Fighting the Cocaine Wars
By Pico Iyer
Worldwide production of illicit opium, coca leaf and cannabis is many times the amount currently consumed by drug abusers. Some governments do not have control of the narcotics growing regions, and prospects in several countries are dampened by corruption, even government involvement in the narcotics trade.
--From the U.S. State Department's International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, February 1985.
The compound, hidden deep in the heart of the Amazon jungle, 400 miles southeast of the Colombian capital of Bogota, was called Tranquilandia (the Land of Tranquillity). Amid a hail of gunfire, 40 Colombian policemen in two helicopters and a small plane touched down on its clandestine airstrip. What they found was a busy, self-contained complex devoted entirely to the production of cocaine. Tranquilandia included a dormitory large enough to sleep 80 or more, and a dining area complete with dishwasher and refrigerator. Its bathrooms were furnished with showers and orange-and-white flush toilets made of Italian ceramic. Among its more luxurious appointments were a Betamax video recorder, a microwave oven and a library of pornographic magazines. According to the community's records, fresh supplies of chickens and pigs were flown in daily; the settlement's payroll took care of as many as 1,000 employees, including electricians and plumbers, waiters and cooks.
Several hundred yards north of the compound's 3,500-ft. runway, the police came upon 19 separate laboratories used for the processing and refinement of cocaine. Before the raid, officials had estimated that Colombia's annual production of the drug was perhaps 50 tons; Tranquilandia alone, however, could process about 300 tons a year. The police arrested 40 workers and seized almost 14 tons of pure cocaine. Then they poured all $1.2 billion worth of the powder into the nearby Yari River, turning its waters white.
Immediately after that operation last year, death threats fell down upon Colombia's Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who had been leading a lone crusade against his country's bustling $5 billion-a-year cocaine trade. Less than two months later, in the streets of Bogota, two young hit men on a red Yamaha motorcycle pulled up alongside Lara's white Mercedes-Benz and pumped seven bullets into the 38-year-old minister. The killing electrified Colombia and enraged its government. "We've had enough," said President Belisario Betancur Cuartas, trembling with anger during his elegy to the slain minister. With that, Betancur declared a "war without quarter" on Colombia's kings of cocaine.
The struggle has hardly abated in the nine months since. In fact, it has slowly engulfed much of South America, and brought the U.S. increasingly into the fray. In Colombia, U.S. subsidies have spurred antinarcotics agents into pursuing the drug mafiosos, as they are referred to by Colombian newspapers, with some success. The first four Colombians ever to be extradited to the U.S. appeared in Miami and Washington courts last month. In Peru and Bolivia, however, the U.S. has been largely defeated in its fight to stamp out the coca plant* where it is grown.
By now, the illicit drug trade, according to Vice President George Bush, head of President Reagan's South Florida Task Force, brings in about $100 billion a year. The alarming growth of some aspects of that trade was confirmed last week, when the U.S. State Department released a wide-ranging report on the global narcotics picture. According to the account, worldwide production of marijuana declined last year by more than 10%, thanks in large part to the war against drugs in Colombia, the leading exporter of marijuana to the U.S. Worldwide production of opium, the base for heroin, slipped by a similar amount, mainly because of a poor poppy harvest in Afghanistan.
But the production of cocaine, the drug that has become so fashionable in the U.S. and, increasingly, in Europe, went up last year by more than 30%, said the State Department. In Bolivia, the world's second-largest coca producer, not a single plant was destroyed in 1984, according to the report; since 1977, coca production in Bolivia has tripled. In Peru, the other principal source of coca, cultivation has also been steadily rising.
Not only is the coca business growing but it is spreading into more and more countries. The most significant new entry, said the State Department, is ) Ecuador. Last year that country registered no significant production; in 1985, according to the report, Ecuador may be harvesting as much as 15,000 tons of the leaf, which would make it the world's third-largest producer.
Brazilians too have started cultivating the leaf, in the form of an adaptable strain of the plant known as epadu. Previously, narcotics experts had been confident that coca could be grown only on open mountain slopes; epadu, however, thrives in the jungle. "The bottom line," said Democratic Congressman Dante B. Fascell of Florida, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, "is that, despite encouraging developments, particularly in Colombia, the (drug) war is being lost."
