CARIBBEAN BLIZZARD

By CATHY BOOTH/SAN JUAN

IT'S ANOTHER WARM EVENING ON ST. Kitts, and the customers gather at Fisherman's Wharf to drink Carib beer, eat lobster tails and listen to the pulsing beat of soca music. Outside, crickets chirp and waves murmur on the beach. The air is soft, the breeze sweet. It's hard to imagine a cozier, more peaceful spot to unwind from winter's onslaught, which explains why every year at this time thousands of sun-starved American and European tourists migrate to St. Kitts by plane and cruise ship. Most of them are unaware that the sleepy little isle also accommodates a more sinister group of visitors, emissaries of the Colombian drug lords who have established a thriving cocaine-transshipment base there.

Over the past two years, a series of drug-related murders and disappearances has rocked the island. On a Sunday fishing trip, a former St. Kitts U.N. ambassador, who had been implicated in laundering drug money, simply vanished with his wife and four friends. The son of a Deputy Prime Minister, suspected of stealing drugs from smugglers, was slain; he and his girlfriend were found burned to death in a sugarcane field. Two of the dead man's brothers were later arrested on gun-possession and drug-trafficking charges. While investigating the case, the island's police superintendent was assassinated.

At Fisherman's Wharf the locals can talk of nothing else. "For the first time, we woke up and found there were drug murders," says a businessman. "This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen on a little island like St. Kitts." No it isn't, not on St. Kitts or any of the other outcroppings of paradise that fleck the Caribbean. Yet the islands now play a major role in the international drug trade, with all its attendant corruption and violence.

Most of the cocaine that reaches the U.S. arrives from Colombia by way of Mexico. As the authorities have put pressure on that route, however, the cartels have turned to the eastern Caribbean for new ones. Since 1990, seizures there have quadrupled to 18 tons of cocaine annually. Today the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration believes that more than 100 major traffickers are using the islands as storage and distribution points for both U.S. and European markets. In one of those ironies of interconnectedness the modern world seems to excel at, while the tourists are getting away from it all, the cocaine is flowing back to further blight what they're trying to escape.

The tourist guides make little mention of it, but no island is free from the new influence of the drug cartels. They stash cocaine on the U.S. Virgin Islands, and their boats lurk in the waters off St. Eustatius and Cuba. St. Lucia has a growing population of cocaine addicts and the second highest murder rate in the world. Drug gangs terrorize Trinidad. St. Martin is the new meeting place for the Colombian and Italian drug Mafias--a real Star Wars bar of drug riffraff, claim DEA agents. Antigua has become the newest offshore banking center for shady American and Russian businessmen.

The center of the Caribbean drug trade--the "new Miami"--is Puerto Rico. "Since 1990 Puerto Rico has been the focal point for the exportation of cocaine to the mainland from the Caribbean," says Felix Jimenez, who heads the DEA's office there. The island's status as a U.S. commonwealth offers traffickers an extraordinary advantage, since passengers and cargo undergo only perfunctory customs checks to enter the U.S. mainland. Once a shipment of cocaine is smuggled onto the island, it can easily be relayed to American cities.

Puerto Rico has paid a steep price for its leading role in the drug trade. Its murder rate has been higher than that of any state for three years straight. Ninety percent of all violence on the island is believed to be drug related. "San Juan has become what Miami used to be. You see 15-year-olds with guns. People are afraid to go out at night," says U.S. attorney Guillermo Gil, the victim of a carjacking by a teenager high on crack. In the summer of 1993 the drug trade had got so bad that Governor Pedro Rossello sent in the National Guard to patrol housing projects, where much of the business is conducted. Two years later, not much has changed. Judges are lenient and bail low, says Pedro Toledo, Puerto Rico's police superintendent. "We arrest people who have committed three, four, five, six murders," he says, "and yet somehow they are free on the streets."

While Puerto Rico battles drug dealers and their violence, the consequences are even more disastrous for the tiny island states that neighbor it. Their economies rely mostly on tourism and perhaps a single cash crop like bananas or sugar. That makes them vulnerable to domination by the drug lords. If large countries like Colombia can turn into "narcodemocracies," how are much smaller and more fragile nations to avoid the same fate when they have little firepower or financial incentive to fight back? "We are really worried," says Robert Gelbard, head of the State Department's Bureau for International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. "There is a substantial risk that these islands could be taken over by criminal cartel groups." He already sees "considerable influence by international drug trafficking groups in the Netherlands Antilles, St. Kitts, Nevis and Antigua."

Consider Antigua, for example, a low-lying island with beaches of soft white sand where both British royals and rockers like to vacation. Under decades of rule by Vere Bird Sr., the tiny island with a population of only 63,000 became one of the most corrupt in the region, long known for sheltering traffickers in armaments and drugs. According to U.S. intelligence sources, Bird's son Vere Jr. has been tied to a 1990 plot to establish a school that would train mercenaries to fight for the Medellin cartel. He was also involved, they say, in covert gun shipments to the cartel through Antigua, Panama and Colombia. U.S. investigators contend that the Bird dynasty--the current Prime Minister is Vere's son Lester--continues to look the other way as traffickers operate. Another son, Ivor Bird, was convicted last year of trying to smuggle 27 lbs. of cocaine onto the island. He paid a $20,000 fine and served no jail time.

