal, or try to invade the American market. Then there is the worrisome fact that to be cultivated profitably, the opium poppy needs only a warm climate and cheap labor. Poppy plantings have recently been spotted in Costa Rica and high in the Andes in Ecuador and Peru.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.