COLUMN ONE : Cocaine Has a Made in U.S.A. Label : American firms make most of the solvents that routinely wind up in Colombian cocaine labs. That chemical trail is surprisingly easy to follow.

By DOUGLAS JEHL

Dec. 5, 1989 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CARTAGENA, Colombia —

For the tanker Catalina, this week-long journey is to be routine: south from Houston across the Gulf of Mexico, a squeeze through the Yucatan Channel then a dash for home across the Caribbean to this steamy Colombian port.

Nothing unusual about the cargo, either. Among the shipments sloshing in her holds will be close to a million pounds of methyl ethyl ketone, direct from Exxon Chemical.

It is an ordinary solvent, best-suited for producing rubber cement. Colombian customers bought up thousands of tons of the chemical last year--about 12% of U.S. exports.

The trouble is that Colombia doesn’t make any rubber cement. Nor does it make nearly enough smokeless powder, varnish or other products to account for the mounting deliveries of MEK and other solvents to its shore.

Instead, authorities believe, its voracious appetite for shipments like the Catalina’s is fueled primarily by the needs of a better-known Colombian industry: cocaine.

Solvents like MEK are vital ingredients in the alchemy that transforms cheap coca leaves into cocaine hydrochloride worth $100 a gram. And while the United States is not the only supplier, it is clear that the vast majority of cocaine chemicals are American-made.

Nine gallons in 10 of MEK dispatched by the United States to Colombia are diverted for use in cocaine production, according to U.S. investigators in Bogota. While other solvents are more often used legitimately, they pose similar problems. Perhaps 20% of what the United States exports to Latin America as a whole winds up in the cocaine laboratories, officials fear.

There is no evidence that U.S. manufacturers knowingly abet this process. Not until the chemicals arrive legally in Latin America do they find their way “out the back door” into the hands of cocaine enterprises, investigators believe.

Thus the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has found no reason to halt the Catalina, which is due to embark on Wednesday, even though a new law empowers the DEA to block suspicious chemical shipments.

Some U.S. officials hope they can use that law to disrupt the chemical trail, which they regard as more vulnerable than the return flow of user-ready drugs along secretive smuggling routes.

“It’s a heck of a lot easier to intercept a tanker-truck of acetone than a few dozen kilos of cocaine,” a senior U.S. diplomat said.

The U.S. assault, known as Operation Tourniquet, aims to staunch the flow of “cocaine chemicals” along arteries that stretch from the behemoth petrochemical plants of Texas and Louisiana to tiny jungle processing laboratories along Colombia’s Magdalena River.

Those arteries span thousands of miles of pipeline and highway, tanker route and river channel. And the suspects in the stream seem infinite: millions of tons of chemicals, countless vehicles and lists of chemical companies that fill five daunting pages in the Bogota telephone book alone.

Critics argue that the knot is simply too big to tighten. In particular, chemical industry officials have warned of the difficulties of squeezing worldwide sources of supply and voiced doubts that such a tourniquet could significantly inhibit the cocaine trade.

But an effort by The Times to chart the chemical trail--based on Commerce Department data, industry documents and interviews with U.S. and Colombian officials in Washington, Houston, Cartagena and Bogota--provided a map of surprising clarity.

Its principal route runs through the single U.S. port of Houston and links only a few dozen U.S. exporters and 270 principal Latin American customers. Compared with the quantity of buyers and sellers that investigators had once feared, “all the big numbers disappeared,” said Gene Haislip, deputy assistant administrator of the DEA.

Demand for Chemicals

Among the lengthy investigation’s most important findings:

--The cocaine industry’s need for chemicals is enormous. To produce a package of cocaine the size of a two-pound bag of sugar, chemists need 15 liters of a solvent like MEK and a host of other chemicals. The annual demand for the solvents alone fills hundreds of full-size tanker trucks.

--Most of these chemicals come from the United States. In Colombia, where the vast majority of processing laboratories are located, officials believe as much as 80% of the solvents used in cocaine production enter via direct shipments from the United States.

--The main trail begins in Houston, where 70% of shipments carrying cocaine chemicals depart. In Colombia, most shipments arrive at the Caribbean ports of Barranquilla and Cartagena.

--Many Latin American companies that regularly import American-made chemicals are suspected of aiding their transfer to cocaine enterprises. In letters dispatched last week, the DEA denied “regular customer” status to 41 of those 270 firms--a major step toward cutting them off permanently from the U.S. supply.

--The most worrisome U.S. export used in the cocaine trade is methyl ethyl ketone. About 90% of the 13 million tons of American-made MEK imported by Colombia last year was believed diverted to cocaine laboratories.

--A small number of companies account for the vast majority of MEK exports and go to considerable lengths to disguise their role. Of five MEK shipments in August and September, three accounted for 99% of the total of 2.06 million gallons. In all three cases, the exporters demanded of the Commerce Department that their identities not be made public.

The Central Intelligence Agency warned in a classified report several years ago that normal economic activity in Latin America could not possibly absorb the solvents offloaded at its ports each year.

