S. America Traffickers : Ingenuity of Drug Lords on the Rise

ASUNCION, Paraguay —  No one thought much about an unclaimed suitcase found on the baggage carrousel at the Miami airport last June. After all, the flight came from Paraguay, not a major player in the world of hard drugs.

When Paraguayan Airlines’ ground staff opened the bag to determine its owner, they found 70 pounds of pure cocaine, worth up to $30 million on the street in the United States. Fearful of having the DC-8 jet confiscated by American authorities, the airline immediately notified U.S. Customs Service officials of the discovery.

As it turned out, the suitcase was never meant to reach the luggage carrousel. The bag should have been rerouted by a drug contact to another flight bound for Europe, probably Madrid. There, the smugglers would sell its contents on the European market, where cocaine brings three times its U.S. price. Investigators identified the mastermind as the son of a Paraguayan military officer close to then-President Alfredo Stroessner.

Sophisticated Tactics

The case yielded a small example of the growing ingenuity, daring and power employed by the labyrinthine networks that produce and smuggle cocaine from South America in the late 1980s. As the resources deployed against drug trafficking increase, members of the cocaine Mafia have resorted to new routes, more sophisticated tactics and, when necessary, raw brutality.

More countries than ever have been drawn into the trade, and the destinations have multiplied, according to interviews with narcotics officials in eight South American countries. Coca eradication programs now confront alliances between growers and guerrillas and peasant trade unions in the producer countries. And the transport of coke no longer is the domain of “mules”--people who carry a couple of kilos through airports--but of vast shipments hidden in commercial containers of legitimate exports.

The cocaine trail used to be relatively straightforward: The coca leaves, produced and partially refined in Peru and Bolivia, were brought to Colombia for final processing and shipment to the United States, principally Florida.

Now the systems are far more subtle and pervasive, and the trail leads in all directions--south to Paraguay and Argentina, east to Brazil, northwest to Ecuador and northeast to Venezuela, sucking all of them into the vortex. And more than ever, the trail leads to Europe as well as the United States.

“The evidence is that they are flooding it, trying to really get control of the market in Europe,” an official in Colombia said. Shipments across the Atlantic may double this year, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official said.

The trail still begins in the coca plantations in valleys on the eastern slope of the Andes Mountains in Peru and Bolivia. Declining central government control over the coca regions in recent years has left narcotics agents willing to settle for not losing further ground.

In Peru’s Upper Huallaga Valley, the world’s largest producer of coca leaves, about 80% of the estimated 200,000 peasants in the valley depend on coca.

Col. Cesar Costa, the slender, articulate commander of the heavily guarded police base in the frontier town of Tingo Maria, acknowledges: “The population lives from coca, so it is very dangerous for us.”

Also, the coca growers have built an alliance with Maoist anti-government guerrillas who, despite their professed abhorrence of cocaine use as an imperialist vice, have seized on the mutually beneficial relationship.

In late March, about 300 guerrillas attacked the police base at Uchiza, considered the coca hub in the valley, and fought an all-night battle that left at least 12 dead. They also freed nine Colombian drug traffickers who were arrested in a recent raid, the most graphic evidence to date of the “narco-guerrilla alliance.”

The U.S. government’s hope for large-scale eradication in Peru and Bolivia now lies in aerial spraying. Bolivia, which has no guerrilla threat, has refused outright to allow spraying by plane, saying voluntary and manual eradication are sufficient. Peruvian President Alan Garcia, who has made the drug war a national priority, is weighing the American request.

But the aerial spraying plan has aroused heated opposition from environmental groups, which argue that the non-selective herbicides would kill crops and rain forest cover as well as coca. They acknowledge that coca production and refining already ravage the environment mercilessly but contend that the cure could be worse than the disease.

The success of eradication efforts surrounding Tingo Maria have pushed coca production further north in the valley and east toward Pucallpa and the surrounding Ucayali district.

“The narcotraficantes have bought Uchiza,” said a frustrated government prosecutor who handles drug trafficking cases in Tingo Maria, shortly before the guerrilla attack on the town. “There is no official law there.”

As many as four clandestine coca flights arrive daily at the Uchiza municipal airport, usually around dawn, a U.S. official said. To make that possible, the traffickers have spread their wealth.

“All the police have to do is stay in their barracks and get paid,” he said. “The flights are sometimes stacked up, two or three, waiting to come in.”

