Colombia Cheers Record Cocaine Hauls : War on drugs: With 75,000 pounds seized in four months, police say 1991 will be their best year.

In less than four months, police based in this northwestern city have made anti-narcotics history by seizing and burning about 55,000 pounds of cocaine stashed on local farms.

The cocaine, stored for Medellin drug traffickers by a Monteria gang, is the biggest take in a single anti-narcotics operation.

Called Centennial 5, the operation around Monteria, the capital of Cordoba state, has practically guaranteed that 1991 Colombian cocaine seizures will surpass the record, set last year, of 99,000 pounds. A total of more than 75,000 pounds have been seized in the first four months of this year.

Government officials and the Colombian press are basking in the light of Cordoba’s cocaine bonfires. The police success in the state supports assertions that Colombia is still committed to the anti-drug fight despite an offer of leniency to cocaine bosses who turn themselves in.

U.S. anti-drug officials in Bogota are no less delighted. “This by far is the fastest start ever in the history of the Colombian national police,” one said.

Col. Cesar Castillo, heading the Cordoba police operation, said in an interview this week that many residents are now cooperating and that his men are likely to uncover more cocaine buried in bins on the state’s flat plains.

Before this year, such cooperation was as rare as a cool breeze in Monteria, a dusty city of 150,000 where the temperature often reaches 100 degrees in the shade. Local citizens say that for years the region was virtually ruled by a drug-trafficking gang led by two men, Dario Mendoza and Jeronimo Berrocal, both now in custody.

Called the Coastal Cartel, the gang helped cocaine producers in Medellin, 170 miles south of Monteria, store their drugs before exporting them from Cordoba’s Caribbean coastline.

A Colombian police official in Bogota explained that the state’s lightly populated plains, used mostly for cattle ranching, were ideal for building clandestine airstrips.

In the recent raids near Monteria, police have destroyed seven such airstrips, complete with floodlights for night landings.

The police official added that after warehousing the drug, traffickers would ship about eight tons each month to the United States from Cordoba.

The vast earnings from the transport business, which began in 1985, helped Mendoza and Berrocal build a private army of about 300 men who patrolled the nucleus of the group’s operations, a triangular area of about 90,000 acres south of Monteria.

“They called it the Bermuda Triangle because anybody who was stupid enough to walk in never came out,” said Castillo from his command center in Monteria. “All the peasants in the area were terrorized into silence.”

One man who was not paralyzed by fear of Mendoza and Berrocal was Capt. Pedro Rojas, the anti-narcotics chief for the national judicial police. He arrived in Monteria on Jan. 18 with a team of undercover agents intent on dismantling the cartel.

Although Rojas recognized the traffickers’ immense power in the region, he underestimated their reach, which proved fatal.

On Jan. 19, Rojas and his police driver, Juan Enrique Montanez, were following a car carrying four members of the drug gang in the direction of the El Totuma farm, where tons of cocaine were reportedly stashed. They were never heard from again, and police, assuming that the two men were ambushed, are still searching for their bodies.

But Rojas’ efforts were not in vain: Under Castillo, who was transferred to Cordoba from Bogota in early January, police used information gathered by Rojas to begin the series of big drug seizures.

The largest, on April 15 at a farm called Manaos, totaled 22,440 pounds, the most cocaine ever found in one location in Colombia. On the same day, Mendoza and Berrocal were captured in Venezuela in a joint operation by that country’s police and Colombian authorities. They are awaiting trial in Medellin.

“One of the problems in Colombia is that there has never been a strong reaction to cops being killed,” said the U.S. official. “In the case of Rojas and Montanez, there has been a concerted effort to solve the murders, and police have seized giant loads of cocaine in the process. I hope this is a trend.”