The Flow Goes On

On a routine coastal patrol last week, Panamanian police noticed two dozen shrimp boats clustered near the island of Cebaco, on the Pacific coast. Suspicious, officers boarded one of the craft and discovered two packages containing 15 kg of cocaine. For Nestor Castillo, police chief of Veraguas province, it was a distressingly familiar episode. "In the past year we are getting flooded with cocaine processed in Colombia," he says. "More than ever before."

Panama, with 1,550 miles of scalloped Atlantic and Pacific coastline, remains a major transshipment point for cocaine moving from South America to the U.S. and Europe. A July report by Washington's General Accounting Office claims that even more drugs are moving through Panama today than before the American invasion of December 1989. That is worrisome for the Bush Administration, which had hoped the removal of General Noriega would curtail drug smuggling through Panama.

Noriega's arrest did disrupt the Panamanian operations of Colombia's Medellin cartel, which allegedly paid the general millions of dollars for passage through the isthmus. But the unexpected result, U.S. experts say, is that the rival Cali cartel established a base in Panama and has since inundated the country -- along with Mexico, Guatemala and the Caribbean -- with vast quantities of cocaine destined for the U.S. and Europe.

Panamanian President Guillermo Endara's nascent antidrug force is starting to score some seizures, thanks to an infusion of U.S. aid, but it remains badly outmanned and outgunned by the narco-traficantes. Says a senior official of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration: "The Endara government has had to create a viable antinarcotic unit from nothing. In our view it has done an excellent job."

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CREDIT: TIME Chart

CAPTION: Average monthly cocaine seizures in Panama.