In a part of the world where even governments are desperately poor, coca production brings $200 million to $400 million into Peru and $300 to $400 million into Bolivia each year, so incentives for stricter control are minimal. And with government control lax at best, and smuggling a way of life, making the transition from contraband electronics, say, to cocaine, is not a moral problem for some people.

In Bolivia, wide-scale corruption and powerful growers’ unions are as daunting an adversary as Peru’s guerrillas.

Bolivian peasants happily accept $800 an acre from the government to stop growing coca, then merely replant elsewhere. Bolivian coca acreage increased by 20% last year despite a dramatic rise in eradication, according to U.S. estimates.

“They’re not stupid,” said a DEA field agent who has worked in the Chapare River basin, Bolivia’s equivalent of the Upper Huallaga Valley. “They are reducing, but they are going further back in and planting again.”

Jorge Alderete, who until recently was the government undersecretary in charge of narcotics matters, said traffickers also have taught the peasant growers to turn the leaves into paste, using a plastic-lined pit in the ground, water and a few chemicals such as lime, kerosene and acid.

“They are obligating the campesinos to become manufacturers of paste,” he said. “Lamentably for the campesinos, they are incorporating them en masse into a criminal activity.”

But the kingpins of cocaine-related criminal activity, the much-feared Medellin and Cali cartels believed to supply up to 80% of the United States’ cocaine, have always been in Colombia.

And these brutal kingpins have “a track record of killing--not a false or hollow threat,” the chief of DEA’s cocaine investigations, Charles J. Gutensohn, said in an interview in Washington.

Flights from Peru and Bolivia enter freely and land at jungle airstrips. “They come over the areas that are not populated, where there is a lot of guerrilla pressure and very little authority in terms of police and military,” said the DEA agent in Bogota, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “I don’t see a solution in the near future.”

Still, there are successes. In one raid last January, drug agents destroyed a complex of 26 labs in the Middle Magdalena Valley of central Colombia. The raid broke up what authorities called the biggest cocaine lab ever discovered: The chemicals alone were enough to make more than 100 tons of coke--perhaps a year’s worth of American consumption.

But just 2,600 pounds of refined coke was found, according to police. The lab complex was spread through forested ranch lands in different units, linked by shortwave radio, to allow others to escape if one unit was hit.

Such vast, compartmentalized production capacity reflects the latest innovation in refining--designed to maximize the scale of production while minimizing losses from raids. Officers say the complex was controlled by Pablo Escobar, a reputed Medellin leader named in a drug indictment in Florida in March. Dozens of people were arrested but, as usual, neither Escobar nor other cartel leaders were caught.

“Because of the impotence of the justice system, we’re unable to get the big figures,” the DEA attache in Bogota said. “They are untouchables in Colombia right now.”

In the past, Colombia traffickers did the final refining of virtually all Bolivian and Peruvian coca in Colombia. But Travis Kuykendall, acting DEA attache in Bolivia, estimated that 30% of Bolivian cocaine no longer goes through Colombia, because Bolivian traffickers want a bigger share of the wholesale price that cocaine commands on U.S. and European markets.

Some shipments, he said, are going north by light plane to the western United States, with fueling stops in Central America and Mexico.

“As the Bolivians become more sophisticated and more traveled, they are beginning to develop their own markets in the United States, mostly on the West Coast,” he said. “The Peruvians are doing the same thing. . . . California is the prime place.”

Bolivian drug chief Alderete acknowledged that his country’s traffickers also are beginning to set up their own trafficking routes--ironically, bypassing the Colombians in the same way that the Colombians are now bypassing Mexican traffickers in transshipments through the United States’ southern neighbor.

In South America, one of the outlets for Bolivian traffickers is Paraguay. Authorities traced the travels of the woman who had checked the errant suitcase on the flight to Miami. When she returned to Asuncion, the capital, police followed her and tapped her phone calls. The investigation led to four arrests and the seizure of 268 kilograms (a kilo is 2.2 pounds) of cocaine bound for Europe.

Investigators also learned that at least seven or eight shipments had preceded the one that went awry, involving at least 800 kilograms of cocaine from December, 1987, to June, 1988. In general, according to authorities, most cocaine bound for Europe is sent through Madrid, Zurich, Copenhagen and Rome.