A U.S. undercover agent told TIME that Americans and Russians are moving into Antigua to set up offshore banks that will launder cash from the Colombian cartels and the new Russian Mafia. The government provides cozy customs arrangements and even citizenship papers, the agent says. In one year, the number of offshore banks on Antigua has doubled to nearly 50. They operate quite openly, some legitimately. Above the local Epicurean supermarket in the capital of St. John's, 12 new banks recently set up in suites decorated with plush gray carpet, sleek dark furniture--and little else. There are no computers or bank windows to suggest a conventional bank, just a few busy employees working client transfers by phone.

Prime Minister Bird denies that Antigua cossets drug lords or money launderers, but the island is increasingly dependent on drug money for its livelihood. "Antigua has reached the stage where, if drug activities ceased to exist, the economy of the island would be in trouble," says Baldwin Spencer, head of the opposition United Progressive Party. "The talk is that if one or two ships don't reach our shores each month, it's serious."

Trinidad is another island that seems to have been lost to the drug cartels. Located only seven miles from the Venezuelan coast, it has a population of more than a million. Last November, Basdeo Panday, the leader of the sugar-industry trade union, became Prime Minister largely thanks to a campaign to stamp out the cocaine trade. But U.S. officials say that one of Panday's top advisers represents many of the island's accused traffickers, including the Dole Chadee group--believed to be the most important trafficking organization in the eastern Caribbean. Chadee is in jail in Port of Spain on suspicion of murdering one of his reputed drug associates, but witnesses against the group have a way of getting killed, their jaws shot off, their food poisoned or their families executed.

"It's the Wild West there," says Jerome Harris, the DEA agent responsible for Trinidad and five other islands. In 1993 officers from Scotland Yard investigating police corruption had to flee to a Hilton hotel after gunmen threatened them--inside local police headquarters. The violence is exacerbated by the Colombian cartels' practice of compensating local traffickers with cocaine, not cash, typically awarding them 40% of shipments. As the number of local dealers increases, competition gets stiff, resulting in more bloodshed.

Some American diplomats in the eastern Caribbean are sympathetic to the predicament of their host governments. "These islands simply don't have the resources to fight the enormity of the cartels," says Brian Donnelly, U.S. envoy in Trinidad. And Washington's cost cutters are in no mood to provide funds, although Jeanette Hyde, the ambassador to Barbados, argues that it is Washington's responsibility to get involved. "These islands are the stepping-stones that traffickers use to move drugs into the United States. It impacts our way of life," she says. Adds Ivelaw Griffith, an expert on the Caribbean drug trade at Miami's Florida International University: "Many of the economically strapped islands in the eastern Caribbean have been seduced by gobs of easy money thrown their way by high-rolling Colombian drug lords." A kilo of cocaine costing $3,000 in South America sells for $6,500 in Trinidad, upwards of $20,000 in New York City and double that in Europe. "These countries are in a situation where they can't provide for the basic needs of the population, yet they are being told to cut drug production," says Griffith. "In many cases, this is their only source of income."

Meanwhile, as the flow of drugs through the Caribbean has increased, the U.S. has reduced the amount of money it spends to interdict drug shipments from the region. Under the Clinton Administration, attention has shifted from Miami and the Caribbean to Mexico and drug-producing countries like Colombia, Bolivia and Peru. Slowly but surely, resources in the Caribbean have been stripped away. In 1992 budget cutters radically reduced U.S. surveillance in the islands, diverting nearly half the ships and almost 80% of the planes to other uses.

The current conditions result in part from the DEA's earlier success in the Bahamas. During the late 1970s, Colombian traffickers bought entire islands, built airstrips and ferried cocaine to the U.S., bribing Bahamian officials to look the other way. In a rare cooperative effort begun a decade ago, U.S. military helicopters with DEA and Bahamian drug agents on board began patrolling the islands as part of OPBAT or Operation Bahamas, Turks and Caicos. In 1988, 28 tons of cocaine were seized in the Bahamas, in contrast to only 1.7 tons last year.

Drug trafficking is like a balloon, though: squeeze it in one place and it just bulges out somewhere else. As smuggling through the Bahamas became harder and harder, the Colombians switched their channels to Mexico. Now that the U.S. is concentrating so much on Mexico, drugs have returned to the Caribbean. "They went to the point of least resistance, the eastern Caribbean, because of our success in the Bahamas," says James Milford, the chief DEA agent in Miami.

The kind of operation that stifled drug trafficking in the Bahamas is expensive--it would cost $9.7 million a year and tie up $500 million worth of military hardware. It would also require the kind of coordination between the U.S. and another country that is difficult to achieve, since most nations in the hemisphere are wary of intervention by the U.S. Allowed easy sailing in the islands, however, the drug lords will leave in their wake corruption, violence and weaker democracies up and down the Caribbean.

--With reporting by Tammerlin Drummond/Basseterre

With reporting by TAMMERLIN DRUMMOND/BASSETERRE