CARTAGENA, Colombia — Every few days or so, a speedboat laden with a ton or two of cocaine launches from somewhere along this country's jagged Caribbean coastline, headed for a rendezvous in deeper waters.
There, the precious cargo gets transferred to a nondescript fishing vessel, which smuggles it into a port in Mexico, Haiti or elsewhere. Then the shipment hitches another ride, by sea or land, to its final destination: the streets of Los Angeles, New York and other U.S. cities, where it fetches about $100 per gram.
At times, Colombian and U.S. authorities are tipped off to a speedboat's departure by radar or other intelligence, and a joint operation to nab it can be mounted. But as often as not, under cover of darkness, fog or choppy waves, the boat slips through -- another battle lost in the government's war on drugs.
After several years and billions of American tax dollars spent fighting drug trafficking, cocaine is still making its way from Colombia to the U.S. in what appear to be hardly diminished quantities, throwing into question the efficacy of counter-narcotics efforts by both countries.
Drug runners have proved adaptable and clever in finding new routes for their shipments, the majority of which now go out by sea rather than by air or land, authorities say.
At the same time, a program that began five years ago to fumigate coca crops in Colombia, hailed by the Bush administration as a major success, appears to have had little effect on overall supply, judging by the availability and price of cocaine on the street. U.S. officials acknowledge that access to cocaine, its purity level and its street price remain virtually unchanged.
The dismaying results come as President Bush is requesting an extension for aid to Plan Colombia, a five-year strategy to combat narco-trafficking set to expire at the end of this year. The U.S. has already poured about $3 billion into the project, primarily to augment Colombia's fleet of military aircraft and ships and to train soldiers and police.
"The plan is producing results," Bush told reporters last month during a visit to his Texas ranch by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who asked for more money and support for Plan Colombia during a visit to Washington last week.
Officials from both countries cite the number of seizures of cocaine shipments as proof that Plan Colombia is bearing fruit. This year, U.S. and Colombian forces netted 45 tons of the drug in joint maritime stings through August, up from 33 tons for all of last year, said Adm. Alfonso Diaz, commanding officer of Colombia's naval base here in Cartagena, on the Caribbean coast. Separately, the Colombian navy had seized an additional 23 tons by the end of August.
But Diaz acknowledged that about 420 tons would probably elude authorities at sea this year, half of it destined for the U.S. That alone would satisfy two-thirds of estimated American demand, which has risen over the last decade, according to a national drug-use study published by the U.S. government last year. Colombia, where 75% of the world's coca is grown, remains the United States' largest source of cocaine.
The beefed-up efforts have also failed to translate into higher prices on the street, as would be expected if supply were declining. Instead, a gram of cocaine now costs less, not more, than it did before Plan Colombia was introduced in 2000, according to the White House's Office of National Drug Control Policy.
U.S. drug czar John P. Walters said in an Aug. 31 speech that a campaign to eradicate opium poppies had given Plan Colombia some success in its effort to reduce the purity and increase the price of heroin, another drug that comes out of Colombia.
But he acknowledged that, with regard to cocaine, "we haven't seen yet the same changes."
The stability of supply and price presents a conundrum for officials and experts in light of the trumpeted achievements of the coca fumigation program, which the U.S. has heavily funded and promoted.
In June, the United Nations reported that aerial spraying had halved the area of land dedicated to coca cultivation in Colombia, from 400,000 acres in 1999 to about 200,000 acres in 2004. (The U.S. estimates that 280,000 acres remain.) Small planes dropping glyphosate, a common herbicide, routinely buzz over fields in states such as Putumayo in southern Colombia, where much of the coca fields are concentrated.
In an ominous development, however, the report noted that coca was now being grown in 23 of 32 states, or departments, in Colombia, a country the size of California and Texas combined, making eradication and accurate monitoring more difficult.
"They spray heavily in a department like Putumayo or Guaviare, but you keep seeing it pop up in new departments like Meta," said Adam Isacson, an analyst at the Center for International Policy in Washington. "A lot of the new coca-growing in new areas is not being detected."