The Paraguayan case also raised the specter of the kind of official protection that had long been whispered about in the social circles of Asuncion and publicly attacked by former U.S. Ambassador Clyde Taylor.

The alleged ringleader--said to have frequently flown a small plane from Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with shipments of cocaine--was identified as Roberto Paredes, the son of senior air force Col. Adolfo Paredes, a close friend of Stroessner, who fell from power in a coup in February.

The cocaine was allegedly stored in the elder Paredes’ small airline’s hangar at the Asuncion airport. During the inquiry, the father removed a safe from his son’s house that investigators believe might have contained key evidence. The empty safe was found in the family’s airline hangar. Roberto Paredes is in hiding, and the case is pending.

Other recent cases underline Paraguay’s transit role:

-- West German businessman Erich Bunte, a Paraguayan resident with a history of fraud convictions over two decades, was arrested in Brussels in August, 1987, along with a Paraguayan associate, and accused of shipping 115 kilograms of cocaine hidden in hollowed-out coconut soap bars. Bunte accused former Interior Minister Sabino Montanaro of involvement.

-- Roberto Gallucci, a daring pilot for the “French Connection” heroin trafficking ring in the late 1960s, was killed in late 1987 when his small plane crashed into a mountain in Argentina. The wreckage was surrounded by white powder--about 200 kilograms of cocaine. Gallucci, a Brazilian living in Paraguay, was flying south to Chile, not a conventional drug trafficking path. But he apparently was en route to Miami via Chile, Peru, Panama and Jamaica.

The man who overthrew Stroessner on Feb. 3, his second in command, Gen. Andres Rodriguez, has denied accusations that he too had protected drug smuggling in the past. After taking power, Rodriguez immediately vowed that Paraguay would reclaim its good name by coming down hard on drug trafficking. One of his first official acts was to approve the aerial spraying of marijuana fields in the north of the country, which began early this month with U.S. help.

Tailor-Made Brazil

Sharing borders with Paraguay, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, Brazil is also seen now as a nation with enormous potential for cocaine trafficking. Indeed, with its vast Amazon interior, an impressive infrastructure and the continent’s only production of high-quality ether needed for cocaine manufacturing, Brazil is tailor-made for drug traffickers.

“It’s the next frontier,” a narcotics official with the State Department said. “If we get good at controlling the problem in Andean countries, I see the bad guys just moving over the border into the wilderness there. Brazil is so huge.”

Brazilian epadu, a local variety of coca grown by Indians in the Amazon jungle, also has aroused concern as a potential source for the traffickers. Its quality is lower than that of coca, but it is produced in vast amounts.

Federal police in Brazil reported confiscating more than five times as much cocaine in 1988 as in 1982. Refining has burgeoned since 1985, when a crackdown on contraband ether and acetone shipments apparently encouraged traffickers simply to move the production into Brazil itself.

An example of the circuitous routes now used by smugglers emerged last year, when DEA agents in St. Petersburg, Fla., found 7,200 pounds of cocaine meticulously hidden in timber aboard the freighter Amazon Sky. The ship had loaded the lumber in Brazil and sailed up the Amazon into Colombia, where smugglers bored holes in the wood, hid the cocaine and carefully covered the holes. The ship then went all the way back down the Amazon and on to Florida.

Using such commercial shipments for cocaine smuggling has become common, because it maximizes profits and is hard to detect without a tip-off. In October, 1986, agents in West Palm Beach, Fla, found 6,600 pounds of cocaine in two containers of furniture shipped from Venezuela. And in Argentina, police broke up a ring smuggling cocaine in frozen lobster crates.

Venezuelan officials estimate that one to three tons of cocaine pass through their country each month, drawing in people from all levels of society. Last year, a Roman Catholic priest from a small mountain town was arrested at the Caracas airport while trying to smuggle 46 pounds of cocaine to Spain.

With its 1,300-mile border with Colombia and direct flights to the United States, Venezuela is not only a transshipment point but “also is being used as a place for meetings between traffickers and customers from other countries,” a DEA agent said.

Another transit point is Ecuador, on the northwestern shoulder of the continent, now used primarily to move cocaine base to Colombia, by river craft and small plane, and as a shipping point to send refined cocaine to market.

