"The Bust of the Century"

By Jacob V. Lamar Jr.

Lawmen crack down on international drug traffickers

It is hardly an exaggeration to call the battle of governments against the international drug trade a war. Consider the elements: airplanes, ships, guns, vast sums of money, raids on enemy territories. In the past few years, the U.S. has fortified its resources and strengthened ties with its allies in the global fight against narcotics dealers. For a while it seemed the forces of law were winning. But it now seems that the U.S. is facing an enemy more powerful and elusive than previously thought. November brought troubling incidents in Mexico, Colombia and Peru, three major fronts of the drug war:

> "It's the bust of the century," said Jon Thomas, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters. Mexican drug agents, with the cooperation of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officials, seized and destroyed a record 9,000 tons of marijuana in raids on five plantations in Mexico's northern state of Chihuahua. (The previous record drug bust took place in 1978, when 570 tons of marijuana were seized in Colombia.) In the U.S., the Mexican pot would have had a street value of about $4 billion, according to Mexican judicial officials. The sheer volume may prompt a reassessment of drug traffic and use in the U.S.

> The code name for the Colombia operation was Hat Trick. The plan was to deploy dozens of Coast Guard and Navy vessels across a wide sweep of the Caribbean to intercept the huge shipments of marijuana that are transported from Colombia to the U.S. at the conclusion of the pot harvest in November and December. The elaborate strategy called for Colombian soldiers to move against marijuana traffickers in the Guajira Peninsula, between the Gulf of Venezuela and the Caribbean. With Venezuelan and Panamanian soldiers guarding their respective borders, the smugglers would be forced to ship out the marijuana. At sea in the Caribbean, they were to be met by American vessels. The pot would be confiscated and the smugglers arrested. Operation Hat Trick was big, ambitious and, supposedly, highly secret.

But word of Hat Trick began leaking almost as soon as the plan was launched about four weeks ago. Federal officials said last week that while the scheme had been "modestly successful," American and Colombian press reports had helped warn drug traffickers of the supposedly clandestine operation. Bad weather may have hurt the operation by delaying the harvest and the shipments. Nevertheless, Operation Hat Trick will continue.

> In Peru, American officials are concerned about leftist guerrillas who may be working with narcotics traffickers to end a U.S.-financed program that hires Peruvian workers to destroy coca plants, the leaves of which are used in the manufacture of cocaine. Two weeks ago anti-drug laborers were attacked in the middle of the night in a house where they were sleeping. According to an eyewitness account, about four unidentified men burst into the building and began firing shotguns and revolvers. At least 15 workers were killed and three were wounded.

Several hours later, a merchant in the area was slaughtered in his home. The murderers reportedly left handwritten signs reading "This is how servants of the government die." Last week authorities recovered the mutilated bodies of four U.S.-employed surveyors. Felipe Paucar, president of an agricultural cooperative in Lima, speculated that the men had been murdered by members of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist terrorist group. "I think it was Sendero," said he, "because of the way they were cruelly tortured: their fingers were cut off, their tongues were cut." The U.S. has suspended the coca-eradication program pending investigation of the killings.

It was the Mexican marijuana enterprise that truly stunned U.S. officials. The plantations, located in high, arid country, included huge barns for storing bales of the drug, drying and packaging facilities, a 30-truck parking lot and, allegedly, some 7,000 campesinos who were being used as slaves. The peasants had been lured to Chihuahua with the promise of earning 3,000 pesos ($14.70) a day for harvesting fruit. At the cannabis plantations, they were forced to work at gunpoint. They were herded into the fields at 4 a.m. and worked incessantly until 10 at night. They ate once or perhaps twice a day. The strongest were given scissors to cut the marijuana branches and separate the seeds, while the children and the old men packaged the pot in bundles of no more than 10 kilos each and loaded the packets onto trucks. The campesinos were threatened with execution if they tried to escape. Some of them claimed that five had died while working on the plantations, but the authorities found no trace of human remains.

The amount of marijuana seized was staggering. U.S. officials had estimated that in 1983 only 1,300 tons, or some 9% of the marijuana consumed in the U.S. that year, was produced in Mexico. The amount found in Chihuahua alone was seven times as great as that estimate. "It represents what we thought was 75% to 80% of our annual consumption," said Thomas.

The latest estimates said that Colombia provided 59% of the pot smoked in the U.S., with 6,000 to 9,000 tons smuggled into the country last year. Jamaica was be lieved to have provided 13%, while 11% was grown domestically and 8% originated in Belize, Thailand and other countries. It was believed that 20 million Americans smoked marijuana regularly. All these estimates may be quite inaccurate, given the implications of the huge bust in Mexico. Said a DEA spokesman of the numbers: "We may have goofed."

-- By Jacob V. LamarJr. Reported by Bernard Diederich/ Miami and Larry Wippman/Lima

With reporting by Bernard Diederich, Larry Wippman