Drugs The Chemical Connection

By William R. Doerner

Shortly after dawn, five helicopter gunships took off from the Palanquero military air base southeast of Medellin. Thirty minutes later, skimming over the treetops of the Colombian jungle, the clattering swarm descended on a ranch outside the Magdalena River town of Puerto Triunfo. Thirty members of Colombia's elite National Police antinarcotics unit jumped from the copters and began searching the grounds. Their eventual payoff: discovery of three complexes containing eight cocaine laboratories. After the raiders methodically burned chemical dumps and bunkhouses, a five-man explosives team blew up brick buildings, generators and 15,000-gal. chemical holding tanks.

So began Operation Primavera, the latest effort by Colombian authorities to destroy the massive cocaine-processing industry that thrives under the green canopy of the country's jungles. By the time the ten-day campaign ended last week, Operation Primavera had become the most successful bust of coke labs in Colombian history, netting a total of 26 plants capable of producing 6.6 tons of the addictive white powder a week. Though the plants never achieved that level of production, the potential output is about three times the demand of the U.S. market. Boasted a senior police official: "This is a bullet to the heart of the cocaine mafia."

Police confiscated about 1.3 tons of cocaine in base and finished form. But what left law-enforcement officials gloating was the seizure of unprecedented quantities of chemicals used in the manufacture of cocaine. The cache included 417,095 gal. of ether acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and 95 tons of potassium permanganate -- enough chemicals to make 104 tons of cocaine, a third of the estimated annual cocaine output of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined.

Those seizures underscore a little noted but crucial fact of life in the $130 billion cocaine business: the drug trade is a two-way street. The cocaine flows from mostly Third World producers to the U.S. and other industrialized nations, but the chemicals and other materials needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine flow from the industrialized nations to the Third World. By participating in this Faustian technology transfer, the drug-consumer nations are, in effect, providing vital raw ingredients for the scourge that bedevils them and that they often blame exclusively on coke-producing countries. "Look at all this equipment," said a Colombian police commander last week, surveying the ruins of a coke lab. "It's almost all from the U.S. And these chemicals come from all over the world. All Latin America supplies are the coca leaves and the labor."

The site of Operation Primavera's first strike was Finca la Brasilia (Brazil Ranch), reportedly owned by Alberto Toro, brother-in-law of the notorious coke lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Early last week the raiders descended on Hacienda Napoles, the grandest -- and gaudiest -- of Escobar's several country estates. The helicopters landed to the trumpeting of three caged elephants, part of a private zoo maintained by the drug kingpin. Not found was Escobar, one of the world's most wanted criminals, who has eluded Colombian authorities dozens of times.

The chemicals seized during Operation Primavera were stored in standing tanks or 55-gal. drums. In some cases the drums were stacked 15 ft. high, creating Andean peaks of testimony to the proportions of the smuggling operation. Ethyl ether, for example, is essential to the final processing of cocaine base into a white hydrochloride powder. The manufacture of ethyl ether has been outlawed in Colombia, and importation is closely regulated. A 55-gal. drum of ethyl ether that sells for $500 in the U.S. fetches more than $12,000 in Colombia. Says Alfonso Barragan, president of the Colombian Society of Chemical Engineers: "The Colombian black market in chemicals probably has a higher profit margin than that of cocaine itself."

The contraband chemicals are not all from the U.S., or even from other industrialized nations. Much of the ethyl ether was manufactured in Brazil. The potassium permanganate, normally used as a water purifier, came from China, which is the world's leading producer.

Since Brazil and China are among the majority of countries that have few regulations governing the foreign sales of chemicals, tracing the path of the seized materials will not be easy. But chemicals manufactured in the U.S. may be another matter, at least in the future. Last year the U.S. passed a new ( law, which will take effect in the next few months, requiring closer supervision of the overseas sales of chemicals used in the production of cocaine, including ethyl ether and acetone.

Authorities may be able to trace at least some of the U.S.-produced chemicals seized in Colombia over the past two weeks. The contraband included containers marked with the logos of Dow Chemical Co. and Union Chemical Corp. Both companies are among major U.S. chemical producers who have agreed to cooperate with the DEA in seeking to ascertain the final destination of the chemicals before allowing them to leave the country. In the case of the chemicals seized in Colombia, however, most of the batch numbers on labels had been scratched off by knife blades. Given how successful drug lords have been in using a dizzying tangle of middlemen and front companies to hide their activities, law enforcement officials may never be able to halt fully the chemical side of the drug trade.

With reporting by Elaine Shannon/Washington