New Strategy Held Promising in Drug Battle

They had mustered every large helicopter available--three--and they wondered whether that was enough.

Carefully, they had laid out drums of fuel along the route to help them leapfrog hundreds of miles through the Andes. Now, hours after takeoff, the elite Colombian troops prepared to descend on their target, a remote laboratory that transforms a leafy paste derived from coca into a narcotic more valuable than gold.

This time, the catch was a bonanza. After a fierce gun battle, the raiders burned room-sized tanks holding enough ether and acetone to process one-fourth of Colombia’s annual estimated cocaine exports.

This attack in Colombia’s Magdalena Valley last month was a success, albeit an infrequent one in the stalemate with cocaine cartels.

Now, a coordinated strategy of military raids, seizures of drug lords’ assets and the extradition of key fugitives offers the greatest promise for disrupting Colombia’s narcotics industry and cutting the flow of cocaine pouring into the United States, drug experts say.

While these tactics cannot completely shut down the cartels’ extensive operations, the experts say, they target two prime points--the key chemicals needed for processing and the ability of the big drug producers to freely enjoy the fruits of their enterprise.

“I definitely believe we will see a decrease in the availability of cocaine,” says Charles Gutensohn, who heads the Drug Enforcement Administration’s cocaine division. “If we don’t, it means the problem was much worse than we ever believed.”

Last week, the Bush Administration put its weight behind the approach, announcing that it was dispatching $65 million worth of sophisticated arms, helicopters and military equipment so that more raids could be launched and more fugitives pursued.

There are immense obstacles to the Administration’s and Colombia’s goal. The cocaine cartels have billions of dollars in resources to defend themselves, rugged terrain to hide in, and they own an estimated 1% of all the land in their country.

However, the national outrage triggered by the recent assassination of a charismatic presidential candidate has created what the Administration sees as a “window of opportunity” to strike back as never before.

New Confidence Noted

Already there are signs of progress, officials say. Dozens of labs have been stormed and hundreds of kilograms of cocaine have been seized. Thousands of drug operatives have been arrested and more than 100 airplanes impounded. And while no major figures have yet been apprehended, their disappearance from public view even in strongholds like Medellin leaves some Colombian authorities exuding new confidence.

“They are like frightened mice, hiding in their forts,” one Colombian intelligence official said. “You can tell they are worried.

Yet echoes of past Colombian crackdowns offer a reminder of how fleeting anti-cocaine offensives can be. In 1984, after assassinations by drug terrorists incited public fury, government raids produced grand displays of processing plants in flames and sent cocaine traffickers fleeing from the country. Then, sobered by the deadly risks and staggering costs of such a war, the campaign subsided. Another offensive petered out early this year.

“We’ve seen this cycle happen before,” said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami expert on Colombia and its cocaine cartels. “Sooner or later, economic exhaustion or unrelenting terrorism will take a toll.”

So vivid are such memories that even those officials who speak optimistically of a “window of opportunity” concede the real possibility that it will soon slam shut. For that reason, they say, it is imperative that no time is lost.

Their hopes rest in large part on Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas’ defiant resolve and the special impetus of the Bush Administration’s high-profile war on drugs.

The new hardware and the attack strategy also figure prominently.

Unlike Bolivia and Peru, where the bulk of the coca crops that provide the raw material for America’s cocaine supply are grown, Colombia is not a large agricultural producer. The use of defoliants to wipe out coca fields and programs to convert farmers to other crops would not be likely to have a major effect.

According to drug experts, at the heart of the drug cartels’ operations in Colombia are the thousands of coca processing factories where imported coca paste is processed and the headquarters operations where cartel leaders coordinate the drug’s shipment northward. The plants, ranging from large installations to tiny, primitive ones, are secreted in remote areas far from the purview of a government whose practical power extends over only about 70% of Colombian territory.

In the past, the lack of troop-transporting helicopters meant that by the time enough equipment could be brought together and a raid launched, surprise was lost and the targets had disappeared.

Large Huey helicopters, 20 of which were provided in Bush’s aid package, “are our battle horses for entering the jungle,” the Colombian official said. This new mobility is the “thrust” of the U.S.-backed strategy, noted Melvyn Levitsky, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics affairs.

“We need to do everything we can do to harass (the traffickers) and let them know that they can run, but they can’t hide,” Levitsky said.

Destroying the laboratories’ equipment or stocks of cocaine is not the chief aim of the raids. The labs themselves--often little more than tin-roofed shacks--can easily be replaced, analysts say.

Far less replaceable are the vast quantities of ether, acetone and other chemicals not manufactured in Colombia and subject to tight export controls by other nations.

As essential ingredients in the production process, their wholesale destruction, such as happened in the Magdalena Valley raid, can crimp the production chain.

‘Gallons of Stuff’

“You’re talking about gallons and gallons of stuff from West Germany and the United States,” a European diplomat in Bogota said. “It’s beginning to be easier to stop that flow than the smuggling of cocaine the other way.”

The quick-strike raids, complemented by state-of-siege regulations in a coordinated strategy, theoretically give Colombian authorities the power to disrupt every aspect of the drug trafficking enterprises.

Under Colombian law, any property linked to drug trafficking is subject to impoundment. Barco also has issued a new extradition decree that can provide for trials in U.S. courts of Colombian traffickers.

Such threats mark a potential sea change in a Latin American nation in which drug traffickers historically have remained confident that bribed and intimidated judges would not dare convict them.

“We were trying to attack a problem when they were operating within a safe haven,” one top-level drug enforcement official said. If the extradition arrangements can be worked out, “now they don’t have a safe haven any more.”

The cartel’s furious response--a campaign of bombings, arson and an unprecedented declaration of “total war” on the Colombian government--served notice of how intolerable that reality would be.

Against that backdrop of almost certain violence, the analysts noted, an early record of success for the Colombian offensive is likely to become essential. Signs that the anti-drug effort is having no real effect almost certainly would inspire renewed pressure inside Colombian society for a cease-fire and negotiations with the traffickers.

Powerful Threat

Extradition--the power most vigorously sought by U.S. authorities in the drug war--would have the potential to immediately strike the top of some of the world’s most powerful criminal organizations.

“The only thing those bastards fear is U. S. justice,” said Sen. Joseph R. Biden (D-Del.), one of the Senate’s leading authorities on international narcotics operations. “It makes a lot of sense to try to decapitate these organizations.”

But many analysts contend that the principal value of such extradition authority is its power to keep the drug kingpins on the run.

It is enough to hope that it might slow the operations, cutting the flow of cocaine to the United States.

“What these guys want is to live the good life,” said the DEA’s Gutensohn. “And you can’t live the good life from behind closed doors.”

Similar benefits could be won through use of the Colombian government’s emergency powers to seize any property used by the traffickers, the analysts said. In addition to bringing the government valuable, salable assets, “it obligates (the traffickers) immediately to go to other places where they do not enjoy the same security they had,” the Colombian security official said.

It remains to be seen whether such tactics, even if executed with long-haul determination, will match the cartel’s intimidating resources--chiefly, money and terror.

Experts acknowledge that so pervasive is corruption, even among army and police officials, that the Colombian government has sought to limit knowledge of its recent offensives to a trusted few.

“It’s tough to resist when a guy comes in and offers you $10,000 to take a coffee break from 10 to 10:15 instead of from 9 to 9:15--especially when he makes it clear that unless you do, he’ll kill you,” noted a U.S. official who served in Colombia.

Times staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow, in Washington, and William R. Long, in Colombia, contributed to this report.