Major Jungle Lab Falls to Colombia-Peru Assault : Latin Nations Uniting in War on Cocaine

The search for the cocaine laboratory hidden somewhere in the Amazon jungle began at this rowdy river port where Colombia, Peru and Brazil come together.

It would be, it seemed, an impossible task. Yet a joint operation mounted by the police of Colombia and Peru found, in Peru, what proved to be one of the best-equipped cocaine laboratories ever discovered.

“This fight does not have frontiers,” a senior Colombian police officer who is in charge of narcotics operations said the other day. “Until production is knocked out in Peru, Bolivia and Brazil, there will always be cocaine moving through Colombia.”

U.S. officials, who have joined the campaign against the billion-dollar cocaine business in Latin America, think that the Colombian government’s anti-narcotics team is the best in Latin America. The joint Colombian-Peruvian operation, according to officials here, was an example of the possibilities for effective regional cooperation.

Still, despite several regional drug conferences of justice ministers and national police forces, Colombian officials say the scale of the effort is still inadequate. The problem, they say, requires greater commitment by other governments, including that of the United States, for it is the United States that is the main market for the cocaine.

The search that resulted in the discovery of the laboratory in Peru grew out of the Narcotics Command’s seizure of 1,226 kilograms (almost 2,700 pounds) of pure cocaine that had been readied for shipment to the United States from an airstrip 1,000 miles to the northwest, in Colombia.

A cement bunker, like a storm cellar, had been built at the strip, which was a secret storage and transit point for cocaine neatly packed in one-kilogram plastic bags and cardboard cartons. Delivered in Miami, narcotics specialists say, the seized cocaine would have had a wholesale value of $33 million.

The airstrip, in a dry, unpopulated area of the Colombian department of Bolivar, was spotted by tracking the arrival of aircraft coming down from the United States and up from the south. It is probably one of many similar locations on the northern coast.

Colombian police said at least 20 flights a week from the United States pick up cocaine at airstrips in the department of Guajira, which reaches north alongside the Gulf of Venezuela, and in the eastern lowland departments of Casanare and Vichada.

The cocaine war has been going on for years, but it took on a new dimension in April, 1984, when Colombian narcotics police smashed the world’s largest known cocaine production center, a complex of 17 laboratories at Yari in the eastern lowlands. They seized nearly 12 tons of pure cocaine awaiting shipment.

Justice Minister Killed

In retaliation, the drug traffickers assassinated Rodrigo Lara, the minister of justice. President Belisario Betancur then declared a “war to the finish” on the narcotics mafia. The big operators went underground.

Narcotics intelligence analysts here felt sure that, after Yari, there was no other laboratory in Colombia operating at such a production level. In addition, the Colombian police said they have broken up more than 500 small labs in Colombia this year and seized more than seven tons of refined cocaine.

Despite all this, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency said 80% of the cocaine reaching the United States was still coming through Colombian territory. Clearly, the Colombian “syndicate” of major drug traffickers who ran Yari as a joint venture had relocated their processing facilities.

Strip Spotted From Air

So the search for the source turned toward the area along the 750-mile border with Peru, a huge swath of heavily forested jungle between the Putumayo and Amazon rivers known as Eastern Loreto. From the air base here by the Amazon river, Colombian reconnaissance flights skimming over the solid green canopy of treetops finally spotted an airstrip about 60 miles due west of here in Peru.

The spotter plane photographed nine small aircraft on the ground beside the 1,200-yard runway, which had been carved out of the yellow jungle soil by a bulldozer.

On July 28, a change of government in Peru brought President Alan Garcia to power with a strong commitment to attack drug smuggling. Evidence of the new strip was presented by the Colombian government, and a joint operation was set up with the Peruvian police.

Early on Aug. 13, with white mist blanketing the jungle, a strike force of Colombian helicopters and transport airplanes, carrying 70 Peruvian policemen, pounced on the airstrip and seized five aircraft. There was little resistance. One Colombian national was wounded. Some pilots and others at the site may have escaped into the jungle.

Six Labs Found

Operation Condor, as the raid was code-named, eventually led to the discovery of six cocaine laboratories in the region. The biggest surprise was a modern “super” laboratory in the process of installation. It had a 300-horsepower generator, steel vats, pumps and centrifuges capable of producing up to 300 kilograms of cocaine a day, about 660 pounds.

Under the shade of the treetops, there was a rest house for pilots. A large sign had been hung out bearing the words “Welcome to Carapanalandia.”

The Colombian police seized packages of cocaine at Carapanalandia that seemed identical to the packages that had been found at the transit airstrip in the department of Bolivar.

The assembling of such a major industrial facility in the Amazon wilderness is a marvel of logistics, rivaling the difficult air and river transport pioneered by oil companies with exploration contracts in the Amazon region of Peru and Colombia.

