Drug Smuggling Colombia

Brian Bennett grew up in a three-bedroom house with seven brothers and sisters on a fading stretch of West Florence Avenue in South-Central Los Angeles. By the time he was 22, he was paying his rent in a fashionable apartment complex off Wilshire Boulevard with $100 bills and doing business from Detroit to Denmark, where, according to federal investigators, he once ran up an $11,000 hotel bill in four days.

After surviving months of grueling training by U.S. Green Berets, about 700 Colombian soldiers graduated Thursday to join one of the most successful crusades against cocaine cultivation in history. Since December, when the intensive fumigation supported by U.S.-backed Plan Colombia began, nearly a quarter of this country's known coca crops has been wiped out. More than 200 drug labs have been destroyed. And the military and police have suffered only a handful of casualties.

Wily and nervous as a hunted fox, and maybe more than a little crazed, Pablo Escobar manages to stay a step ahead of Colombian anti-narcotics forces as they dog his trail from hide-out to hide-out. Escobar, 40, is Colombia's leading drug lord and most-wanted man.

A brilliant blue butterfly the size of a wren drifted through the jungle clearing. The Colombian general dropped his voice to a whisper. "At this moment, we can't see them or hear them. But they are only 50 meters [55 yards] away from us now," he said. Suddenly, with a shout, the area turned into a war zone. The men in the clearing, seemingly busy at work in a cocaine lab, dropped to their knees and began firing. A percussion grenade exploded with a skin-shaking thump.

The crack epidemic in Los Angeles followed no blueprint or master plan. It was not orchestrated by the Contras or the CIA or any single drug ring. No one trafficker, even the kingpins who sold thousands of kilos and pocketed millions of dollars, ever came close to monopolizing the trade.

Mexico announced that it will extradite a West German woman charged in the United States with smuggling 6.6 tons of cocaine in the early 1980s. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said Veronica Kiera-Wahl, who has been jailed in the southern Mexican state of Yucatan since last year, will be handed over to U.S. authorities in the next few days. Kiera-Wahl had allegedly smuggled cocaine from Colombia for six months until September, 1982.

After years of terrorizing Colombia with bombings, kidnapings and assassinations, Pablo Escobar, the world's most notorious drug lord, has stunned his violence-weary countrymen again--this time with an offer to surrender. The announcement, 21 months into the most determined manhunt ever mounted by Colombian police, came last week from an eccentric, 82-year-old Roman Catholic priest who said he met with the billionaire cocaine dealer at a luxurious ranch hide-out and knelt with him in prayer.

In 1986, when federal and local anti-drug agents raided his Mission Viejo home, cocaine trafficking suspect Ronald J. Lister met officers in his bathrobe and warned that they were making a mistake, that he "worked with the CIA, and . . . his friends in Washington weren't going to like what was going on." According to a Los Angeles County sheriff's report on the incident, when deputies dismissed Lister's claim, he threatened to report them to his contact at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

Federal officials have arrested a man they accuse of being the mentor and principal financier of imprisoned drug kingpin Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo during the drug lord's two years in prison. Baltazar Diaz Vega, 40, was arrested Tuesday at his home in Culiacan, a city in northwestern Mexico known as a drug center and Felix Gallardo's home base. Diaz Vega has played a key role in Colombian-Mexican-U.S.

It was a typical night at Porky's, a strip joint known for its Russian dancers in the seedy Miami suburb of Hialeah. The girls were grinding on the dance floor while, inside the club's inner office, cut off from the driving rhythms, owner Ludwig Fainberg was talking business. Big business, federal prosecutors now say: drug business, Russian mafia business and how the two were coming together in a single deal. And the U.S. government was listening.

From this island of bars and brothels gripped by dark green jungle, you can see the nightmare rising in Colombia. Here, in a remote corner of the rain forest, the army has broken up what was once a cocaine paradise. There were no cops, no military, no government. The drug labs ran day and night. Coke was currency, with a gram buying a cold beer flown in from faraway Bogota. It was a world where everything was controlled by one organization--the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

A mayor here in Colombia's major coca-growing province was killed Wednesday, authorities said, as a Marxist rebel protest against U.S.-backed drug crop eradication entered its third month. Two men on a motorcycle--a common assassination team in Colombia--killed Carlos Julio Rosas, the authorities said. Rosas was the mayor of Orito, a town in the southern province of Putumayo, which is under siege by insurgents opposed to the fumigation of coca fields.

They should have been friendlier to the neighbors. The three foreigners first raised suspicions in the Andean mountain village of Facatativa because they never smiled or waved. Then people noticed that they always had food delivered and seldom emerged from the warehouse where they worked. Finally, someone called the police. Officers, shocked by what they discovered when they entered the warehouse during a predawn raid Sept. 7, made two phone calls: one to the U.S.

For the first time since the United States stepped up drug interdiction efforts on the high seas, the Navy and Coast Guard have succeeded in seizing one of the supply ships that play a crucial role in helping drug-laden speedboats make the long voyage from Colombia to Mexico, officials said Tuesday. Military and law enforcement officials lauded the seizure of the leaky, rusting fishing trawler Gran Tauro as a major victory in the fight to close off the eastern Pacific route to drug-runners.

They have smuggled cocaine in high-speed boats, low-flying planes and even in the centers of lollipops. But on Thursday, Colombia's audacious drug traffickers astounded even the country's seasoned police. A narco-submarine was discovered in a mountain workshop just 18 miles west of Bogota, Colombia's capital, police announced. Aided by intelligence from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, stunned Colombian police found Russian-language manuals along with the partly constructed submarine.

President Clinton swooped into this troubled country Wednesday to showcase American determination to face down leftist rebels and drug traffickers. But he pledged that aiding Colombia will not embroil the U.S. in a military escalation echoing the Vietnam War. "I reject the idea that we must choose between supporting peace and fighting drugs. We can do both; indeed, to succeed, we must do both," Clinton said at a ceremony to tout $1.3 billion in U.S.

Everything was in place to pick up seven American couriers arriving from New York on Swissair Flight 101. A Mercedes-Benz minibus stood by outside the air terminal, its last two rows of seats removed to accommodate the expected 14 large Samsonite suitcases. The Swiss chauffeur, a trusted driver for the drug-trafficking Escobar family of Medellin, Colombia, waited at the wheel. Inside, Julio and Sheila Nasser waited at the rendezvous point.

In a major escalation of the already bloody war between the Colombian government and narcotics traffickers, presumed drug barons attacked one of the nation's most important newspapers, setting off a powerful truck bomb that killed at least one person and wounded at least 83 more. The 6:40 a.m.

U.S. officials said Saturday that they have broken up a major drug trafficking operation that used commercial ships to haul Colombian cocaine around the world. The Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Customs Service said 43 people have been arrested and almost 25 tons of cocaine confiscated during the two-year investigation, dubbed "Operation Journey." Officials believe that the organization transported at least 68 tons of cocaine to 12 nations in three years.

President Clinton on Wednesday defended his decision to release $1.3 billion in anti-drug aid to Colombia, as administration officials sought to shift attention away from military assistance and toward efforts to build civil institutions and wean peasants from drug production.