If they were needed, last week brought other sobering reminders of the increasing volume--and violence--of the drug trade. In Miami customs officials seized a $119 million 747 jet belonging to Avianca, the Colombian airline, after discovering that it was carrying more than 1,000 kilos of coke, worth $600 million on the street. The contraband was hidden in a shipment of 32 boxes of cut flowers. The incident marked the 34th time in five years that illegal drugs have been found arriving aboard an Avianca plane. Meanwhile, in the Mexican narcotics center of Guadalajara, an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was kidnaped, apparently by drug dealers. Hours later, a Mexican who sometimes flew missions for the agency was also abducted.
Indeed, as the drug busters step up their campaign, they find themselves targeted more and more often for reprisals by multimillionaire cocaine czars. Last November alone, Washington's efforts were menaced on three separate fronts. In Colombia, a bomb exploded under a car parked outside the U.S. embassy in Bogota, killing a woman and, when backed up by telephoned death threats, causing 17 U.S. officials and their families to leave the country. In Peru, 19 members of a U.S.-sponsored program to eradicate coca bushes in the wilds of the Amazon jungle were killed, four of them, the State Department was told, after being tortured. In Bolivia, intelligence agents discovered that Colombian and Bolivian cocaine traffickers had paid a gunman $500,000 to murder U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr (the ambassador continues to drive around La Paz, varying his routes and his routine each day).
The violence seems likely to mount: Colombia's drug kings have sworn to kill five Americans for every compatriot extradited to the U.S. They have even placed a $300,000 bounty on the heads of U.S. narcotics agents, dead or alive. "These are very tough and mean men," says a Panama City banker familiar with the drug trade. "If you attack their livelihood, they'll fight you until the death."
The Reagan Administration is giving the drug war high priority, having involved 37 federal agencies and eleven Cabinet departments. The U.S. is fighting on a number of fronts: from eradicating coca crops in the foothills of the Andes to using trained dogs to sniff out the presence of cocaine residue in suspect bundles of cash. Political measures are also being taken. An amendment passed by Congress in October 1983 stipulates that the President should cut off aid to any country that has failed to meet projected reductions in narcotics production. The first victim of that law, some Washington officials believe, could be Bolivia, which is to receive $48 million in U.S. assistance during the current fiscal year. "Bolivia's not going to get another dollar, so far as I'm concerned," Republican Senator Paula Hawkins of Florida, the amendment's sponsor, told TIME Correspondent David Beckwith after the State Department report was released.
The Administration's various efforts to curtail the drug trade have by no means been fruitless. The amount of cocaine seized in the U.S. has increased thirtyfold since 1977, and the wholesale price of a kilo of coke in Miami has jumped from $23,000 to $35,000 in the past six months. In one two-week period a month ago, Florida authorities confiscated over two tons of the drug, more than was seized by all federal agents in 1981. But the record amounts of cocaine intercepted may only serve to prove that there are record amounts of cocaine pouring into the country--through Miami or, increasingly, Arizona, Texas and California.
Moreover, as coca production booms, refineries and transshipment centers have been sprouting up throughout the hemisphere. Traditionally, Peru and Bolivia have grown 90% of the world's coca and converted the leaves locally into raw coca paste (see box). Colombians have taken care of 80% of the rest of the business, refining the paste into pure cocaine, then smuggling it into the U.S. As some of the Colombian drug dons have been forced out of their homeland, however, and as coca plants have begun to shoot up in Ecuador and Brazil, refineries have been springing up in Panama, Venezuela, Argentina and even Miami.
From these labs the tendrils of the traffic have reached into Nicaragua and Paraguay, while continuing to flourish in Mexico and the Caribbean. The cocaine business has, in fact, drawn its net around every country in South America except the tightly policed dictatorship of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet. "The drug trade is like a water balloon," says one frustrated U.S. official in Colombia. "You step on it in one place, and it squeezes out the side of your foot."
