The Lure of Cocaine

The Lure of Cocaine

The Americas: It is a sweatshop industry that taps a limitless supply of cheap labour, generates enormous profits and enjoys a base of addicted customers.

THEY have tried to stamp out cocaine for years. Governments have sprayed herbicides on fields of coca leaf. Police have raided the primitive laboratories that refine coca paste. Counter narcotics agents have seized and destroyed hundreds of tonnes of cocaine powder, arresting or killing thousands of smugglers.

Yet after 20 years and eradication programmes totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, cocaine can be bought on every continent, in virtually every major city. The drug has even survived a market decline in which the number of regular cocaine users in the United States dropped, to 1.5 million in 1995 from 5.7 million a decade before. Americans are still snorting, smoking or injecting cocaine at the rate of 240 tonnes a year, almost all of it produced in Colombia and much of it smuggled through Mexico.

The reasons for cocaine's resilience are a matter of simple economics, as interviews with the people who make, sell, use and try to destroy cocaine confirm. It is a sweatshop industry that taps a limitless supply of cheap labour, generates enormous profits for a few and enjoys a base of addicted customers. And just as any large and diffuse commercial enterprise is ultimately dependent on the favour or cooperation of officials and regulators, the cocaine trade is well oiled by corruption along the way. A draft analysis by American intelligence officials estimates that Mexican drug traffickers earn up to $10 billion a year and then dole out as much as $6 billion on bribes for Mexican officials and police officers.

The most powerful symbol of cocaine's resilience is the trail that the drug follows from leaf to crack and powder, from farmer to addict, from the Andean jungles to the New York City streets. "For a narcotics trafficker, the most valuable asset is his route," said Gen.Rosso Juan Serrano, commander of the Colombian National Police, referring not just to the physical trail, but also to the clandestine airstrips, the hidden warehouses and corrupt officials like air controllers and police along the way. And as with an octopus that grows new tentacles when old ones are damaged or cut off, the trail sprouts new paths, means of transport and markets when the old ones are attacked.

The trail starts in the Andean jungles, where peasants strip coca bushes of their oval leaves, dump the leaves in a plastic plined put and pour in kerosene or gasoline, water and, sometimes, sprinkle on cement. Barefoot, the workers stomp the mixture to press out the psychoactive alkaloids into a paste that resembles grimy snow. Across rural Colombia, thousands of laborers process the paste into the sludge that is dried to form the raw ingredient for powdered cocaine hydrochloride.

Everyday, more than two tons of powder flows through Mexico and the Carribean, with one-third of that ending up in the United States. Once cocaine was ferried by small planes. Now, to evade American radar surveillance, more and more cocaine floats north in the holds of freighters, fishing boats and yachts and every other imaginable way.

ALTEMAR RESTREPO could not earn enough cutting sugar cane to support his family. So Restrepo, a slender Colombian, followed other peasants and apprenticed himself to the making of cocaine. For four of his 25 years, Restrepo said, he has worked in the tangled jungle of southeastern Colombia, fetching the gasoline used to leach coca leaves of their alkaloids. The "cocina," or jungle laboratory where Restrepo was interviewed, consisted of six wooden maturation pens, in Which a tonne of leaves soaked in gasoline and water. Every week, he said, the laboratory produced more than 75 pounds of coca to be refined elsewhere into powdered cocaine.

"We do this because you can't raise cattle or corn in this region," Restrepo said as he fidgeted, shirtless and sweating, beside a waist-high pile of coca leaves. As a cane cutter, he said, he was lucky to earn $35 a week. For processing coca leaves he was promised $10 to $15 a day, plus a dormitory cot and food. Restrepo gave his account minutes after having been seized by Colombian narcotics police commandos who raided the laboratory, sending co-workers bolting into the jungle. He admitted having been arrested before. "I don't know who owns the patch and I don't ask," Restrepo said.

The police ripped up the pens with a chain saw and kicked over the metal drums, splattering coca base into the mud. When the officers tried to blow up what was left, the water-logged leaves refused to ignite. The police retreated under the machine gun of a hovering helicopter, leaving Restrepo looking unperturbed. "He said he had a family, so we couldn't leave his wife and children alone," Col. Leonardo Gallego, commander of the police unit, said. "I feel strongly about the plight of young men and children who get into drugs or fall in with drug-trafficking gangs."

