Escobar’s surrender was ostensibly a victory for the government of President Cesar Gaviria and a turning point in Colombia’s bloody struggle against narcoterrorism. But it was a victory obtained at tremendous cost, and no one knew whether the Gaviria government had given up the war against cocaine trafficking in return for an end to the violence that has racked Colombian society for the past seven years. In an interview with NEWSWEEK, Gaviria insisted that Colombia would continue to interdict cocaine smuggling and said he was confident the cartel leaders would be convicted by Colombian courts. But many U.S. officials - and a vocal minority of Colombians - thought Gaviria had capitulated to the traffickers by agreeing to end the extradition of Colombian criminal suspects, and there was widespread doubt the cartel leaders would get more than token sentences. “I think we need to have a very candid conversation with [Colombian officials] about this,” said former drug czar William Bennett, the chief architect of Bush’s policy. “Let’s see what happens. But presuming Escobar ends up in a soft situation, I think we have to go back to the drawing board.”
That drawing board may be as big as all Latin America. In the 16 months since Bush announced his Andean strategy, the drug syndicates have begun to disperse their smuggling and cocaine-processing operations out of Colombia and into nearly a dozen different Latin American nations (map). The U.S.-backed drug war is sputtering in Bolivia and Peru, which have long been prime sources of raw coca for the cartels: according to U.S. and other experts, both countries are rapidly becoming major producers of finished cocaine as well. Cocaine trafficking is on the rise in Brazil, Venezuela, Argentina, Ecuador, Panama, Costa Rica, Paraguay and Chile, and the cartels are steadily expanding their markets in Europe. “Latin America as a whole is sliding into the drug war,” says Iban de Rementeria, a narcotics expert with the Andean Commission of Jurists. “Argentina and Brazil can see their future in Bolivia. Bolivia sees its own [future] in Peru, Peru in Colombia and Colombia in Lebanon. It’s an endless cycle.”
In military terms, Bush’s Andean offensive is in danger of being outflanked. The military analogy is accurate - for after a six-month lull caused by the Persian Gulf crisis, the Pentagon is once again fighting the Latin drug war with an array of high-tech intelligence resources. NEWSWEEK has learned that the U.S. Southern Command, headquartered in Panama, is restoring satellite and radar surveillance of cocaine-smuggling routes across the Caribbean and the Andes. SouthCom is also working to expand a pilot program called the Command Management System that will provide detailed “real time” intelligence on smugglers’ planes and processing sites to agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and Latin American police battling the traffickers. Significantly, SouthCom officers are now pushing to expand U.S. military surveillance far beyond the Andean countries - for they, too, recognize that the cartels are branching out.
A SouthCom source says the command is “trying to move to where the drug trafficking will move in the future and put a noose around its neck.” The noose is an elaborate web of electronic and human surveillance that includes satellites, AWACS and E-2C Hawkeye radar aircraft, U.S. Navy picket ships and U.S. special-forces teams deployed in Latin America. The Green Berets and military-intelligence officers are organized in tactical-analysis teams (TATs) linked by satellite to the Pentagon and SouthCom headquarters. They have already scored an operational coup. That came last Sept. 24, when 300 Bolivian police and 20 DEA agents staged a successful raid on a major cocaine-processing plant in Bolivia’s Chapare region. The plant, which produced up to 10 tons of cocaine a month, was allegedly operated by Carmelo Dominguez, 34, reputedly one of Bolivia’s biggest traffickers.
The raid set off a fire fight that left one DEA agent wounded. But Dominguez and 70 members of the organization were arrested, and the operation is regarded as a crucial test of both the TAT concept and the Command Management System. The tactical-analysis team, working through DEA agents and Bolivian police, spent months watching the organization covertly. Agents photographed gang members and their smuggling planes; nine planes were seized in the raid. It also used satellite reconnaissance, offshore radar surveillance and ground sensors to trace the gang’s smuggling patterns. SouthCom sources told The Miami Herald last week that the Pentagon is budgeting $100 million for anti-drug operations in Latin America this year and that the command is pushing for an additional $143 million to improve Caribbean radar coverage. SouthCom’s commander, Gen. George Joulwan, also convened a secret session in Panama last month to set up a regional intelligence network to track the traffickers.
No one knows whether this expansion of the U.S. intelligence effort will be enough. Cocaine’s profits are as addictive as the drug itself, not only to the traffickers but also to police, government officials and ordinary citizens of the region. Corruption is widespread, and collaboration with U.S. drug warriors is a sometime thing. In Bolivia, where the government was overthrown in 1980 by a group of so-called cocaine colonels, the commander of the special antinarcotics police resigned under pressure for alleged involvement in drug trafficking. He denied it, but the minister of the interior and the head of the national police also were ousted in the scandal. Argentina’s president, Carlos Menem, says, “We are fighting a Third World war” against cocaine. In Brazil, nearly 4,000 miles of land border are defended by 375 abysmally underpaid narcotics police. Brazil’s cocaine seizures doubled last year and are likely to redouble in 1991. The cartels are extending their smuggling routes to Brazil’s coastal cities and recruiting Brazilian distributors.
The big picture on Latin America’s cocaine insurgency is very bleak. The DEA estimates that total cocaine production has nearly doubled in two years, from 360 metric tons in 1988 to about 700 tons in 1990; that total is expected to rise to nearly 1,000 tons in 1991. The Gaviria government’s search-and-destroy campaign, though gaining ground, does not appear to have curtailed Colombia’s cocaine production significantly, and absolutely no one thinks the truce with the Medellin cartel will stop the flow of drugs.
To all this can now be added a familiar nightmare - heroin, which is making a roaring comeback in the U.S. drug market. NEWSWEEK has obtained a pessimistic DEA intelligence survey reporting that Colombian traffickers are now experimenting with opium-poppy cultivation and may well diversify into heroin sales by the mid-1990s. If so, they will be following a path now being blazed by Chinese gangs from Southeast Asia. In San Francisco last week, U.S. Customs and DEA agents intercepted 1,080 pounds of “China white” heroin worth up to $4 billion on the street. The seizure set a new U.S. record for size and value - and it was a clear indication that America’s enemies in the war on drugs have reopened an old and very dangerous second front.
