Buried By a Tropical Snowstorm

By Stephen Koepp

Not long ago in the woods of Georgia, a black bear wandering in search of food came across an air-dropped duffel bag packed with about 75 lbs. of cocaine. The animal proceeded to nibble at the coke until it died from an overdose. At about the same time in Haiti, millions of dollars' worth of poorly aimed cocaine packages fell upon an isolated farming village. The natives tried to make the mysterious substance into a whitewash for their huts but discovered it worked better as a foot powder and diaper-rash treatment. They began selling it for about $50 a kilogram (actual wholesale value: $30,000 per kg) until police heard about their windfall and carted away what was left of the drug.

Like an acid rain, cocaine is pouring from the sky and corroding everything it touches. Although the battle to keep coke and other illegal drugs out of U.S. offices and factories may be a winnable one, shutting those substances out of the country is another story. The Reagan Administration's campaign to stop the smugglers, an effort backed by $1.2 billion last year compared with $708 million in 1981, seems to make the outlaws only craftier and more cold-blooded. Total imports of heroin and marijuana have declined somewhat, but cocaine now flows into the U.S. from Latin America at a rate of roughly 125 tons a year, compared with about 58 tons in 1982. "Despite the rhetorical bravado and a few highly publicized successes, the U.S. effort has been a bitter disappointment," says Ted Galen Carpenter, a foreign-policy expert at the Cato Institute, a Washington research organization.

Because of the booming supply, cocaine users are getting far more buzz for their buck. Even though U.S. coke consumption went up 11% in 1984, the most recent year for which statistics are available, the price has dropped from $100 a gram to as low as $60 in some cities. Meanwhile, well-stocked dealers have substantially boosted the purity of street cocaine, which makes the drug more attractive than ever.

Even so, the Reagan Administration can claim some victories, notably in starting to control the growth of trafficking in the cocaine corridor of Florida and the Caribbean. "We are having a major impact on the supply side," declares John Lawn, chief of the federal Drug Enforcement Administration. The South Florida Task Force, launched by President Reagan in March 1982 and headed by Vice President Bush, has brought more personnel and high-tech gear to the task. AWACS-type aircraft and three tethered balloons --soon to be eight--provide radar to help authorities keep track of nearly every plane and ship that moves through the region.

In downtown Miami the drug busters have just finished building an ultramodern electronic command post that resembles the bridge of the U.S.S. Enterprise in Star Trek. Drug agents hover 24 hours a day over four multicolored radar screens that display the entire region's traffic. When authorities spot a suspicious craft, they quickly calculate which law- enforcement boats or planes can make the fastest interception. Then they dispatch the police craft with a state-of-the-art radio network that puts dozens of federal and local agencies on the same wavelength. Customs Service technicians built the system from scratch, starting with computer software borrowed from the Pentagon. "We're light-years ahead of the military. I'm very proud of it," says Michael Wewers, a Customs Service special agent.

Yet the show of force in South Florida has resulted in much faster growth of the smuggling business at other border crossings and landing strips from San Diego to Portland, Me. Smugglers' jets equipped with long-range fuel tanks now bypass Florida's notorious narcs and land instead in South Carolina, Tennessee or even New York's Long Island, which puts the product only a few miles from Manhattan's penthouses and discos. The influx has prompted New York Governor Mario Cuomo to assign 200 more officers to drug-enforcement squads.

The Northwest has also become a smuggler's cove. In January the Coast Guard tracked the 195-ft. Honduran freighter Eagle One as it tried to sneak up the California coast toward Seattle. Just outside Puget Sound, drug agents boarded the ship and took it into dock, where they seized 447 lbs. of cocaine in a welded-shut compartment. Says Robert Dreisbach, spokesman for the Seattle office of the DEA: "The smugglers are moving away from the heavily patrolled ports, and we are particularly vulnerable because of our less dense population along an immense amount of coastline."

By far the busiest new cocaine alley is the 2,100-mile Mexican border. "It's a sieve, and we don't have enough fingers to plug all the holes," says Drexel Watson, a senior special agent for the Customs Service. "More drugs than ever are coming in. It's pretty devastating." Mexico has become a conduit for as much as a third of the South American cocaine entering the U.S. Mexico is also grabbing larger shares of the U.S. markets for heroin and marijuana. Partly because of Mexico's economic woes, struggling farmers have boosted their crops of opium poppies and marijuana plants. U.S. consumer demand for their output has increased as well. Mexico's illicit heroin- refining labs have upgraded their equipment so that their product, previously a crude substance dubbed "Mexican brown," now competes with purer varieties from Southeast Asia. At the same time, Mexico's marijuana has made a comeback with bargain-minded smokers; it costs only $100 or less an ounce on the street, compared with $200 for California's superpotent sinsemilla.

Narcotraficantes usually have little trouble moving South American coke by plane or ship from processing plants in Colombia to stopover depots in Mexico. The next step, crossing the U.S. border, requires more subterfuge. Typical methods: flying at night to deserted airstrips in the Southwest or hiding the drugs in the axles and wheel wells of cars and trucks.

The smugglers and U.S. Customs agents play a high-stakes cat-and-mouse game at the Tijuana-San Ysidro border crossing, an inspection station that handles 27,000 vehicles a day. On one recent afternoon, a raggedly dressed vendor carrying a load of serapes could be seen watching the inspectors and tipping off the Mexican driver of a pickup truck to work his way over to lane 7, where a weary Customs officer was waving most cars through without a check. At the same time, another supposed vendor worked the other side, scrutinizing the vehicles for the Customs agents and whispering into a miniature radio when he spotted a nervous-looking driver.

