Regional Report : Remapping Latin America’s Drug War : From Bolivia to Mexico, governments are getting aggressive. One sign of success is higher street prices for cocaine.

Colombian anti-narcotics police have been swooping down on that country’s burgeoning fields of opium poppies since January, dumping deadly chemicals from their aircraft and destroying more than 12,000 acres of the raw material for heroin.

That may be as much as half of the Colombian fields under poppy cultivation, according to pleased U.S. officials helping to fight the Latin American drug wars.

A few thousand acres of Colombian poppies are admittedly just a blip on the chart compared with Latin American cocaine and its cheaper, smokable derivative, crack--which constitute by far America’s No. 1 illicit drug problem.

But Bogota’s decision to use aerial spraying--highly unpopular in Colombia as it is elsewhere in Latin America--is important as a sign of the renewed commitment that those U.S. officials say they see among governments in the Latin countries that are the primary fronts in the multibillion-dollar battle against the illicit drugs.

“The Colombian government did not begin fighting the cocaine trade until 10 years after it was established here,” said Juan Tokatlian, a Bogota political scientist specializing in anti-narcotics issues. “The (President Cesar) Gaviria administration is determined not to make the same mistake with heroin.”

The status of the Latin drug wars as sketched in interviews with top U.S. officials in Washington tends to be slightly rosier than that emerging from on-the-scene reporting by Times correspondents.

And it’s clear from all assessments that whatever the extent of real progress to date, the war is not likely to be won soon and will remain a significant factor in U.S. relations with Latin American nations for the foreseeable future. The scope of the problem remains awesome, and the resources available to fight it are limited.

Those Colombian poppies are reminders that agile drug traffickers, alert to changing markets and delivery obstacles, constantly switch their tactics, their markets and sometimes even their products to stay a step ahead of the multinational anti-narcotics forces arrayed against them.

“The Colombians (drug traffickers) have shown a remarkable ability to learn fast,” said John Walters, deputy director for supply reduction at the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy. “They’ve also shown a remarkable ability to market a product. There wasn’t any demand for crack in 1985. That was something they came up with and managed to market like mad.”

But some of America’s Latin allies in the drug wars are showing ingenuity of their own in attacking the illicit industry.

One sign of progress cited by officials is a recent sharp spurt in the wholesale price of cocaine in several U.S. cities. In New York, a major distribution point for the drug, the price jumped from a range of $12,500 to $22,000 per kilogram in the first quarter of the year to $25,000 to $30,000 last month, said Robert C. Bonner, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Wholesale prices also jumped in three so-called gateway cities for incoming cocaine.

This marked only the second time since the cocaine epidemic began in the late 1970s “that we have seen actual upturns,” Bonner said. “We think the upturn in price indicates there is, at least temporarily, less cocaine available. The question is can we sustain the effort.”

“This is a result of U.S. government efforts with host countries, especially over the last year when seizure rates were high,” a State Department official added. “It does show we can have an effect on things.”

The Latin drug wars touch Mexico as well as virtually every country of Central and South America and the Caribbean, aiming at growers, processors, distributors, transit countries and money launderers.

But there is particularly heavy focus on the so-called Big Four: the main cocaine “source” countries of Peru, Colombia and Bolivia and the currently favored transit country on America’s doorstep, Mexico, which is also the main foreign source of marijuana.

A look at each of those battlefronts:

COLOMBIA

After turning its back on the cocaine problem for a decade, until purveyors nearly brought the government to its knees, Colombia has done more in the fight against illicit narcotics than any other Latin American nation. Cocaine seizures there have risen from 23 metric tons in 1988 to 87 metric tons in 1991, according to the latest State Department International Narcotics Control Strategy Report.

U.S. officials say they are convinced that with leaders of the infamous Medellin cocaine cartel now in jail, Colombian police are committed to going after other traffickers--particularly the so-called Cali cartel.

In a series of raids starting last November, police have seized crucial financial records that U.S. officials confirm have helped bring about the arrests of several Cali cartel members in the United States.

Bonner said those raids also led to the arrest in Colombia in April of Ivan Urdinola, a cartel associate whom the DEA chief calls “Ivan the Terrible.”

Urdinola is believed to be spearheading the move into heroin. He is also suspected of ordering, with his two brothers, the violent deaths of dozens of people whose mutilated bodies have been found in the Cauca River outside Cali over the last two years.

The diversification into heroin by Colombia’s drug barons points up their swift response to the first signs that cocaine demand is no longer expanding in the United States and their recognition that anti-narcotics efforts have boosted the cost of getting cocaine to its primary market.

So, too, does their push of cocaine into the European market, with routes developing from Argentina and Brazil, sometimes through Africa, according to a State Department official.