It is the only country to have virtually wiped out its coca production, in a model program during the early 1980s, said DEA agent Mike Kane, the agency’s staff coordinator for Ecuador in Washington. But he added, “Ecuador is very important . . . for precursor and essential chemicals being diverted to traffickers.”

Indeed, U.S. officials see the control of precursor chemicals through countries such as Paraguay and Ecuador as a key to breaking the cocaine chain. Many of the chemicals come from the United States and some from West Germany. According to Gene Haislip, deputy assistant DEA administrator, a new U.S. law regulating 20 chemicals should help curtail their diversion into cocaine production.

Many Latin American officials, who have been on the front line of the often-deadly campaign, have long criticized the United States for emphasizing eradication and interdiction instead of reducing demand at home. They have expressed satisfaction at the change in tone by American policy-makers in the last year or two--principally the growing recognition that curtailing the demand is the final solution.

A recent report on narcotics control by the House Foreign Affairs Committee emphasized that point. “The solution to the narcotics trade will not be found overseas,” it said. “Enforcement efforts can only provide breathing space until consuming countries can implement meaningful demand reduction programs.”

Hopes for successful solutions in Latin America, the report added, are dimmed by a litany of problems: “A lack of resources due to difficult economic situations, low pay for police and military personnel, pervasive corruption, difficult terrain and, in many cases, a lack of government control over large areas in narcotics-producing regions.”

And a U.S. State Department report acknowledged, “For all (the) country-by-country progress, no real progress was made in a regional approach to cocaine control. When we look at the cocaine ‘big picture,’ it still remains discouraging and suggests that the current direction of Latin American cocaine control efforts may need to be reassessed.”

Meanwhile, Latin American nations themselves have also recognized that the drug problem is not one that afflicts only the gringos to the north. Bolivia, Peru and Brazil all have growing addict populations, often addicted to a crude form of coca paste not unlike the American scourge, crack.

In “Little Chicago,” a shabby neighborhood of Tingo Maria, the damage is apparent even in the shadow of the Peruvian coca ridges. Scores of young men stagger about the lanes in a bleary-eyed stupor; they are hopelessly hooked on the paste. Shining Path (Sendero Luminoso) guerrillas recently came in and killed seven of the men, accusing them of committing crimes to feed their habit.

It may have been Sendero Luminoso as well that attacked the garish home across town of the Cabrero brothers, among the region’s known cocaine merchants. The three-story house was gutted in a firebomb attack a few weeks ago, and the Cabreros fled. Then again, the assault may have been the work of rival traffickers, or even the Peruvian security forces.

The wrecked house, its walls daubed with revolutionary and anti-coca eradication slogans in a neighborhood of shanties, serves as testimony to a truth understood firsthand across broad swathes of South America: narcotrafico, fed by the demand in the Northern Hemisphere, is enriching a few at the cost of unraveling the fabric of several increasingly desperate nations.

Times staff writers William R. Long in Rio de Janeiro and Ronald J. Ostrow and Douglas Jehl, both in Washington, contributed to this story.

THE SOCIAL COSTS OF COCAINE

According to a 1988 study by the Los Angeles County Department of Health Services, the total drug-related cost in 1987 for the county was $1.23 billion, one-third of which--or an estimated $400 million--was cocaine-related. This includes costs to the criminal justice system, medical emergency costs, costs to victims, costs of lost productivity and lost wages and costs of prevention and treatment. Some figures from the report:

Cocaine accounted for over half of the illegal drugs seized in the county in 1986.

In 1987, 38% of the jail inmates in Los Angeles County used cocaine at least once, compared to 12% of the general population.

The National Drug Abuse Warning Network estimated there were 24,000 emergency room admissions nationwide due to drug overdose in 1987, with the majority involving cocaine.

THREE FORMS OF COCAINE

Cocaine is extracted from leaves of the coca plant ( Erythroxylon coca ). It can also be made synthetically. Three forms of cocaine are powder (cocaine hydrochloride), paste (cocaine sulfate) and crystal, or “crack.”

Cocaine hydrochloride is extracted and the solvent is evaporated. The substance is redissolved, crystallized, then reduced to a powder.

Cocaine sulfate is a paste formed during the processing of coca leaves. Users mix it with marijuana or tobacco and smoke it.

Crack is made with equal amounts of cocaine and baking soda which is heated, then dried. The mixture hardens, then is “cracked” into chunks.

Sources: Van Nostrand’s Scientific Encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Americana