The U.S. inspectors no longer have to waste time ripping apart a car to find contraband. They now wield high-tech instruments, including fiber-optic devices for examining the interiors of gas tanks and ultrasonic range finders to determine whether hollow panels really are empty. Last week the San Diego district began a policy of tougher inspections that had cars backed up for more than a mile.

Despite such scrutiny, "an astronomical amount is getting through," admits Customs District Director Allan Rappoport. Worse still, the so-called mule skinners who are caught with the shipments seldom turn out to be Mr. Big. "The people who drive the vehicles are usually very poor and uneducated," says one U.S. drug agent. "There is so much poverty in Mexico that traffickers have an unlimited labor pool. The drivers almost always keep their mouths shut, since they have been told that their wives and kids will be blown away otherwise."

U.S. agents have been hamstrung in their efforts to catch smuggling kingpins south of the border because many Mexican government officials are on the traffickers' payroll. When smugglers tortured and murdered DEA agent Enrique Camarena Salazar near Guadalajara last March, Mexican investigators seemed to be looking the other way. But honest members of Mexico's government are just as upset as Americans about the violence bred by smuggling. In a massacre last November, an army of 50 marijuana traffickers equipped with automatic weapons shot and killed 17 Mexican police officers and seven guides.

Frustrated U.S. drug busters may have decided to go outside diplomatic channels to apprehend one reputed marijuana smuggler, Rene Martin Verdugo, who is suspected of being involved in the DEA agent's killing. Verdugo, widely known as La Rana (the Frog), was walking the streets of tiny San Felipe, Mexico, on Jan. 24 when six masked men pounced on him and whisked him into an unmarked car. They drove their blindfolded captive north to an obscure stretch of the Mexican border near Calexico, Calif., where they handed him through a hole in the fence to U.S. marshals. He is now in a San Diego jail awaiting trial on smuggling charges.

Cocaine money has compromised many government officials in the Caribbean, where smugglers seek islands as rest-and-refueling stops for trips to the U.S. In the words of one disheartened religious leader in Barbados, politicians "see the glint of gold and not the blood dripping from this accursed money." In the Bahamas, an inquiry by a three-member panel implicated two Cabinet members in drug smuggling and nearly toppled the administration of Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling. Commented the Miami Herald in an editorial: "The panel portrays a country haunted by cocaine abuse, a police force riddled with corruption, lawyers perverted by greed and a government tainted by widespread influence peddling."

Most cocaine arrives in the U.S. aboard private aircraft, which the smugglers consider expendable. Even a $450,000 Cessna twin-engine plane costs far less than the millions of dollars of cocaine it can carry. The latest stunt among cocaine pilots has been to air-drop a shipment of cocaine, then put the aircraft on automatic pilot and bail out. One pilot laden down with 79 lbs. of cocaine was killed last September in Tennessee when his parachute failed.

An estimated 18% of coke shipments arrive on commercial airlines. Last month a DEA official revealed that a grand jury was preparing criminal indictments against as many as 50 Eastern Air Lines workers, mostly baggage handlers, who allegedly had smuggled a billion dollars' worth of cocaine into Miami in the cargo bellies of jets. Customs officers routinely find large caches of cocaine aboard flights from the main producing countries, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia. Inspectors at Miami International Airport found a near- record shipment of 3,227 lbs. of cocaine in January aboard a cargo jet owned by Avianca, the Colombian national airline. Agents discovered the drug when they opened 55-gal. barrels of passion fruit in syrup and found football- shaped containers of coke bobbing in the mixture.

Some airborne smugglers try to bring coke or heroin through Customs in their baggage, an old-fashioned but sometimes successful ploy. Another, potentially deadly, technique is to pack the drug in condoms and swallow them or insert them in body orifices. If the package breaks, the carrier is likely to die of an overdose. One day last November, inspectors at New York's Kennedy Airport caught 13 smugglers who had swallowed or inserted their contraband.

Besides pinching the inflow of drugs, the Government has tried to squeeze the outflow of profits. Since 1980 the Treasury Department has required financial institutions to report any transaction involving more than $10,000 in cash, a step that has sharply limited the ability of trafficking tycoons to invest or spend their money. In the past year the Government has clamped down on twelve major banks that failed to file the forms and may have been accepting drug money, wittingly or otherwise. In January the Treasury Department fined BankAmerica a record $4.75 million for such offenses.

The Administration ultimately hopes to cut smugglers off at the source by persuading producing countries to root out their drug crops. Yet despite an increase in cooperation from such nations as Thailand and Peru, many developing countries have mixed feelings about eradication programs because their peasants earn far more money cultivating opium poppies or coca plants than they would get from corn or cotton. Bolivia, for example, earns $1 billion a year from cocaine, its largest export.

Developing countries see drug abuse as America's dilemma, not theirs. Says Bolivian Interior Minister Fernando Barthelemy: "It is unfair to put most of the weight on the coca-producing countries when it is a simple law of demand. American and Western European consumers keep doping more and more. Consequently more coca is planted." For that reason, U.S. corporations that try to stem the demand for drugs are getting right to the heart of the problem.

With reporting by Jonathan Beaty/San Diego and Bernard Diederich/Miami, with other bureaus