In cocaine processing, American-made ether was then the “chemical of choice,” a cheap and caustic liquid capable of extracting the valuable alkaloid from a leafy coca paste. Its notoriety--and a resulting crackdown by South American authorities--has helped reduce ether’s role.

But that change has done nothing to reduce the American role. The lesser-known new favorites, MEK and acetone, also come almost entirely from the United States.

U.S. Mounts an Effort

The government initially did almost nothing to disrupt the chemical trail. It had no legal power to halt the shipments, and officials concentrated instead on stopping the flow of drugs back to the United States.

“We really weren’t very serious about it,” Michael Skol, a deputy assistant secretary of state for Latin America, told a recent Washington forum.

That approach--regarded as hypocritical by Latin American officials--changed last year with enactment of the Chemical Diversion and Trafficking Act, which for the first time empowered U.S. authorities to halt chemical shipments it believed likely to wind up fueling production of cocaine and other drugs.

The restrictions, which took effect Oct. 31, apply to 20 chemicals, including MEK, acetone and three other chemicals that may be diverted for cocaine production.

“When the Arabs shut off the oil supply in 1973, people drove a lot less,” one U.S. official here argued. “If we can shut down this supply, they can’t keep their cocaine automobile running.”

So far the agency has blocked two shipments: a load of acetone to Mexico, a sometime transshipment point for chemicals bound further south; and a cargo bound for Taiwan of a chemical sometimes used in heroin processing.

The new law required exporters that had formerly dispatched their solvents without warning to obtain the DEA’s approval. While it applies worldwide, officials say they are most concerned about shipments to Colombia, where vast quantities of chemicals have been seized in jungle laboratories.

Among other ports of concern are those in Ecuador and Venezuela, where chemical imports have increased sharply. Between 20% and 40% of cocaine chemicals are believed smuggled into Colombia along roads and rivers from those two neighbors.

But more nearly typical of the chemical trail is the Catalina, a 375-foot Colombian-flag tanker that regularly shuttles between her home country and the Gulf of Mexico ports of Texas and Louisiana.

Her scheduled 137,000-gallon shipment of MEK now waiting pickup in Houston was manufactured more than 100 miles away in Baton Rouge, at an Exxon Chemicals plant that is one of the nation’s two principal sources of the chemical.

According to documents submitted to the government by Exxon and obtained by The Times, it is headed via Cartagena for Colombia’s biggest petroleum company--Empresa Colombiana de Petroleos, or ECOPETROL. The DEA granted approval for the shipment on Nov. 20.

Karel Coors, the Catalina’s U.S. agent, said MEK was merely one of many kinds of chemicals the 12-year-old ship frequently carried between the United States and Colombia.

A Firm Responds

Exxon Chemicals Americas, in response to submitted questions, expressed disappointment that the confidentiality of its scheduled shipment aboard the Catalina had been “breached.” Asked whether it was “confident” that the shipment of MEK would be used in legitimate industry, the company did not answer directly.

“Certainly shipments, including all Exxon Chemical shipments, receiving DEA approval have undergone the required reviews to establish they are for legitimate purposes,” it said.

U.S. officials involved in the anti-drug effort acknowledged that there was no guarantee that such a shipment--particularly of MEK--would not end up in a jungle laboratory. Once such vast quantities of chemicals reach port in Colombia, they said, they are ever-vulnerable to schemes designed to put them in the hands of cocaine enterprises.

Some truckloads disappear soon after they arrive, “pumped at midnight” from storage tanks near the ports to 10,000-gallon capacity vehicles while corrupt Colombian customs inspectors look the other way, according to U.S. officials in Bogota.

For others, the exchange comes a few miles inland, where trucks dispatched to a legitimate delivery point stop off instead at a roadside rendezvous. There they exchange their chemical cargo for a load of a watery substitute and a fistful of cash.

And for still further shipments, the leakage comes somewhere down the chain, as large importers sell solvents to smaller firms, and they to others. In Colombia, authorities say, such transfers are almost bound to end up in drug producers’ hands.

Among the enterprises discovered to be stockpiling such goods were a paint company “wholly owned” by the Medellin cartel, U.S. officials said. It simply slowed paint production and shipped the extra acrylic to jungle laboratories. A similar scheme uncovered this summer involved Quimica Esteres, a Bogota firm.

“The vast majority of the companies that buy this stuff are front companies with little more than a phone and a desk--and sometimes a narco for a brother-in-law,” a Western diplomat in Bogota said.

Colombian importers of the chemicals say they take extensive steps to guard against such diversion, questioning customers about their need for the chemicals and avoiding sales to distributors. An ECOPETROL spokesman, Julian Geraldo, said this week’s Catalina shipment would be used “as a primary material for the production of paraffin” at its factory in Barrancamea.

The city is located along the Magdalena River, a principal link between the coastal ports and the interior. The remote region, known as the Media Magdalena, harbors many of Colombia’s cocaine processing laboratories.