Restrepo's employers got no such sympathy. "They only commit crimes because of cruelty and personal gain," Gallego said. "There's no regard for the country or the views of the international community. Because coca pays much better the pineapples or bananas and is easier to market, the farmers who grow it express few qualms about working for what they see as, ultimately, the Yankee dollar, though one such "cocalero," Franklin Gonzales, said he would rather sing.

But pop singing pays little. So Gonzales, a wiry 24-year-old, left his wife and young son and travelled southwest to the river town of Miraflores. He was making $30 or $40 a day tending coca fields until the National Police sprayed the with herbicide last summer. Now, Gonszales said: "It's hard. There is no money. There are people her, but not as many as before." Coca production in Colombia created boom towns out of many backwaters like Miraflores, a ramshackle settlement of whitewashed houses with metal roofs along the muddy Vaupes River. The drug lords do not bother to visit, sending commercial agents to buy the paste openly from growers.

After coca had displaced rubber as the primary crop, Miraflores swelled to 10,000 inhabitants, 600 of them prostitutes, said the Rev. Manuel Mancera, the Roman Catholic priest in the town. Coca money built a new discotheque that glitters with mirrors. Fighting and whoring became nightly diversions. Since the spraying , however, Miraflores has shrivelled to a few thousands residents. The farmers are hard put to make a living , because they have no roads to carry legal crops to market. The National Police reported that they sprayed 55,715 acres and destroyed 938 cocaine laboratories last year. But when towns like Miraflores die, traffickers find others, making alliances with leftist guerrillas who charge a tax according to the weight of cocaine passing through their territory. The government cut off deliveries of gasoline and cement to the region after discovering that extensive quantities had been diverted to process coca leaves. now, those materials are smuggled from Venezuela.

THE PROFITS of cocaine are manifested in a two-story residence that rises like a fortress above an attractive neighborhood of Cali, a fashionable western city that is the home of the world's most prominent drug cartel. The house, made of concrete, has no windows facing the street. But inside are marble floors, crystal chandeliers, furniture gilded and tasseled in Narco-Deco style and bowling lanes. The garden has an enormous swimming pool. A police specialist in the search party told an accompanying reporter that the house was worth $15 million.

The police and soldiers raided the house because its owner, Jose Orlando Henao Montoya, is suspected of being a rising drug trafficker. He was not home at the time. The closets held barely a changed of clothes. Family photographs had been stripped from silver frames. The maid said the family had left for its country ranch.

The searches began when the police, with discreet help from American agents, captured six leaders of the Cali cartel in 1995. "They were very powerful," the commander to the search team, Lt. Col. Ramiro Villalobos, said. "People were afraid of them. But not any more." But with some cartel leader's running the business by telephone from prison and new independent traffickers' taking up the slack, has the output of cocaine been stanched? Villalobos paused and replied, "We can't say its' less, no,"

The bulk of the cocaine that enters the United States passes through Mexico, with the help of Mexican crime federations that demand upto half the Colombians' cocaine and heroin in return, the Drug Enforcement Administration said. The Mexicans distribute their share through their own networks. "The Colombian narcotraffickers have very comfortable relations with the Mexican mafia," General Serrano of the Colombian police said. "It's almost a natural relationship."

The cocaine increasingly arrives in Mexico on vessels like the Don Celso. The rusty fishing boat, flying the Ecuadorean flag, ostensibly carried shrimp and tuna between Buenaventura, Colombia, and Manzanillo, Mexico. But Colombian and American agents who boarded her off Ecuador in October reported finding 12 tonnes of cocaine. Once in Mexico, the cocaine is trucked north to the U.S. border, with the connivance of corrupt government officials, federal agents said. One agent said 30 to 40 tonnes of cocaine were stockpiled in Medico, awaiting delivery to the United States.

Mexico's economic problems and double-digit unemployment help in recruiting smugglers for a relative pittance. Once smuggler was offered $500 to smuggle a load to Los Angeles and promised another $500 if he made it back, an antidrug agent said. Lose a load, however, and a smuggler can be forced to work for nothing to make it up,or the smuggler could be disfigured or killed. "The level of violence is like nowhere I've ever seen," said a federal agent in Texas.

