Weekend TV : Cocaine Cartel Can’t Hide From CNN

The Colombian cocaine cartel may have gone global, but CNN long ago mastered another worldwide racket--international news. The cartel might run, but it can’t hide from CNN snoops Peter Arnett and Brian Barger in “The Kingdom of Cocaine.”

But because all of CNN’s lengthier reports (“Kingdom” clocks in at 90 minutes) are designed in short segments that may be slotted into the network’s daily news schedule, the narrative flow of a complex story is dammed up, rendered choppy and almost incoherent. And the complexity of the drug cartel story is especially impeded by this seemingly inflexible approach.

Adopting a garish approach right out of “True Stories of the Highway Patrol,” the early segments reported by Barger serve up a bloody but manic account of the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar, Colombia’s first drug lord. Moderately exciting and fairly pointless, the Escobar affair is quite unrelated to the current, infinitely more sophisticated and corporatized cocaine cartel based in Cali, Colombia.

Here is the real coke kingdom, now richer than such U.S. companies as Texaco and in control of 80% of the world market. Run largely by two brothers who parlayed a corner drug store into a big chain operation before branching into illegal substances, the cartel dominates Cali and the nation through bribery and influence peddling rather than Mafia-like force.

Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez own soccer teams, shopping malls and phone companies, and pump so much cash into the Colombian economy (1993 profits reportedly topped $2 billion) that they seem to be untouchable. Certainly, Barger and Arnett show, they easily avoid arrest, and have developed incredibly intricate means of shipping drugs to the vast U.S. market.

The report sloppily includes an admission from U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency official Thomas Clifford--who says, “There’s no way we can win,” then adds lamely and nonsensically, “There’s no way we can give up”--that deserves a whole report unto itself. That, and the Reagan Administration drug-war official Michael Abbell, caught on camera, who is now the Rodriguezes’ attorney in Washington.

So much for just saying no.

* “The Kingdom of Cocaine” airs at 6 p.m. and again at 9 p.m. Sunday on CNN.