A Seaside Chat About Drugs

By Jill Smolowe

Even for a country so security-minded that it assigned 1,300 soldiers to protect the contestants in a beauty pageant last year, Colombia's precautions for this week's antidrug summit are extraordinarily tight. Though a spokesman for the drug cartels against which Colombia has been waging an all-out war promised that they would not make trouble, the government is taking no risks. Hundreds of Colombian and U.S. undercover agents disguised as beach vendors, taxi drivers, bellboys and happy-go-lucky tourists are prowling the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, where George Bush and the leaders of the three South American nations that are the source of virtually all the world's cocaine will hold their five-hour meeting. An additional 5,000 troops have set up pedestrian checkpoints and roadblocks. Nearby, frogmen are scouring waters for submerged bombs, and a force of jet fighters and helicopter gunships will patrol the sky.

But while the pomp and preparations make it appear that a momentous new phase of the war on the drug lords could be at hand, the reality is probably otherwise. For all the bold talk of hammering out a coordinated antidrug assault by the U.S., Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, not much is likely to happen until the post-Panama cooling of Washington's relationship with many Latin nations is reversed.

Bush originally conceived the summit during the 1988 presidential campaign as a forum for reading the riot act to Latin leaders about their failure to curb the tidal wave of cocaine that continues to flood the U.S. But that was before Colombia embarked on its brave and costly offensive against the narcotraficantes and the U.S. launched its military strike against Panamanian strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega, stoking long-standing regional resentments of gringo imperialist intervention.

So angered by the Panama invasion was Peru's lame-duck President Alan Garcia Perez that he recalled his Ambassador to Washington and vowed not to attend the summit "as long as North American troops are illegally in Panama." After an appeal from Colombia's President Virgilio Barco Vargas, Garcia had a change of heart, and he now plans to be on hand in Cartagena. But tensions were further inflamed when in the heady days after Noriega's fall, the Pentagon clumsily leaked word of its plan to station an aircraft-carrier task force in international waters off Colombia's Caribbean coast to track suspected drug- smuggling aircraft. Though U.S. officials insist that Barco had privately approved the plan, the ill-timed disclosure aroused the Colombian press to dire warnings of a "yanqui blockade." The Bush Administration promptly backed down and assured Barco that no U.S. warships would be deployed until Bogota agrees.

Thus, rather than pressuring the Latin Presidents to step up their attacks on the cocaine lords, Bush will spend much of the meeting listening to their complaints. "We're going down there in part just to let ourselves get beat up," confesses a White House official.

Bush will reaffirm U.S. commitments to a consensual approach to fighting the drug lords. He will applaud Colombia's six-month-old crackdown against the drug barons. He will offer reassurances that except for the soldiers stationed at the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, there will be no American troops left in the region after the U.S. completes the withdrawal of its invasion force from Panama, perhaps by the end of this month. Bush hopes that once those assurances are given, Barco will agree to the deployment of the antismuggling naval task force and the installation of a U.S.-built radar system that would be turned over to Colombia's antidrug forces.

For their part, the Latin leaders will reiterate long-standing claims that American consumers, not Latin suppliers, fuel the drug wars. To buttress that accusation, the Andean Presidents may even bring up the arrest on drug charges of Washington Mayor Marion Barry. The Latins will decry what they perceive as an attempt by Bush to shift the flagging need to battle international communism to an expanded offensive against a new "evil empire," this one based in Medellin. If, as one Colombian commentator warns, Bush attempts to "project the image of the defiant macho," he can expect little cooperation from his Latin friends.

All three countries will be seeking greater financial assistance from the U.S. Colombia will request trade preference for its $200 million annual export of cut flowers and a revival of the international coffee pact that lapsed last July, costing the country some $400 million. Also on the Latin leaders' wish list:

-- Concessions on foreign debts and the granting of new credits from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.

-- A share of the proceeds from confiscations of drug-related property and money, including bank accounts in the U.S.

-- Massive new infusions of direct U.S. aid -- about $1 billion each per year -- both to subsidize the war on drugs and to cushion the blow to their economies that will result if the lucrative trade in cocaine is halted.

Much of the wish list will not be realized. Last month Bush unveiled a proposed foreign aid budget for fiscal year 1991. He allocated a total of $423 million for military, law-enforcement and economic aid to the Andean nations. While the request would double the 1990 bequest, the package represents just 4% of the $10.6 billion Bush has proposed for all antidrug programs. The White House emphasizes, however, that European countries will join the U.S. in providing Andean aid.

The summit is set against the backdrop of a continuing hemispheric drug scourge that shows little sign of abating. Colombia's effort to rein in the drug lords has scored some successes. Barco told TIME, "The leadership of the drug cartels has received a major blow. A number of members of the cartels have been extradited to the U.S. to face trial. Their leaders are hiding and on the run." In the past twelve months, troops have confiscated more than 1 million gal. of precursor chemicals used in cocaine refinement and 32 tons of cocaine and coca paste, compared with 14 tons in the same period a year earlier. Sixteen suspected cartel traffickers have been captured and shipped to the U.S., and one of the most notorious kingpins, Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, has been killed.

Still, Colombia remains the cocaine capital of the world, and any claim to the contrary, says a U.S. diplomat in Bogota, "is bull." To escape the pressure in Colombia, the cartels have relocated some drug refineries to Peru and Bolivia, where 90% of all coca leaves are grown. As antidrug efforts have clogged traditional smuggling routes through the Caribbean to the East Coast, Venezuela has become an increasingly popular transshipment point for eastbound cargo. Now cocaine travels primarily from Colombia's Pacific ports, often via Costa Rica, to Mexico and on to California.

Enlarging their reach, traffickers are also moving drugs through Chile to the cartels' new growth markets in Asia, and through Brazil, Uruguay and Argentina to Europe. In anticipation of the 1992 consolidation of the European Community, the cartels have opened operations in Spain and Amsterdam. In the U.S., despite record seizures, cocaine is as freely available as ever, and as cheap. One possible reason is that the cartels may have stockpiled huge amounts of the drug inside the U.S. before the crackdown in Colombia began.

Many U.S. experts acknowledge that any effective war on drugs cannot be waged primarily on the suppliers. But the U.S. is far from devising an effective plan for reducing the insatiable demands of some 14.5 million users who spend an estimated $100 billion annually on illegal drugs. The disarray was evident again last week when the nation's drug-policy director, William Bennett, a former Secretary of Education, declared that attempts to "inoculate" young Americans against drugs through education would not work. More effective, Bennett said, would be rigorous prosecution of even casual users. Where the billions of dollars will come from to hire enough police and build enough prison cells to make such a policy more than a charade Bennett did not say.

The sad truth is that no approach the U.S. has tried, from greater involvement by the armed forces in drug interdiction to Nancy Reagan's Just Say No campaign, has done much to curb drug abuse inside its borders. Government studies of drug abuse show that the problem is deepening in the impoverished nonwhite underclass, whose swelling ranks attract little interest or sympathy from politicians and whose addicts, as a result, face long waits for slots in underfunded treatment programs. Not until the despair and alienation of that group is reversed through improved schooling, better job opportunities and a rebirth of self-respect can the U.S. and its Latin allies hope to put the drug lords out of business.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington and John Moody/San Jose