Another official cited reports that Colombian drug traffickers are hiring chemists in Southwest Asia, a principal source of the world’s heroin, to help process Colombian poppies. “It’s a matter of great concern,” he said.

Walters noted that, while encouraging, the destruction of Colombian poppy fields has not yet eliminated the heroin threat. He cited the difficulties of estimating acreage in the mountainous, often cloud-shrouded terrain where the poppies are growing, and cautioned that growers, who can raise three poppy crops a year, are expected to replant.

A potential sour note in the U.S.-Colombian relationship is the way the country’s judicial system finally deals with leading figures of the Medellin cartel, who surrendered last year under an offer that guaranteed them no extradition to the United States and reduced sentences for confessed crimes. Traffickers who accepted the offer included Pablo Escobar and the Ochoas--Jorge Luis, Juan David and Fabio.

Gaviria has downplayed the importance of the trials to the bilateral agenda. But DEA chief Bonner, while hailing Colombia’s actions against the now-dominant Cali cartel, said it is “extremely important that Escobar and the Ochoas be held accountable . . . that they be dealt with severely.”

PERU

In Peru, the major world source of the coca leaves from which cocaine is derived, the effort to attack the problem by eradicating the offending crop is meeting decidedly mixed results even as bilateral relations with Washington suffer following President Alberto Fujimori’s military-backed suspension of democratic government in April.

However, according to U.S. officials in Lima, Fujimori has also reinstated anti-drug measures that were suspended by the disbanded Congress. “We have seen more drug enforcement action in more places by more people in Peru than you could have seen before,” one American said.

One of the measures, for example, makes money laundering a criminal offense--a step that some U.S. officials regard as key to any genuine attack on narcotics.

Another measure authorized the Peruvian air force to take charge of civil airports in cocaine-producing areas. It has taken over six so far.

Top U.S. officials in Washington praised the attempt to choke off traffic in cocaine paste and base--intermediate steps in turning coca leafs into finished cocaine hydrochloride powder--to processing labs mainly in Colombia as an important means of reducing the illicit flow. But critics in Peru contend the move is mainly for show, since drug planes come and go freely at dozens of other well-known landing strips.

One possible casualty of Fujimori’s coup may be U.S. radar and electronic surveillance in eastern Peru--an operation, coordinated with the Peruvian air force, that forced down 10 airborne drug runners before it was discontinued at the end of April. A planned follow-up operation was suspended by Washington as part of its diplomatic protest against the coup.

Other U.S. officials say it’s not the coup or the U.S. response to it that is hampering actions against Peru’s cocaine traffickers so much as a shortage of resources, especially aircraft, to speedily transport police to drug war hot spots.

A U.S.-financed, joint DEA and Peruvian police anti-drug base called Santa Lucia in eastern Peru, for example, has seen three of its five Vietnam-era Huey helicopters put out of commission by crashes. Meanwhile, the cocaine trade is moving out of range of the remaining aircraft.

“We can’t build another Santa Lucia,” an American official in Lima said. “We don’t have the time, we don’t have the money and we don’t have the helicopters.”

BOLIVIA

Bolivia, the second-largest source of coca, has become a “bright spot” in the drug wars, Bonner said. Operation Ghost Zone, under way for about two months, is moving to seal off the Chapare region where most of the crop is grown and to block precursor chemicals used in processing cocaine, such as ether and acetone, from reaching the area.

Operation Ghost Zone “demonstrates that (Bolivian) law enforcement is capable of carrying out a large-scale, sustained counter-narcotics effort that would have been very unlikely only a couple of years ago,” Bonner said. “It also demonstrates a strengthening of political will and determination.”

(Last Thursday, President Bush said Colombia and Bolivia will receive preferential trade treatment under legislation meant to encourage democratic Andean nations with good human rights records to get out of the drug trade.)

MEXICO

Mexico’s role in the drug wars has become more important because of a shift in U.S. strategy. The original plan, outlined by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy in 1989, emphasized attacking cocaine and other illicit narcotics in the source countries. Recently, however, interdiction of drugs on their way to the United States from Latin America has gotten greater attention.

Under Operation Halcon, also known as the Northern Border Response Force, Mexico detects northbound cocaine-bearing planes from Colombia that attempt to land there in order to shift their illicit loads to cars, trucks or other planes for the final leg across the porous, 1,933-mile border into the United Staters.

Using U.S.-leased, Vietnam-era helicopters and tracking aircraft, the operation has forced the Colombian cartels to stop short of the northern states where they used to make the transfer and instead land in southern Mexico or Guatemala. It has proved costly to the cartels, with more than 45 tons of cocaine seized along with more than 23 aircraft.

“Before (the operation) began in October, 1990, Colombian cartels were essentially flying loads of cocaine convoy style--seven to 14 airplanes at a time, each loaded with 1,500 pounds of cocaine,” Bonner said. “They would unload and store the cocaine at haciendas in northern Mexico, where traffickers with decades of experience of moving large volumes of marijuana across the (U.S.) border would take over.”

State Department and other U.S. officials also praised Mexico’s commitment to eradicating the opium poppies and marijuana that farmers grow there.

There were reports that some forms of cooperation with the U.S. anti-drug effort were halted after last month’s Supreme Court decision upholding the authority of U.S. agents to seize fugitives overseas without a host country’s permission.

U.S. sources insist no such “stand down” occurred, although senior Administration officials noted that any similar abduction in the future would require presidential approval, and they virtually ruled it out if Mexico was involved.

AT HOME

If the drug wars have a mixed record in Latin America, the same might be said in more ways than one on the home front. Consider, for example, the case of the Blackhawks.

In January, in keeping with the stepped-up interdiction effort, DEA chief Bonner and Atty. Gen. William P. Barr began to push plans to deploy modern, Pentagon-supplied Blackhawk helicopters against cocaine traffickers in Guatemala, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica--all known to be transshipment points for cocaine trafficking. The helicopters would carry teams of DEA agents and foreign anti-narcotics police for raids against clandestine landing strips and other targets.

The plan, however, led to a turf struggle with the Treasury Department’s Customs Service--the kind of bureaucratic warring that has long plagued the U.S. narcotics efforts. And Sen. Ernest F. Hollings (D-S.C.), a powerful member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, objected to the $2.5-million bill to retrofit the helicopters for DEA use.

As a result, the Guatemala expansion has been called off. However, Customs and the Coast Guard will operate in the Dominican Republic and Jamaica after discussions with those countries, a knowledgeable source said.

Times staff writers William R. Long in Lima and Marjorie Miller in Mexico City and Times special correspondent Stan Yarbro in Bogota contributed to this article.

The Cocaine Connection

* Main Route: 1) Cocaine base is transported by light plane from the Peruvian Andes directly to Colombia or via indirect routes that cross Ecuador or Brazil. 2) Cocaine is refined into powder and flown out by private plane from Colombia. 3) Arrives at staging areas in southern Mexico or northern tier of Central America, primarily Guatemala and, sometimes, Belize. 4) Transported to U.S. sites, such as large cities, via various methods, including plane, automobile, foot and, to lesser extent, by sea.

* Secondary Route: (Steps 1 and 2) Same as above. 3) Powder is sealed in water-tight containers and air-dropped into waters off Puerto Rico, Dominican Republic or Virgin Islands. 4) Picked up by boats. 5) Travels by various methods into U.S. In the case of Puerto Rico, often packed into suitcases and flown to New York.

* Other Routes Although Peru is the main source of coca leaf, Bolivia, Colombia and other nations also produce it. Some cocaine base is transported via boats or motorized canoes down Amazon River tributaries into Brazil, where it may be shipped to Europe or elsewhere. Other base is sent through Bolivia and Chile. The possibilities are endless.

* Defunct Route: Until about two years ago, the main route for cocaine powder was via private plane from Colombia into northern Mexico and then into the United States, by various means. However, interdiction efforts have pushed traffickers into southern Mexico and into Guatemala.

Sources: Drug Enforcement Administration; Times Staff

U.S. Support for Drug War

Under one program, Washington spends nearly eight times as much fighting drugs in Latin America as in the rest of the world.

* The Money

International Narcotics Control Program--Country Funding Program as of 3/92 (in thousands of U.S. dollars)

Subtotal: $90 Million

* Other Regions:

The International Narcotics Control Program -- Country Funding Program for fiscal year 1991 (in millions of U.S. dollars)

Subtotal: $11 Million

Source: Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, U.S. State Department

* Types of Assistance:

The International Narcotics Control Program is only one weapon in the drug war. Some other U.S. programs that impact directly or indirectly on drug trade:

DEA: Drug Enforcement Administration. Provides agents and technical assistance to reduce production and trafficking in drugs.

FMF: Foreign Military Financing. Usually a grant or loan for military equipment.

IMET: International Military Education and Training. Military training programs.

EDA: Excess Defense Articles. Donation of articles that U.S. armed forces declare in excess.

DA: Developmental Assistance. AID-sponsored programs to accelerate economic growth, alleviate hunger and improve health and education.

ESF: Economic Support Fund. Aids allies and developing countries. It mainly provides balance-of-payments support to ensure acquisition of raw materials and capital goods when foreign exchange is not readily available. AID administered.

* The Seizures

Washington reports rising seizures of Latin American cocaine, but production continues to rise, too.

Latin American cocaine production and seizures, in metric tons Note: Average of low and high estimates. For instance, 1991 low figure is 955; the high is 1,170.

Source: Federal Drug Statistics