Already this year, in raids on those laboratories and on suspicious front companies, Colombian authorities have seized more than 2 million gallons of chemicals believed likely to be used in cocaine production--enough to process more than 500 tons of cocaine.

That enormous volume is testimony to a problem that, the companies’ protests notwithstanding, investigators in Colombia say stems from “laxity on the part of importers.” A related weakness came from Colombian police, who “have not been knocking on the door and saying: ‘I want to check the records for that 300,000 kilo shipment.’ ”

Some are optimistic that the new U.S. law might halt some of the leakage. “What we’ve done now,” a senior anti-drug official said, “is to send notice that the eyes of Texas were upon them.”

U.S. authorities are careful publicly not to affix blame on the American manufacturers, which cooperated extensively in drafting the new regulations. But privately, some officials evince exasperation at each company’s insistence that it is not at fault.

“It’s always the other guy,” complained one federal agent in Houston who has interviewed chemical industry executives. Added another official: “Colombia is flooded with this stuff, and these guys know it. They’ve got to know that a good chunk of it is going to the bad guys.”

The chemical manufacturers cite competitive reasons for their refusal to publicly reveal the magnitude of their solvent exports, particularly of MEK. On a private database that otherwise provides detailed breakdown of the sources of chemical shipments, major exporters all demanded anonymity.

However, knowledgeable sources said Exxon was the exporter last August of an enormous 150,000-gallon shipment of MEK--more than 10 times the quantity the company plans to ship this week--that also went to Cartagena aboard the Catalina. (The company confirmed only that it was the source of one of two large MEK shipments sent to Colombia that month.) And law enforcement sources reported that the major exporters of the chemical were also its principal manufacturers.

According to industry profiles, the two largest are Exxon and Shell, whose Louisiana plants each have annual capacities of 230 million gallons. Each of the other two producers--a Celanese Corp. plant and an Arco Corp. facility, both near Houston--produces less than 100 million gallons a year.

Insinuations that the U.S. chemical industry might not be doing enough to solve the problem have produced angry reaction in the past. When President Bush last spring told an audience in Miami that “industry has to do more,” Chemical Manufacturers Assn. President Robert Roland shot back that Bush was “misinformed.”

European Sources

The industry has also suggested that overzealous enforcement of the crackdown might force importers to turn to European sources of supply.

“These chemicals are widely produced and widely available,” Garrity Baker, the CMA’s director of international affairs, said in an interview. “If it were too difficult to get them from the United States, our customers might just get them from another source.”

In recent months, Colombian authorities in Barranquilla seized a tanker carrying a vast quantity--370 metric tons--of methyl ethyl ketone from Rotterdam on suspicion that it was going to be used in cocaine production.

So far, however, even the chemical industry officials acknowledge that the United States remains the primary source of the chemicals. They expressed concern in recent interviews that DEA investigators had reportedly developed sufficient suspicions to refuse “regular status” to more than 15% of Latin American customers, as the agency did this week.

“If anywhere close to one-fifth of our chemical exports are going to jungle labs, we have a problem of proportions that no one has ever imagined or confronted,” said Joe Cook, executive vice president of the National Assn. of Chemical Distributors.

Such concerns appear particularly well-founded when viewed from close range in Colombia, where the chemical trafficking is an open secret.

Near the port of Barranquilla, flatbed trucks share muddy streets with horse-drawn carts. One truck carries dozens of 55-gallon drums of MEK, painted a vivid blue. Its driver, who says he bought the load from a nearby paint factory, reports that it is headed “to a customer in the interior.”

Outside Barranquilla’s customs zone, 10,000-gallon tankers line up in hopes of winning bulk loads. Asked whether he knows his expected load of acetone can be used to make cocaine, one driver winks broadly.

“It makes no difference to me,” he says.

And in Cartagena, whose majestic harbor has been guarded for centuries by the Castillo de San Felipe and ranks of cannon, Western authorities say there is little effort to guard against the chemical invasion.

The Navy has steadfastly insisted that smuggling poses no problem, a diplomat noted. Customs authorities are generally regarded as Colombia’s most corrupt. And once shipments arrive in Cartagena, they are rarely scrutinized by the national police.

“These are dangerous chemicals, and the responsibility of the port is to get them out of the way as fast as we can,” says Ricardo Daza, chief of security for the Port of Cartagena. “Who knows where they go next?”

COCAINE: THE CHEMICAL CONNECTION

The major delivery routes for chemicals necessary to process cocaine.

WHAT GOES INTO IT

Chemicals needed to make one kilogram of cocaine hydrochloride:

Kerosene--250 to 500 liters.

Sulfuric acid--10 liters.

Methyl ethyl ketone, acetone or ethylether--15 liters.

Potassium permanganate --100 grams.

Potassium carbonate or sodium carbonate--50 grams; or ammonium hydroxide--50 liters.

Source: U.S. officials in Colombia.

WHAT IS EXPORTED

U.S. exports of selected essential chemicals to Colombia: