The Drug Thugs

By Jill Smolowe

Deep in the lush tropics near Quepos, a sleepy town on the Pacific side of Costa Rica, lies an airfield that services only small propeller-driven planes. Not long ago, Costa Rican security forces caught a band of smugglers on the runway as they unloaded 1,100 lbs. of cocaine. The cache, provided by Colombian drug lords, had been flown to Quepos aboard a Panamanian-registered Cessna piloted by a Colombian. A Costa Rican produce-export company served as the front. Had the operation run its course, the shipment would have continued on to Miami for sale in the U.S. The proceeds, estimated at $50 million, would have been laundered in a Panamanian or a Bahamian bank. And the money would have been spent by the men who masterminded the deal, in this case Cuban- Americans and Colombians.

The incident in Quepos provides a hint of the reach of a multitentacled narcotics conspiracy that has grown into one of the hemisphere's most pernicious forces. Capitalizing on the seemingly insatiable appetite for drugs in the U.S., Latin America's cocaine and marijuana czars have extended the scope and volume of their operations well beyond what Southeast and West Asia's more established opium lords ever dreamed of. Greasing palms and, when necessary, using the gun, the drug barons have spawned corruption from Bolivia to the Bahamas, and in more than one country are threatening to supplant elected government as the reigning power. Warns John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads a Senate panel that is investigating the problem: "There is a whole new force in our hemisphere. The power of the narcodollar is buying countries and altering geopolitics."

In the U.S. as well as Latin America, officials insist that the drug merchants have been so successful at subverting law-and-order that they have superseded leftist insurgents as the main threat to the region's fragile governments. The tentacles of the narcotraficantes reach up to top officials and down to lowly policemen. With a wink and a nod from cooperative judges and prison officials, notorious narcotics peddlers have strolled out of jails in Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia. Customs and immigration officials in Costa Rica and the Bahamas look the other way as some of the hemisphere's most wanted men have walked from their private planes to waiting limousines. Police and military officials in Honduras and Panama have tipped off traffickers to impending raids. Efforts to slow the trade, from destroying coca crops to extraditing traffickers, are bumping against the drug barons' bloody blueprint for expansion.

The secrets of the drug lords' success? Greed and fear, or, as Colombians call it, plomo o plata (lead or silver), meaning take the money or the bullet. The lure is rarely subtle. Last fall, for instance, agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) discovered a freshly dug tunnel less than 100 ft. from the prison cell near Mexico City that houses Rafael Caro Quintero, one of Mexico's most notorious traffickers. Preparations were made to move him to another building. Then a prison official received an envelope in the mail. It contained cash, pictures of his children and a description of their daily routine. Plans to transfer Caro Quintero were quietly dropped.

For years, the Latin American drug business was dominated by Mexican marijuana and heroin dealers. Now cocaine has replaced marijuana as the hemisphere's most troublesome -- and most lucrative -- drug, and the Mexicans, though still flourishing, have been surpassed in wealth and political influence by Colombians. In little more than a decade the Medellin cartel -- a small group of men who operate out of Colombia's second largest city -- has come to dominate the cocaine business, as well as the economies and governments of several countries.

The cartel, operating through a wide network of associates, controls a tightly organized enterprise. Coca leaves are grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, where they are turned into a thick paste. The paste is shipped to processing laboratories, most of them in Colombia, where it is converted into the powder that drug users, especially in the U.S., consume. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and the Bahamas are among the favored transshipment points. Profits are usually laundered in Panama and invested in the U.S.

The cartel, which supplies 80% of the world's cocaine, has come to be recognized as a law unto itself. Its vast financial resources and revenues, which run to the billions, have enabled the cocaine lords to wield immense political power. "Drug money has contaminated the whole system," says Colonel Orlando Pena Angarita, commander of Colombia's investigative police force. "There isn't anywhere that is clean anymore." Reflecting the concern, an antidrug program unveiled in January by Colombia's President, Virgilio Barco Vargas, is called "Decree for the Defense of Democracy."

President Barco's crusade followed the assassination two months ago in Medellin of Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jimenez, his Attorney General. Hoyos was gunned down by unidentified men, thought to be in the pay of the drug bosses, after he dismissed two judges and ordered the investigation of five other government officials. He had acted after a local judge released Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, one of the cartel's five leaders, from a Bogota prison. Hoyos was the latest victim in a long list of Colombian officials and prominent citizens killed by the drug brigades. The roster includes a Justice Minister, 21 judges, scores of policemen and soldiers, a newspaper editor and more than a dozen other journalists.