The cocaine trade in Colombia took off in the late 1970s when crime bosses entered the business. Until then, their profits had largely come from smuggling cars, liquor and electronic appliances into the country and sneaking cattle, emeralds and coffee out. Then, it seems, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, an entrepreneur whom Colombian bankers describe as "a self-taught administrator with a genius for organization," convinced Smuggler Fabio Ochoa of the profits to be earned from cocaine. The two took over the domestic industry and sent murderous local toughs, now known as cocaine cowboys, to seize control of the U.S. wholesale market.
Before long, the Colombian cocaine kings had created the largest chemical export operation in South American history. Overseeing the business as if they were heads of a multinational firm, the coqueros transformed a once chaotic industry into a vertically integrated consortium. For the transportation of drugs, they used well-established smuggling pipelines; for their distribution, a North American syndicate stretching from Miami to Vancouver. Escobar united the coqueros into a cartel and even organized a fund to serve as a kind of insurance in the event of raids or losses. The drug dons were also shrewd enough to invest their profits in diversified holdings: they now own extensive real estate in Florida, half of the approximately 200 high-rises along Panama City's oceanfront, and a variety of small businesses and financial institutions, like currency-exchange houses, through which they can launder their profits. "These guys don't rob banks," says Craig Vangrasslek, who studied the drug industry on a Fulbright scholarship in Bogota. "They buy them." Soon the drug pipeline was operating as smoothly and as punctually as a regularly scheduled airline. Almost every day, soon after dawn, Colombians in sleek twin-engine Cessnas descend upon remote airstrips carved out of the hinterlands of Peru and Bolivia. In a matter of minutes the traffickers load up the planes with a few hundred kilos of raw paste. This is whisked off to processing plants like Tranquilandia to be turned into cocaine and eventually smuggled into the U.S.
At the outset, the final stage was an amateurish hit-or-miss affair. The coqueros were content to ship cocaine into the U.S. via "mules," who would coat their stomachs with cod-liver oil or honey, then swallow the cocaine wrapped in condoms. If they were lucky, they could flush the drug out once they were over the border. Soon enough, however, the cocaine czars could afford to send bulk shipments into the U.S. in their own DC-6 aircraft or by high-powered speedboats. By 1983, indeed, the system was running so efficiently that the market was glutted with cocaine, and the wholesale price of a kilo in Colombia plunged from $20,000 to $5,000 (it is now roughly $7,500). All the while, million-dollar bribes, backed often by threats, bought the coqueros official indulgence at home and abroad. "These are vicious people with huge amounts of money at their disposal," says Francis ("Bud") Mullen, head of the DEA. "That does inhibit individuals who would ordinarily support law enforcement."
Last year, however, the traffickers' seamless system was disrupted when President Betancur declared a state of siege under which suspects could be arrested in Colombia without warrant. Betancur also revived extradition, which he had previously opposed on philosophical grounds. Signaling his determination to pursue even the most powerful of traffickers, he promptly signed an agreement with Washington for the extradition of Cocaine Kingpin Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, an ultrarightist who is wanted for a host of drug-related crimes in the U.S. In all, Washington has requested the arrests of 85 Colombians for drug-connected offenses in the U.S.
Although Betancur's assault caused the drug kings to lie low for a while, they were by no means cowed. Within a month of the Lara murder, Entrepreneur Escobar and a few colleagues, claiming to represent a group of coqueros controlling 80% of the drug market, met first with Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, a former Colombian President, and then with Attorney General Carlos Jimenez Gomez in Panama City to offer the Colombian government a deal: in exchange for total amnesty, they said, they would dismantle their illicit empires and repatriate $5 billion into Colombia's troubled economy. The government replied ; that it would accept nothing short of the traffickers' unconditional surrender.
To make the point, the 1,500 men of Colombia's U.S.-supported antinarcotics squad persevered in their search-and-destroy missions and, for a time, scored one spectacular victory after another. In early December, for example, they intercepted more than 550 kilos of high-grade cocaine, packed and readied for shipment at a rambling ranch known as Villa Julia, and flushed it down a sewer in nearby Medellin. Four days later, in northern La Guajira province, squad members came upon 1,054 kilos of pure coke that had been stashed in lunch boxes, leather pouches and even official-looking CARE packages,
and dumped it into the Caribbean. In the following weeks they eliminated 32 cocaine- processing plants in the llanos, the sparsely populated areas along the Brazilian border, accessible only by foot, boat or light aircraft.
