Pubdate: Sun, 7 Jun 1998 Source:Orange County Bajak-The Associated Press COLOMBIA'S DRUG CARTELS ADOPT LOW-KEY APPROACH Crime: Today's drug-lords dress simply and keep operations small. But their output hasn't dropped. BOGOTA, Colombia - Adapting to stepped-up pressure from law enforcement, a new breed of Colombian drug trafficker has abandoned the model of the huge narcotics cartel and is shunning ostentation in favor of a low-key lifestyle. Out are bodyguards and armor-plated Toyota Landcruisers. In are taxis and conservative business suits. "Today's drug trafficker shelters himself in very small, subtle organizations," said Colombia's national police chief, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano. "He doesn't go around anymore in fancy sneakers, with Rolex watch, gold chains and a revolver on his belt." The vast majority of today's traffickers in Colombia are virtual unknowns. But they are efficient, U.S. and Colombian officials agree. The flow of cocaine out of the world's leading producer nation, estimated at 550 tons a year, has not ebbed. Nor has business declined for Mexican druglords, who have also adopted a quieter, more businesslike style in recent months. One example is the Arellano Felix gang in Tijuana. Once known for violence and high visibility, the Arellano Felix brothers are no longer spotted in the upscale nightclubs they once frequented. The shift is more evident in Colombia, however, where the business has become more diffuse. Gone are the days of the big drug cartels - conglomerates that controlled the business each step of the way from crop cultivation to cocaine production in secret labs to sales on U.S. streets. "This is more like after the breakup of AT&T. Now you have the Baby Bells," said a U.S. Embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "Notwithstanding, there's still a lot of dope out there." And it keeps moving into new markets - Russia, South Africa and Japan are now in vogue. Colombia's retooled cocaine trade is once again concentrated in Medellin, the city that the late Pablo Escobar made murderously notorious but was always a model of commercial efficiency. Authorities have identified 43 trafficking gangs in Colombia, nearly half of them in Medellin. Each has an average of 10 to 20 associates, compared with the hundreds of people who were on the payrolls of the old cartels. "They are mostly people between the ages of 25 and 40 who have no criminal records and work through legitimate small businesses," said a Colombian police intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity. Some of the Medellin traffickers are former Escobar lieutenants, but most are sophisticated newcomers who employ the latest technologies, are Internet savvy, have a keen grasp of global finance and are deft money launderers. Colombia's first generation of traffickers, the "cocaine cowboys" typified by Escobar, trained legions of young assassins, kept mounds of cash in wicker baskets and concentrated operations in specific regions. Flaunting their wealth and defying authorities, they went down in flames in the early 1990s after waging a war on the state that killed hundreds. The successor Cali cartel fared well for a while, bribing police officers, judges, journalists and politicians to look the other way while hiding behind an intricate web of legitimate businesses like its Drogas la Rebaja pharmacy chain. But with the help of U.S. agents and intelligence, political pressure from Washington and a police anti-corruption purge by Serrano, brothers Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez and the rest of the Cali cartel's pinstripe-suited principals were caught beginning in 1995, convicted and jailed. The new generation remains discreet and harder to infiltrate. "We know of very important traffickers in Medellin who don't even have cellular phones or beepers. They know that makes things difficult for us," said a police intelligence official. Witness to the self-destructiveness of the Medellin-Cali rivalry, today's Colombian traffickers tend to collaborate rather than compete. They sometimes pool resources, but are autonomous. And they work equally with paramilitary groups and rebels, both of whom earn tens of million of dollars a year from cocaine production. Medellin's main drug bosses - nine are identified in an April 1 intelligence report by Colombia's equivalent of the FBI - allegedly include a major shareholder in a local soccer team and Carlos Castano, a fugitive paramilitary leader who lives in a northern mountain hideout. "The business is more dispersed. They don't send 7 tons like before, but 100 kilos or 50 kilos at a time because that way it's much more difficult to identify the organization," Serrano said. The new traffickers are also less inclined to violence than their predecessors, although they have killed six judicial investigators in Medellin over the past year, riddling one with 23 bullets from a submachine gun, said senior judicial official, requesting anonymity. "At the moment, they're controlling Medellin's bands of assassins," he said, referring to the professionals trained by Escobar, who was killed by police in 1993. The laboratories used to process cocaine also reflect the new order. "They are smaller, and although their production can still be high, there is less accumulation of product than before, and their location is better concealed," said Col. Leonardo Gallego, chief of Colombia's anti-narcotics police. Today's traffickers still use small planes and speedboats to get cocaine, and increasingly heroin, to transshipment points in the Caribbean and Central America. But they are relying more and more on couriers known as "mules," many of them foreigners recruited in Europe and Africa. They still do a lot of business with Mexican cartels, but some now bypass those costly middlemen. And cocaine distributors in the United States are increasingly independent, acquiring drugs from a variety of sources. Colombian smugglers are constantly inventing new ways of eluding the law. The latest is black cocaine, a mixture of the drug with iron dust and charcoal the fools both sniffer dogs and the standard chemical detection test. After German police first identified the substance with the seizure of 33 pounds in March, Colombian investigators tracked down the shippers and found 250 pounds at Bogota's airport. It was in barrels labeled industrial pigment and was waiting to be shipped by air to the African nation of Togo via the Netherlands. Experts said that once it reaches its destination, the cocaine in black cocaine can be separated out with a simple solvent like acetone. The extra steps add to the cost of smuggling, but the ploy gives the gangs a new edge. - ---