The cartel's gunmen are thought to have struck as far away as Eastern Europe; a year ago Enrique Parejo Gonzalez, Colombia's Ambassador to Hungary, was ambushed in Budapest. Last November men armed with guns attacked the home of Juan Gomez Martinez, a candidate for mayor of Medellin who vows to fight the drug scourge if he wins an election scheduled for March 13. They missed their target, and Gomez Martinez now campaigns under the protection of six bodyguards.

Andres Pastrana Arango, a mayoral candidate in Bogota, also ran afoul of the cartel. Two months ago, he was kidnaped from his office and taken, blindfolded, to a hideout near Medellin. After seven days he was released. Police raided the house where he had been held and uncovered a cache of weapons that included more than a dozen U.S.-made AR-15 rifles as well as Austrian-manufactured assault weapons and Israeli Uzi submachine guns. Also found were assorted 9-mm pistols, infrared night-vision scopes and a sniper rifle. "They have the kind of arms you only see in Rambo movies," says William Jaramillo Gomez, the mayor of Medellin. "We are suffering because of a lack of international solidarity in the fight against drugs."

With the drug merchants increasingly brazen, Colombia is slipping into the kind of lawlessness that may someday risk comparison with Lebanon's. Last year most of the 3,000 murders in Medellin had to do with drugs. "Our way of life is being threatened," Bogota Prosecutor Francisco Bernal Castillo told TIME last month. Bernal, still reeling from the shock of the assassination of Hoyos, who had been his superior, was carrying a pistol in his waistband and was accompanied by a bodyguard. Last week Bernal fled to the U.S. after receiving death threats from the Medellin cartel.

Also last week, Alfredo Gutierrez Marquez, the new Attorney General, shocked law enforcement officials at home and abroad when he suggested that the only way to fight cocaine trafficking was to legalize the drug and possibly negotiate with the cartel. "The fight against drug dealing is useless," Gutierrez asserted. "It's time we stopped playing the fool." Gutierrez's proposal reflects the desperation Colombian officials feel as the drug lords gain strength. More and more Colombian lawyers refuse judicial appointments, fearing they will become marked men.

Peasants tell an entirely different story. To them, the drug lords are Robin Hoods, providing housing, roads and money. Pablo Escobar-Gaviria, the acknowledged head of the Medellin cartel, has built soccer fields, a zoo and an entire suburb of low-cost housing. The cartel even fields political candidates. A case in point: Cartel Member Carlos Lehder-Rivas is running for a state legislative seat in this month's elections. Never mind that Lehder is in a Jacksonville jail while on trial for drug trafficking.

If Colombia's political leaders are being challenged by the drug dealers, some of Panama's leaders are the drug dealers. Two federal indictments were unsealed in Florida last month charging General Manuel Antonio Noriega with an assortment of crimes, among them drug trafficking and money laundering. Witnesses who testified before Senator Kerry's subcommittee charged that ! Noriega and his cronies institutionalized corruption, putting the country's military services, corporations, banks and airfields at the disposal of the traffickers in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Perhaps the most startling testimony was offered by Jose Blandon Castillo, the former director of Panamanian political intelligence and a Noriega adviser until the two men had a falling-out earlier this year. Blandon branded Noriega's Panama a "criminal empire" and cataloged its alleged sins: bribery, kickbacks, money laundering, arms trafficking, kidnaping, murder. Warned Blandon: "This is a new type of political, economic and financial power, one which can even have an influence here in the United States."

Convicted Trafficker Leigh Bruce Ritch of the Cayman Islands and Money Launderer Ramon Milian Rodriquez, a Cuban-born American, described some of the services provided by Noriega and his associates in exchange for a percentage of the drug proceeds: transit from airports and docks in guarded cars and armored trucks, round-the-clock bodyguards for leading dealers, limousines, apartments, bank accounts, even planes to fly to and from Colombia to drum up new business.

It is hardly news in Washington that the drug thugs can undermine the integrity of vital institutions. The Bahamas, known among drug runners as "our aircraft carrier," serve as a transshipment point. Senate hearings last May and again last week pointed accusingly at the government of Prime Minister Lynden Pindling. Similar charges are now surfacing in the Jacksonville trial of Cocaine Kingpin Lehder, who in the late 1970s acquired parts of Norman's Cay, using its 3,000-ft. runway as a refueling point for drug loads. Former Lehder associates have testified that Pindling and other officials were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to ensure smooth transit. Pindling denies the charges.

A more recent safe haven for the traffickers is Honduras. Its location, only a few hours' flying time from Florida, and its many secluded airstrips make Honduras an ideal transit point. Last November a shipment of mahogany boards arriving in Florida from Honduras was packed with 8,052 lbs. of cocaine. A few days later the Honduran military attache in Colombia, Colonel William Said Speer, was linked to traffickers when Cartel Member Ochoa was arrested while driving Said's $80,000 sports car in Colombia. "The upper echelon of our military has been corrupted," charges a Honduran official.