Proximity to Border

“If the narco traffickers are smart--and nobody said they are dumb--they will not put another big lab that close to the Colombian border again,” said Enrique Diaz Contreras, the air force general who runs the unified military and police command here.

Diaz said that several other laboratories and 30 clandestine airstrips have recently been destroyed--the latter by dynamiting the runways--in Colombia’s Amazonas department. But he said that while production of illegal drugs is declining in Colombia, it is going up in neighboring countries.

Coca leaf production has not been substantially checked in Peru and Bolivia, and it is in these countries that the basic cocaine paste is prepared. Colombia, however, will continue to be the key country in the traffic because of its geographic proximity to the U.S. market and the dominant position of Colombian operators in the international cocaine traffic.

$10-Million U.S. Grant

The United States is helping Colombia in the fight against drug smuggling, with a $10-million grant this year and the largest single overseas team of DEA agents. The United States has also provided helicopters, which are used for spraying marijuana plantations and for raids on illegal airfields and laboratories in remote locations.

The main thrust of the program here has been the eradication of sources of production. This has been effective against marijuana plantations, which until recently made Colombia the largest external source for the U.S. market.

There has been a 50% decline this year in marijuana seizures on ships from Colombia, because last year the Colombian government approved the spraying of herbicide on big marijuana fields, mainly on the slopes of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and the Sierra de Perija, on the border with Venezuela.

Sources of Marijuana

The valleys that descend from the snow-capped Sierra Nevada are legendary sources of marijuana. Isolated growing areas such as the Rio Frio “reserve” on the western slope had been virtually out of the reach of police but, with helicopters spraying the herbicide glysophate, the plantations have been heavily damaged.

Still, marijuana is a secondary drug compared to the cocaine that moves through Colombia. The big money and the major international traffickers are in cocaine.

Colombian Minister of Justice Enrique Parejo said in an interview in Bogota, the Colombian capital, that he has asked U.S. officials for more technical support to interdict the drug traffic.

Parejo said Carlton Turner, the White House narcotics adviser, had promised him three-dimensional radar equipment, which can track aircraft movements, and additional helicopters to expand the fleet of 14 that is now operated by the National Police.

Satellite Photos Needed

He added that Colombia needs U.S. satellite photographs of the area where the cocaine traffickers operate in order to spot the airfields that must be destroyed.

“We are risking our lives,” Parejo said, “and if this government were not totally committed to this fight, we wouldn’t be asking for more means to hit them.”

The fight is deadly. Five judges involved in prosecuting drug traffickers have been killed this year, including Tulio Manuel Castro Gil, who was investigating the assassination of Lara, the minister of justice.

Another victim was Alcides Arizmendi, director of the national prison, where 13 Colombians, wanted for drug crimes, are awaiting extradition to the United States. The prison director was gunned down after preventing an escape by one of the prisoners.

100 Extraditions Asked

The United States has asked for the extradition of more than 100 Colombians. So far, President Betancur has signed orders handing over six, against considerable nationalist opposition in political circles. One senator visits the imprisoned drug dealers every week.

The biggest drug traffickers, among them Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder Garcia and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, who set up the Yari laboratories, remain at large. Another man wanted here, Fabio Ochoa, is under arrest in Spain, where he has successfully avoided extradition to the United States.

The Colombian police admit that Lehder has been frequently in the eastern lowlands, where he was almost caught in a raid earlier this year on his ranch on the Guaviare River. It is widely believed in Colombia that Escobar, who is said to be the No. 1 cocaine operator in the world, is underground in Medellin, where he is known to have a private army.

Presence Is Felt

If the drug traffickers are underground, they are not on the run. Their presence is felt by any official who fights them.

The Colombian Supreme Court has been asked by lawyers for prisoners awaiting extradition to declare unconstitutional the 1980 extradition treaty with the United States.

Alfonso Reyes Echandia, president of the Supreme Court, said before he was killed in a guerrilla attack on the Supreme Court last month that all the members of the court had received death threats to themselves and their families in anonymous telephone calls. The calls included the playing of recordings of conversations the justices had had on their office and home telephones, showing that their phones were tapped.

11 Other Judges Slain

Eleven other judges died with the court’s president in the shoot-out between army troops and the guerrillas who had commandeered the building.

“Before they killed . . . (Lara), the narco traffickers were striving for respectability,” Parejo, the minister of justice, said. “They gave money for social causes, financed football teams and had access to the highest political and social circles.

“Now, their real face is in the open. They kill judges, they bribe officials. The damage they do to the health of our youth by selling drugs here is very serious. In poor areas, we find that 20% of the kids are blowing their minds with bazuco (a cigarette made from cocaine waste).

“But the most serious damage they do is moral, because what they do corrupts the whole society. They have so much money and, until the enormous market for drugs is reduced in the United States, everything we do may be futile.”