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Colombia's Heroin Trade Is Flourishing
Pubdate: Fri, 24 Aug 2001
Source: Chicago Tribune (IL)
Copyright: 2001 Chicago Tribune Company
Contact: http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/82
Author: Juan O. Tamayo, Knight Ridder/Tribune news service
COLOMBIA'S HEROIN TRADE IS FLOURISHING
Seized Shipments Alarm U.S. Agents
LA CAMPANA, Colombia - Clinging to a steep hillside 9,000 feet high in the
Andes, Mariana Almendro's tiny garden is a gorgeous blanket of red, violet
and pink opium poppies. Profitable, too, producing a milky gum that brings
about $115 a pound from buyers who turn it into heroin.
A Guambiano Indian living on a reservation a half-hour drive from the
nearest paved road, Almendro, 48, sees nothing wrong with her illegal crop.
"It just brings in a little money for food," she said.
But U.S. and Colombian officials are sounding an alarm over a dramatic
increase in the number and size of U.S.-bound shipments of heroin seized in
recent months, and a possible boom in poppy cultivation.
While Colombia grows only 2 percent of the world's opium poppies, its
heroin accounts for 66 percent of all U.S. seizures and 72 percent of the
total seized on the East Coast, according to the Drug Enforcement
Administration.
With Afghanistan's Islamic Taliban rulers outlawing poppies in a country
that produced 70 percent of the world's heroin last year, mostly for Asian
and European consumption, Colombian traffickers may be tempted to fill the gap.
After pumping $1.3 billion in U.S. aid into a Colombian counternarcotics
offensive largely targeted on cocaine -- the country produces 80 percent of
the world's total -- U.S. officials are now paying increasing attention to
a drug once considered almost outdated.
"We must develop a heroin strategy," U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson said.
"We're seeing a dramatic increase in heroin purity and seizures."
Leo Arreguin, head of the DEA office in Bogota, said that is why he is
working to add 13 agents to his staff, a 10 percent increase, devoted
solely to what he called a "priority for probably everyone in the United
States."
"Hospitals are flooded with overdoses in Miami, in Orlando, all along the
East Coast, North Carolina, South Carolina, Baltimore, New York and New
Jersey, everywhere, because of this," Arreguin said.
Signs of growth in the heroin trade are everywhere in Colombia, racked by a
bloody war in which leftist guerrillas and rightist paramilitaries finance
themselves by protecting the illicit drug markets.
Colombian police recorded seizures totaling 1,650 pounds of heroin in the
first half of this year, three times the figure for the same period in 2000
and 25 percent higher than the total seized last year.
Arrests of "mules" -- travelers who try to smuggle out small quantities of
heroin in suitcases or swallowed capsules -- totaled 160 in the first six
months of this year; 266 arrests were made in all of 2000.
And in a nine-day period in June, Colombian troops seized shipments of 147
pounds, a national record, and 66 pounds--compared to average seizures of 4
to 9 pounds in the past year--worth $25.8 million wholesale in New York.
"All of a sudden, in the last three to four months we started noticing
large cargoes, bulk cargoes," Arreguin said. "And when you're talking about
heroin, the final destination is always the United States."
Less certain is whether the increased seizures are the result of expanded
poppy cultivation, improved law-enforcement interdiction or new smuggling
methods requiring larger shipments.
Borrowing a page from cocaine smugglers, the usually family-based gangs
that run the heroin trade have recently begun pooling their shipments, so
that one big score can make up for many little loses, Arreguin said.
Estimating the size of poppy fields is more difficult than it is for coca,
the raw material for cocaine. While coca bushes are a lowland crop easily
identified by satellites, poppies are smaller plants grown on the upper
slopes of Andean mountains often draped in clouds.
The anti-narcotics division of the Colombian National Police reported a
drop in poppy cultivation last year, from 16,000 acres estimated for 1999
to 15,300 acres by the end of 2000.
But one of its senior officers in the southern state of Cauca, where La
Campana is, estimated Cauca alone holds more than 18,000 acres and that
neighboring Tolima state has far more. Nine other states are known to have
poppy plantations, the officer said.
Colombian police crop dusters financed largely by Washington sprayed 22,900
acres of poppies with herbicides in the first half of this year, up from
11,400 in the same period in 2000, plus 125,000 acres of coca.
Poppies are a far different crop from coca.
While coca is usually grown in plots of 3 to 4 acres or more and requires
many fertilizers, insecticides and relatively sophisticated chemistry to
turn it into cocaine, poppies are grown in much smaller plots, require
little care and are much easier to process into heroin.
But for their farmers the story is the same -- crops that are illegal yet
seldom punished by a largely absent government, and which can make the
difference between hunger and putting meat on the table once a week.
"No one is rich here. This is just to be less poor," said Almendro, a widow
living with her three children in a one-room adobe hut up a steep and
winding gorge from Silvia.
A year-old campaign by Guambiano leaders to voluntarily eradicate poppy
fields on their reservation managed to reduce the total from 1,500 acres to
less than 50, said Segundo Montano, deputy governor of the council that
rules the Guambianos.
"We don't want fumigation. We want help with alternative development
projects to alleviate our poverty," said Cauca Gov. Floro Tunubala, a
Guambiano and Colombia's first Indian state governor.
The U.S. Agency for International Development is negotiating several
million dollars' worth of development grants for heroin-producing regions,
in return for the voluntary eradication of 7,400 acres of poppies within
five years.
But rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, have
been pressing Guambiano reservation farmers to keep planting poppies,
Montano said, arguing that Colombian and U.S. governments will never
fulfill vows of aid for alternative crops.
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