The Colombian imprint deepened when Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran drug dealer, returned from Colombia in 1986 and settled in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Matta, who has been described as a chief contact between the Medellin suppliers and Mexican smugglers, is wanted by the DEA in connection with the 1985 murder in Mexico of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar. In Honduras, which does not allow extradition, Matta is living the good life, flamboyantly dispensing money to the poor who line up outside his palatial estate. His assets are said to amount to more than $1 billion; he reportedly paid $2 million in bribes to facilitate his 1986 escape from a Colombian prison. Honduran officials are so concerned by Matta's activities that they have invited the DEA to reopen its office in Tegucigalpa, closed six years ago.

Costa Rica, by contrast, seems an unlikely target for the Medellin cartel. The country has no army, is not dominated by greedy generals or politicians, and is proud of a democratic tradition. Yet Costa Rica's ports and its more than 200 rural airstrips have become key transit points for cocaine cargos. In recent years the Costa Rican business community has noticed that shipments of perishable products receive a less rigorous Customs inspection than nonperishable goods upon entering the U.S. Thus they are often used to conceal drugs.

The spotlight may soon shift to Haiti. Leon Kellner, the U.S. attorney in Miami who prepared one of the two pending cases against Noriega, is concluding an investigation of Haitian Colonel Jean-Claude Paul for allegedly helping the Medellin cartel move cocaine into the U.S. Paul, who commands an infantry battalion in Port-au-Prince, is widely regarded as Haiti's most powerful military man. For more than a year Haitian exiles have suspected that the airstrip on Paul's ranch, across a valley from Port-au-Prince, is a refueling point for U.S.-bound cargoes of cocaine. Paul's former wife was arraigned in Florida on drug charges a year ago and remains on the run.

In Bolivia and Peru, where the cocaine trail begins, governments have made considerable progress toward cleansing themselves of corruption. While some high-level bribery persists, both governments must convince poor farmers that they should get out of the coca business and give up the $1,000 the cartel pays for each 2.5 acres planted in the leaf. The local poseros, or processors, who grind the leaves into paste, are paid even better, which enables them to . acquire four-wheel-drive vehicles and color television sets. "It is an unbalanced and unfair fight," says Juan Carlos Duran, Bolivia's Interior and Justice Minister. "Drug kingpins work in terms of millions of dollars, while we have to do it in terms of cents."

For Mexican farmers, the patronage of local drug dons often means the difference between eating and going hungry. "What choice do we have?" asks a peasant in the state of Guerrero who earns $10 a day from his poppy field, $8 more than the agricultural farmers. "We have to live." In Sonora the tale is told of an up-and-coming trafficker, known as El Cejaguera (Blond Eyebrows), who visited several drought-stricken farms, handed the proprietors cash- stuffed envelopes, then disappeared without a word.

Until recently it was assumed in Mexico that the country's drug problems were not as grave as Colombia's. Local moguls oversaw marijuana and poppy harvests; many made money; no one got hurt. Then on Feb. 1, when 22 suspected narcotics traffickers were arrested in three Mexican states, it became increasingly clear that Mexico had become yet another way station for Medellin cartel business. Six of the detainees were Colombians believed to be midlevel operatives for the cartel. When Mexican federal police inspected a warehouse the Colombians used in Sonora, they found 100 AK-47 assault rifles, 65,000 rounds of ammunition, 92 bayonets and six infrared night scopes. Said a high- level Mexican official: "If Mexico allows itself to get caught up in the arms-for-drugs cycle that Colombia is in, I think the entire tissue of society could be in danger of collapse."

While acknowledging serious problems, officials from President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado on down insist that drug corruption infects only the lower levels of the federal government and the provincial police forces. U.S. investigators disagree. Not only is Mexico the largest exporter of heroin and marijuana to the U.S., they say, but 40% to 75% of the region's cocaine hopscotches its way north to the U.S. through Mexico. "The major traffickers in Mexico can't operate without the assistance of Mexican officials," asserts a senior Customs agent. "So we're focusing on the chief Mexican law- enforcement officials."

As a result of DEA and Customs probes in Mexico, several senior officials have been linked to drug traffickers. U.S. investigators are also pursuing allegations that one Cabinet-rank official accepted payoffs from dealers. At the state level, corruption appears rampant. One DEA investigation tied a large drug operator both socially and financially to five former state governors and at least one current governor. "Corruption has penetrated all levels of the Mexican government," says a ranking U.S. law-enforcement official. "It's vertical, it's horizontal and it's total."