J.J.LOPEZ stood on the concrete Bridge of the Americas in EI Paso, watching the flow of automobiles from Ciudad Juarez, a few hundred yards away. More than one million cars, many driven by commuters, cross between EI Passo and Juarez each month, giving U.S. Customs inspectors a scant 10 or 15 seconds to look over each car. Lopez, the chief customs inspector at the bridge was watched by a young man who cradled the receiver of the nearest pay telephone, about 50 yards away. nearby, his accomplice talked into a two-way radio as he surveyed the heavy traffic.

They were spotters, Lopez said, hired by the syndicate of Amado Carrillo Fuentes to tell smugglers which lanes touser or avoid. Spotters earn $25 to $50 a day for working the bridge, far more than the $25 to $40 a week that they might earn in a Juarez factory. Customs inspectors conduct two-minute blitzes in which they stop and check every car in one lane or walk through traffic with dogs trained to sniff out drugs. 'We've had people bail out of their cars and run back" to Mexico, Lopez said. To reduce chances of losing a major load, traffickers now move cocaine in quantities of a few hundred pounds. After crossing the border, loads are deposited at stash houses for consolidation.

Lopez said drugs were concealed deep inside vehicles, often behind electronic trapdoors. Inspectors have found cocaine replacing trailers insulation, inside tire rims and poured in the fuel tank to form as a sediment to be scooped out later. Sixty pounds of cocaine can fit behind some dash-boards, he said. Cocaine has even turned up in a baby's diaper. Certain other areas of the border are not even policed. Before dusk erased the shadows across the sagebrush, cactus and mesquite outside Eagle Pass, Texas, the rancher coaxed his Jeep to the rim of a bluff overlooking the Rio Grande. Rifle at hand, he watched for the smugglers who walk their loads across the placid river and onto his 165-acre spread.

No fences or barriers define the border here. The rancher would not allow his name to be used fearing would not allow his name to be used, fearing smugglers might retaliate. "They're not looking for trouble," he said. "But if you run into them, They're armed and you don't have a chance." He used to call Border Patrol agents earlier, he said, but now, he said, "my neighbours and I watch each other's backs." "My gates have been torn down, and run over," the rancher said. " Our place is valueless now. You can't rent it." In fact, ranches along the Rio Grande attract buyers ready to pay-in fact, ranches along the Rio Grande attract buyers ready to pay-in cash-more than the properties are worth. One spread worth barely $300,00 was bought for $850,000 by someone who was later traced to drug smuggling.

CHRISTOPHER S. WREN in New York and Mexico

An unlikely romance

GRACA MACHEL settles at the conference table in her office in Mozambique's capital Maputo, asks and assistant for a cup of espresso and says, as nicely as such things can be said, that she will be glad to discuss her work but has no intention to talking about her relationship with President Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Soon, however, she cannot seem to help herself. The very mention of his name brings on a girlish, conspiratorial grin. She wrinkles her nose and laughs at her lack of resolve. "Oh, all right," she says, with a mock sigh. "I thought that that part of my life was over, and here I am in love......." The couple have said that although no wedding was planned, they would be spending two weeks a month together.

The woman Mandela has fallen for has an impressive list of credentials. Mrs. Machel has a law degree and speaks fluent English, Portuguese and French. She was trained as a guerrilla fighter (she can strip an assault rifle and put it back together), and she spent 10 years as Mozambique's minister of education and culture. Friends of Mandela's have said that the turning point for the couple was in 1992, when he met Mrs. Machel for the second time as she was receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, South Africa. They say he was struck by her beauty and sensitivity to others. She says she does not remember what she said that so impressed him.

Mrs. Machel, 51, is perhaps as well-loved in her country as Mandela, 78, is in his. Her husband Samora Machel was killed in 1986 when his plane crashed just inside South African territory. Since Machel's death, she has remained devoted to his memory and to helping the poor. She is sometimes described as Mozambique's Jackie Kennedy. She, too, was left with two young children to raise after the death of her husband, a hero of the movement for liberation from Portugal. now Mrs. Machel heads a community development foundation and was chairwoman of the United Nations' first study on the impact of war on children.

Mandela, who divorced Winnie Mandela, his wife of 38 years over a year ago, has conceded that the decision not to marry is hers. "I like being called Mrs. Machel," she has said. "It is my way of keeping my husband alive." There are many people in South Africa who have practically deified Mandela. But Mrs. Machel insists that she is involved with a flesh-and-blood human being. "He is really a very simple man," she says. "That's what makes him so lovable."

SUZANNE DALEY

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