Yet snuffing out the business in Colombia remains a disheartening undertaking. For one, the traffickers have infiltrated virtually every segment of Colombian society. At least 100 air force personnel and 200 national policemen have reportedly been discharged because of drug connections; last year Attorney General Jimenez ordered investigations of 400 judges suspected of complicity in the trade. A particularly damaging cocaine link was revealed earlier this month when Roman Medina, the personal press secretary of President Betancur, was arrested on suspicion of helping smuggle 2.7 kilos of cocaine into Spain in two diplomatic pouches.
But the key figures in the cocaine business continue to elude the authorities. Washington has stationed 16 antinarcotics agents in Colombia and hopes to budget a record $9.2 million for its Colombian campaign in fiscal 1985. By comparison, Drug King Escobar is said to command a personal army of more than 2,000 retainers and a fortune estimated at more than $2 billion. Escobar, who is suspected of having taken out the contract on Lara's life and is wanted in the U.S. on charges of smuggling ten tons of cocaine into the country, at one time faced just one charge in Colombia: illegally importing 82 of the 1,500 exotic animals in his private zoo.
Even if "Los Grandes Mafiosos" could be caught, moreover, it is unlikely that they would be held for long. When the drug war was declared, ex-Smuggler Fabio Ochoa voluntarily gave himself up to the police. "I have nothing to fear," he announced. Sure enough, the authorities could muster no more % serious charge against him than illegal possession of firearms. Six weeks later he was released on bail, and the case is now in limbo. "We know who (the cocaine kings) are, and we can't nail them," says Police Captain Guillermo Benavides. "But the worst thing is that even if we could get all the bosses, new ones would immediately take their places. They'd pop up like mushrooms."
As the business of the Colombian drug czars has emerged from the shadows, their illicit dealings with neighboring countries like Panama have also come to light. Ever since the cocaine market began to prosper, some Panamanians have taken money in exchange for allowing the coqueros to use their country as a transshipment point. In addition, a few corrupt Panamanian bankers have permitted the Colombians to take advantage of the strictest banking secrecy laws in the hemisphere by laundering drug dollars. Last June U.S. customs agents in Miami discovered that a DC-8 jet transport, owned by Inair, at the time Panama's largest air cargo company, was carrying more than a ton of coke, stuffed in freezers, neatly packaged in kilo-size parcels and specially coded for efficient delivery in the U.S. "They had been shipping the Colombians' coke for them for some time," says a former Inair associate.
More worrisome for U.S. agents, Panama's role as a middleman has changed to that of a leading player in the drug scene. Last May, in Panama's Darien rain forest, authorities came upon an elaborate cocaine laboratory, almost identical to the complexes across the Colombian border. Some of the 22 Colombians arrested at the site claimed that they had earned the right to process cocaine by paying off a leading Panamanian official. The Colombians were sent home without being charged with a crime.
At Washington's instigation, Panamanian agents later swooped down on a warehouse in the Colon Free Trade Zone, a busy international transshipment center. There they found 17,000 55-gal. barrels of ether, worth about $1 million and enough to process around 200,000 kilos of cocaine. Both the chemicals and the building were apparently owned by Colombia's Ochoa clan. Shortly afterward, Julian Melo, the general secretary of the Panamanian National Defense Forces High Command, was arrested, accused of allowing the Colombians to transport the ether through the country in exchange for a $2 million bribe. Melo was never prosecuted, however, and many Panamanians assumed that he was merely a symbolic victim sacrificed to appease / Washington. "It stretches the imagination," said a Western diplomat in Panama, "to think that nobody but Melo could have been aware of the dealings."