The harsh tone reflects the strain in U.S.-Mexican relations that set in following the torture-murder three years ago of DEA Agent Camarena. In December a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted nine people, including Drug Barons Caro Quintero and Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, and three former Mexican police officials. U.S. authorities charge that the Mexican police hindered the investigation and are still withholding evidence that might help to arrest other suspects.

Upset by U.S. complaints, Mexican officials point out that in the same year in which Camarena was murdered, twelve members of a Mexican antidrug unit were killed, presumably by drug thugs. The Mexicans note that the estimated $130 billion spent annually on drugs by U.S. users could pay off the entire Mexican foreign debt. Complains Leonardo Ffrench, a press officer at the Mexican embassy in Washington: "It is deeply unfair and even ridiculous that some officials of a country like the United States, which has not been able to solve its own drug problems, keep blaming other countries with a lot fewer resources."

Some Latin American officials go further, laying the entire blame for their drug problems on the U.S. "If there wasn't any demand in the U.S.," says Colombian Justice Minister Enrique Low Murtra, "it wouldn't be grown and produced here." U.S. officials counter that it is illegal production that gives rise to consumption. But such finger pointing, satisfying as it might be, is increasingly hollow. While the U.S. is without question the world's biggest market for narcotics, some of the drug-exporting countries are developing a taste for the goods. In Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, consumption of basuco, a low-quality coca derivative, has reached levels that frighten health experts.

As such problems multiply, Latin Americans -- and even some U.S. officials -- have come to question the Reagan Administration's commitment to fighting the drug blight. Despite Nancy Reagan's much vaunted Just Say No campaign, the Noriega indictments and the Kerry hearings suggest that the Reagan Administration has selectively ignored some narcotics dealing. Says Representative Larry Smith, a Florida Democrat who heads a congressional task force on narcotics: "You can't tell people 'Just Say No' at home, and then turn a blind eye on the diplomatic front."

Several members of Congress have pressed for the U.S. to get tough with foreign governments that fail to make a good-faith effort at halting the drug trade. Each year the President must "certify" whether drug-trafficking countries have made progress. Those that are "decertified" lose U.S. aid, trade preferences and other economic benefits. There is particular pressure in Congress to punish Panama and Mexico. This week President Reagan is expected to decertify Panama. Mexico, however, will probably receive only warnings and be exempted from economic sanctions on the ground that greater punishment might tend to destabilize it and thus thwart U.S. security interests.

The Reagan Administration prefers to push for tough extradition treaties that can put drug thugs away in U.S. prisons. Extradition appears to be one weapon that the narcotraficantes truly fear. A cartel-sponsored group calling itself the Extraditables has waged a campaign of intimidation against law- enforcement officials, taking as its motto "We prefer a grave in Colombia to a jail in the United States." Although a frightened Colombian Supreme Court struck down the country's extradition treaty with the U.S. last June, even talk of extradition sends the cartel into a fury. On Jan. 24, Colombia's drug lords declared "total war" on anyone who favors extradition. The next day Attorney General Hoyos was assassinated.

A measure that offers slightly more promise is eradication. In Bolivia, a U.S.-sponsored program has resulted in the destruction of some 3,000 of 88,000 acres of coca plants. A Peruvian police raid last November took 57,200 lbs. of coca paste and 880,000 lbs. of coca leaves out of circulation. But while it makes sense to tackle the drug problem at its source, the narcotics trade is proving to be hydra-headed: as soon as one area is cleared, another opens up. "Eradicating crops has the same effect as an atomic bomb," says a Mexican official. "It destroys what it hits, but the contamination spreads all around."

The same can be said of attempts at interdiction. For each shipment discovered in such transit countries as Panama, Costa Rica and Honduras, several others coast through. Yet U.S. officials nonetheless believe that if drug dealers feel pressured, they may resort to riskier routes and contacts, making their organizations more vulnerable to penetration.

Short of a total turnaway from drug use in the U.S., none of these methods will by themselves wipe out the narcotics scourge. What is required is a campaign that combines all of them, pursued by every government in the hemisphere and adequately funded by the only country that can afford it, the U.S. Also needed is a more vigorous program of drug education and prevention in the country with the most abusers, the U.S. Though the drug traffickers seem to have the momentum to carry on, the forces of law-and-order are making some gains. U.S. military advisers are quietly training Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian police units for such basic maneuvers as helicopter raids on processing plants. The Mexican military is waging a campaign to persuade farmers in poppy-growing areas to switch to other crops. "Ultimately, this is a battle for minds and will," says U.S. Attorney Robert Merkle, who is prosecuting the case against Lehder. "It is a genuine war."

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty and Elaine Shannon/Washington and John Borrell/Bogota