Argentina Joins War Against Smuggling of Bolivian Cocaine, Curbs Domestic Use

Argentina is belatedly joining the international cocaine war, both as crusader and victim.

The seizure this month of 70 kilos (154 pounds) of semi-refined coca paste and the arrest of more than a dozen people who apparently financed their smuggling with counterfeit Bolivian bank notes is being called the biggest drug bust in Argentine history. The gang may have moved as much as 250 kilos (550 pounds) of cocaine per month through Buenos Aires, police said.

The arrests in the affluent northern suburbs of Buenos Aires highlight a rising spiral of seizures resulting from improved enforcement and what officials say is a scramble by Bolivian cocaine producers to outflank U.S.-coordinated attacks on their home bases.

‘Flows Like Water’

In recent weeks, police, customs and the Argentine border patrol have found cocaine in the bellies of big river fish and secreted inside a 15-pound chocolate cake. They have arrested a number of “mules,” as cocaine couriers are called, and are nonplussed by pack trains of real mules trained to carry coca leaves across the border from Bolivia without supervision to pickup points in the Argentine outback.

“Cocaine flows like water. If you block its passage, it seeks another outlet. Drugs have become a first-line priority for us,” Juan C. Delconte, Argentina’s director of customs, said in an interview.

Far south of Andean production centers, Argentina has historically been a bit player in the cocaine drama, mainly as a transit point for small, hand-carried shipments bound mostly for Western Europe.

Now, however, there is evidence of increased smuggling from Bolivia, where U.S. Army helicopters are spearheading a back-country crackdown, as well as signs of a growth in domestic cocaine consumption that alarms Argentine officials.

U.S. Training Available

“In the past, we have perhaps egotistically failed to become alarmed because of our transit role. But internal consumption of both cocaine and marijuana is increasing. Couriers are now being paid not in cash but in drugs,” Delconte said.

Officers of Argentina’s expanded police and customs anti-drug units are regular students at American-financed training sessions here and in the United States. The Argentine Coast Guard recently made its first drug seizure, and the first detachment of drug-sniffing dogs trained by the Argentine border patrol will debut later this month at Ezeiza International Airport here.

Earlier this year, Argentine customs began monitoring the sale and export of precursor chemicals used to refine cocaine. Information is shared with U.S. investigators.

“The Argentines have become convinced that drugs are everybody’s problem, not just the gringos’ ,” said Paul L. White, attache of the Drug Enforcement Administration at the U.S. Embassy here.

Chilean Couriers Favored

Argentina, which has a 420-mile frontier with Bolivia, an excellent internal transportation network, a huge port in Buenos Aires and frequent air service to the United States and Europe, is an inviting end-run for Bolivian producers pressured from the north.

Chileans are among the traffickers’ favored couriers. Typically, they enter Argentina overland, pick up their cargo here and travel to Europe or the United States on false Spanish or Italian documents.

Prostitutes are often used for the European runs; two of them, an Argentine and an Italian, were sentenced to four-year terms earlier this month. For the United States, traffickers sometimes rely on older couples whom customs agents are less likely to search.

One of four courier bands broken up by police this year used Montevideo, in neighboring Uruguay, as a jumping-off place for flights north and east. Uruguayan customs and police, also U.S. trained, began making their first seizures this year.

According to Antonio Armesto, narcotics chief of the Argentine federal police, seizures of processed cocaine in Argentina thus far in 1986 have totaled 198 kilos (436 pounds), compared to 43 kilos (95 pounds) in 1985 and nine kilos (20 pounds) in 1984. There have been 487 cocaine arrests nationwide through mid-October, compared to 287 in 1985.

Contrast to U.S.

“The government is more concerned with this kind of crime. Enforcement is becoming more professional,” said Armesto, who also reports a small increase in the number of drug arrests among individual consumers in greater Buenos Aires, home to one-third of Argentina’s 30 million people.

Cocaine and marijuana use in Argentina is infinitesimal by U.S. standards, and subject to strict censure in a conservative, family-oriented society. Two American basketball players were astonished to be arrested for smoking marijuana in the southern provincial city of Bahia Blanca. Nobody had ever hassled them at home, they complained to arresting officers.

Chewing coca leaves, legal among highland Indians in coca-producing Bolivia and Peru, is also a long tradition in the northwestern Argentine border provinces of Salta and Jujuy, where it is illegal but never prosecuted. Police in Buenos Aires recently arrested two visiting Jujuy businessmen after a chambermaid found a handful of coca leaves in their hotel room. A judge threw out the charges.

Police Hampered

There is evidence for the first time, though, that coca leaves are being smuggled into the country for processing into paste and perhaps the finished product.

There is sweet irony in the improving Argentine enforcement effort. In a country, once again democratic, where between 1976 and 1980 at least 9,000 people died in an epidemic of state terrorism, police complain that they are forbidden investigative techniques routinely used by their American colleagues.

Undercover work, setting up a buy and trailing a courier to his source are all prohibited by Argentine law. Police are lobbying for wider powers under a new anti-drug law being debated in congress.