While Colombian and Panamanian authorities have made some headway in the fight against drugs, their counterparts in Bolivia and Peru face problems that seem almost insuperable, as underlined by last week's State Department report. For centuries, Andean natives have chewed coca leaves as freely and frequently as Americans drink coffee. Indeed, most Bolivians, including President Hernan Siles Zuazo, routinely offer visitors coca tea. This is all quite legal because there is no law in Bolivia that prohibits either the cultivation or the marketing of coca. From the law-abiding family that earns $200 for a year's harvest of coca leaves to the young mother who receives $70 for carrying 40 lbs. of paste to a middleman, many Bolivians rely on coca to make the difference between subsistence and poverty. The government, saddled with an annual inflation rate that runs close to 3000% and a crippling foreign debt of almost $5 billion, is equally reluctant about eliminating its most profitable crop. Last year coca accounted for more than $2 billion in unofficial foreign exchange earnings. "Over the past two years," explains a former coca plantation owner, "the only money in the country that counts has been narcodollars."
Above all, Siles, who in 1982 inherited a presidency that had changed hands 13 times in twelve years, is well aware that challenging his people's livelihood could bring about his political demise. Warns an aide to Roberto Suarez Gomez, one of the country's most flamboyant coca suppliers (see box): "U.S. pressures could lead to another revolution and a takeover by another repressive military government or, worse, by the leftists."
The danger is real. In 1980 General Luis Garcia Meza seized control of Bolivia in what came to be called the Cocaine Coup. One of his first acts was to release drug mafiosos from jail. He proceeded to have the police records of cocaine traffickers destroyed and to punish those who disagreed with his policy. His army meanwhile pocketed millions of dollars in bribes and payoffs from drug dealers. In despair, local U.S. drug enforcers closed their office. As soon as Siles brought back democracy in 1982, however, the fight against drugs resumed. The DEA reopened its office and President Reagan appointed Corr, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotic Matters, as ambassador. Ten months after taking office, Siles signed a bilateral agreement with the U.S. for a five-year, $88 million program to fight cocaine. But the effort remains an uphill struggle. "The mere fact that they're beginning to chase the traffickers is refreshing," says Dr. Carlton Turner, special assistant to President Reagan for drug abuse policy. "But I have my doubts that you're going to be able to do away with the corruption built into the Bolivian system."
The antinarcotics campaign in Bolivia has indeed proved fitful. Last August Siles ordered 1,200 troops to destroy coca crops in the Chapare region, the broad tropical valley where nearly a third of Bolivia's coca is grown. As it turned out, only six ill-equipped 100-man companies took to the field. Some of them gave local growers warning of their imminent raid six days in advance. One general actually resigned, saying that he was not about to kill campesinos just to please North Americans. The 150 men of the U.S.-funded Bolivian antidrug unit known as the Leopards have not fared much better. After two months of special training, complained one U.S. official, "they spent months and months doing nothing. The government's choice was to avoid confrontation, so they stayed in their barracks." Finally, last October, 93 members of the heavily armed paramilitary unit were sent on a sweep of the Beni, a roadless wilderness east of the Andes in which some 200 cocaine barons process and ship coca out of huge estates, some as large as 100,000 acres and many equipped with processing plants and airstrips. The biggest target of all was Suarez, who maintains a feudal rule over a colony of peasants in what amounts to a coca state within a state. Though they raided several ranches, the Leopards failed to find Suarez; they uncovered a paltry 380 kilos of cocaine. Clamping down on coca cultivation has been even harder in Peru. Four years ago, Washington launched what was regarded as a well-planned $26 million program centered on the coca-growing upper Huallaga Valley, a steep-sloped area some 200 miles northeast of Lima, the capital. The first part of the program was an $18 million, five-year project by the Agency for International Development to help the Peruvians build roads, bridges and water systems. The scheme was also designed to reduce coca production and encourage instead the cultivation of coffee, bananas, rice, citrus and other crops. Yet the seemingly apolitical program became the target of repeated assaults led by the Maoist guerrillas known as Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) or a related leftist group called Puka LLacta (Red Fatherland). Last July the terrorists drove into the project's central village of Aucayacu, ordered residents to stay indoors and sprayed the town with bullets, killing five policemen. Three other policemen were ambushed and killed outside of Aucayacu as they went to the rescue. Most of the program's workers were withdrawn from the town.
