A Letter From the Publisher

By Robert L. Miller

A deep sense of irony comes over Washington Correspondent Elaine Shannon when she reports, as she did for this week's cover stories, on the growing power of drug traffickers. "In the 1960s," she says, "my generation marched for civil rights and to end the Viet Nam War. We were well educated, open, idealistic, progressive." Then, she adds, "my generation discovered drugs. I saw friends die from overdoses, go to jail for drug peddling or, if they were lucky, just burn out." Shannon finds it especially painful that millions of peace-loving, privileged young Americans provide the revenues that have allowed drug traffickers to subvert legitimate government in much of the hemisphere, a process described in this week's stories. "We seldom acknowledge this," she says. "We still talk about using drugs as a matter of personal choice. We smoke dope, while we boycott Chilean asparagus, California lettuce and South African diamonds. But we are responsible for creating an exploitative, murderous force."

That pessimism is shared by Los Angeles Correspondent Jonathan Beaty, who also reported on this week's cover and has lunched with New York Mafia heads involved in the trade. "Despite all the political verbal pyrotechnics, cocaine is cheaper and more plentiful than it ever was," says Beaty. "The drug cartels are posing a greater threat to U.S. national security than any bands of ragtag Communist insurgents. That is a lesson still to be learned."

In reporting this week's stories, Shannon joined U.S. Customs officers on a flight over the U.S.-Mexican border. She began her career in journalism as a reporter for the Nashville Tennessean while a senior at Vanderbilt University, then attended Harvard in 1974 and 1975 as a Nieman fellow. After four years as the Tennessean's Washington correspondent, she joined Newsday and then Newsweek. Since last April, TIME has become the fortunate recipient of her investigative skills and long experience in tracking the activities of U.S. drug enforcers. Desperados: Latin Drug Lords, U.S. Lawmen and the War America Can't Win, her book about the dark world of illegal drugs, will be published by Viking Penguin later this year. For this week's stories, Shannon drew upon the scores of sources she has accumulated through the years, including combatants on both sides of the drug war throughout the hemisphere. Says Shannon: "The only kind of sources I don't have are optimists."