The second part of the U.S. drive involved the eradication of coca crops, accompanied by a reimbursement of about $120 for each affected acre. For 19 months, brigades of laborers tore out coca plants by hand and sprayed them with herbicide. By last November they had wiped out around one-fifth of the approximately 45,000 acres under cultivation in the upper Huallaga Valley. But after the bloody murder of 19 crop-eradication workers, believed to have been ordered by a local drug czar, the program was suspended for a couple of months.
Washington's best hope for an effective attack against Peru's coca producers was a U.S.-financed, 220-man force called the Rural Mobile Patrol Unit. Yet hardly had the understaffed and poorly equipped force entered the field than it was shadowed by rumors--all of which it denies--that it was under-reporting drug seizures, making wrongful arrests and openly filching money and goods from peasant homes. In retaliation, guerrilla-directed campesinos bombed police stations and ambushed drug busters. A score of policemen were killed. As the mutinous spirit quickened, the government of President Fernando Belaunde Terry began to fear that guerrillas might exploit the drug-related troubles even further. Last August the President declared a state of emergency and sent 1,000 troops to restore order. They did so--by telling the antinarcotics squad to halt its war against drugs.
Even as coca production continues to thrive in Peru and Bolivia, it has also begun to explode in previously undeveloped areas, such as Brazil's Amazon River Basin, a wilderness of lush jungles and rivers that is almost two-thirds the size of the U.S. Three years ago, policemen noticed that relatively primitive Indians were suddenly sporting modern clothes and traveling in motorboats. The peasants, they learned, had been pressured by Colombians into cultivating epadu, a shrubby small tree that can grow in the forest and attain a height of 10 ft. Epadu contains about 40% less active alkaloid than the more common coca variety cultivated in the Andes and yields less pure cocaine per kilo. But it costs the trafficker 60% less to buy and can sprout as many as 30 shoots, often very rapidly. "It's easier to grow than any other crop in the Amazon," says a U.S. embassy official. Brazil has also begun to master the more advanced stages of the trade. Last fall alone, twelve Brazilians were caught in the act of carrying cocaine to the U.S. Shipments of illegally imported processing chemicals have also been intercepted with increasing frequency. Most of all, coke preprocessing plants have begun sprouting up in the Brazilian backcountry. By now, says Dr. Juarez Tavares, the federal criminal prosecutor in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil has become "the distribution center for cocaine leaving South America."
The Brazilian government has not pursued the trade with notable zeal. On the books in Brazil is 1980 legislation under which foreign drug dealers, if caught, can be expelled rather than imprisoned. That, says Tavares, is "an open signal that the narcos have nothing to fear in Brazil." Dealers who wind up behind bars, moreover, manage to get free relatively easily. Last year, a Colombian who had set up a refinery just outside Rio simply walked out of a federal maximum-security prison and away from a 27-year sentence. Not long thereafter, a prison guard who claimed that the fugitive had taken his gun was temporarily dismissed.
As more refineries are set up across South America, drug routes cross more and more borders, bringing previously untainted countries into some phase of the business. Sixteen months ago, customs seized 667 kilos of cocaine, at that time the largest haul in history, at an airport near Caracas, Venezuela. In Paraguay last September, officials intercepted 49,000 gal. of ether, acetone and hydrochloric acid, enough to process eight tons of cocaine; DEA officials speculate that influential Paraguayans might be involved in drug trafficking. Cocaine arrests in Trinidad soared to 150 in 1983 from three in 1978. In the Bahamas, three Cabinet ministers in the government of Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling resigned from their posts and two others were fired just before the release of a Royal Commission report that portrayed a government riddled with cocaine corruption.
The processing business has also started to take root in the U.S., which up to now has been mostly a customer. Forced to quit Colombia and aware that the ; U.S. is the world's largest producer of ether, traffickers have decided to import coca paste to Miami and process it locally. Over the past 18 months, authorities in Miami have closed down cocaine refineries at the rate of one a month. In January, an elderly woman strolling along the seashore in Palm Beach County almost stumbled over a dozen Army duffle bags. Suspicious, she called the sheriff's office; when the authorities opened the bags, they found almost half a ton of unprocessed coca.
As the nerve center for much of the U.S.'s drug activity, Miami has become a dumping ground not only for narcotics but also for narcodollars. In early December, a hooded witness appeared before the President's Commission on Organized Crime and confessed that he had laundered $250 million in drug money through Miami banks. In an effort to stop such large-scale manipulations, a task force of U.S. Customs and Internal Revenue Service agents has, since 1980, been auditing all financial transactions larger than $10,000. But still the traffickers outfox them. One way to defeat the audit: part-timers, from college students to grandmothers, are hired to drive around the country changing the cocaine producers' cash into cashiers' checks worth slightly less than $10,000.
In the end, Washington's most effective weapon is still its most direct one: cutting off drugs at the source. "The closer you are to where it comes from," explains Ambassador Corr in Bolivia, "the more bang you get for your buck. By the time it gets to East St. Louis or Champaign, Ill., it's all over the place." U.S.-backed programs of coca eradication have enjoyed some measure of success: last fall in "Operation Federico" in Brazil, 9 million epadu plants were burned while workers in Peru slashed down more than 5,000 acres, three times more than in all 1983. But eradication does not work unless it is accompanied by adequate compensation to campesinos for the loss of a crop that requires less work and promises ten times more profit than such alternatives as coffee or bananas. Often, however, other crops cannot flourish on the soil where coca grows. At the same time, the U.S. is not about to send huge infusions of dollars to recompense coca growers stripped of their income. "We just can't afford it," says a Washington official. "If we gave money to Peru or Bolivia, other countries would start growing coca in order to get U.S. funds."
Even harder to uproot than the coca leaf may be the widespread conviction among South Americans that cocaine is a U.S. problem. "We are putting our lives in danger to prevent drugs from entering the U.S.," complains Bolivian Under Secretary of the Interior Gustavo Sanchez. While U.S. officials claim that it is illicit production that begets consumption, many South Americans contend that the process works the other way round. "The U.S. is to blame for most of this mess," says one Panamanian official. "If there weren't the frightening demand in the States, we wouldn't even have to worry about trying to eliminate the supply." As reports of cocaine use in the developing world circulate, says Enrique Elias Laroza, Peru's former Justice Minister, South American governments lose heart and people "ask how a poor country can win the fight against narcotics trafficking when much more powerful, rich countries have failed."
In recent months, local governments may have come to appreciate better the problems afflicting their North American neighbor: coca abuse has begun to spread across South America. The greatest culprit is a brown, pennies-cheap cigarette made of an addictive low-grade coca paste. Often known as brutos, the cigarettes contain impurities that have not been processed out, including caustic soda, sulfuric acid and kerosene. The cheap high, once favored only by teenage street kids, has now hooked a significant cross-section of society.
The coca-paste phenomenon may prompt South American governments to tackle the drug problem with new resolve. Nonetheless, many of the kings of cocaine remain so powerful that they continue to challenge authority with impunity. Flamboyant Colombian Coquero Lehder, for example, established his own newspaper, as well as his own political party, the Latino National Party, to wage war against the U.S.-Colombian extradition treaty. He has publicly admitted to purchasing an entire island in the Bahamas, Norman's Cay; it has been developed to serve as a cocaine distribution and transshipment center. He has also persisted in taunting his pursuers like a computer-age Scarlet Pimpernel: earlier this winter, Lehder agreed to meet reporters from the leading Colombian weekly Semana, on the Guaviare River deep in the llanos. Steering his own motorboat to the rendezvous, Lehder coolly assured the journalists that he enjoyed the support of many sectors of Colombian society. Said he: "I'll be around longer than President Betancur." On that defiant note, he gave his boat full throttle, and disappeared round a bend in the river.
FOOTNOTE: *The coca plant (Erythroxylum coca) is a shrub approximately 3 ft. high that grows most commonly on the mountain slopes of Bolivia, Peru and Java. The plant's leaves contain the alkaloid cocaine.
With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/La Paz, Bernard Diederich/ Bogota and Gavin Scott/Rio de Janeiro