‘Speed’ Is Testing Guatemala’s War on Drugs : Latin America: Past success against cocaine and heroin is hard to repeat with methamphetamine.

This nation has been a Latin American star in the fight against drugs during the first half of this decade, virtually banishing the heroin and cocaine trade with more than a little help from friends in U.S. law enforcement.

While Colombian opium poppy production rose tenfold over the past four years, in Guatemala, poppy fields all but disappeared under clouds of herbicide sprayed from planes. Cocaine traffickers abandoned Guatemalan airstrips last year after U.S. pilots using night-vision goggles seized virtually all drug cargo entering this country for 18 months.

But now the Guatemalans and their U.S. advisers are battling a drug that is beating them: methamphetamine, better known as “speed” or “crank.” Popular in the United States in the 1960s, speed has enjoyed a resurgence recently, particularly in California. And Guatemala has become a key transshipment point on the route to the U.S. market.

“In some areas of California, [methamphetamine] has now reportedly replaced cocaine as the drug of choice,” Thomas A. Constantine, chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee recently. “Some have called it the ‘poor man’s cocaine.’ ”

As its name implies, speed is a stimulant. Users stay alert to the point of hyperactivity for as long as 14 hours, often turning violent or paranoid. Methamphetamine is legal when prescribed by a doctor for weight loss or to keep patients awake.

Unlike heroin or cocaine, though, speed is made from common, usually innocuous materials; one of its key chemicals, acetone, is found in nail polish remover. And crackdowns on methamphetamine may amount to dress rehearsals for controlling “designer drugs,” also concocted in laboratories, that many observers believe will be the next big wave in illegal narcotics.

Rehearsals are not going well. “The world is losing the battle against narcotics traffickers who are constantly looking for new avenues,” said Manuel Quijano, a Mexican member of the International Narcotics Control Board, a worldwide body set up by various treaties to control drugs. “Some countries are slower than others in updating their laws, and drug rings take advantage of that.”

Speed is the perfect example. In the 1980s, with police in the United States closing speed labs and monitoring shipments of ephedrine--another important ingredient in methamphetamine--dealers began looking for other manufacturing sites, the narcotics control board reported. Seizures of clandestine speed labs fell steadily in the United States from 1989 to 1993--at the same time ephedrine seizures in Mexico rose from nothing to more than five tons.

“This observation lends support to the view that illicit laboratories are increasingly based outside the United States, particularly in Mexico,” the board found in its 1994 report.

Mexican drug lords used what they learned smuggling cocaine for Colombia’s Cali cartel to diversify into speed sales, said the DEA’s Constantine.

After customs agents seized a consignment of speed going into the United States from Mexico last year, authorities of the two countries took action. Working with European governments, they uncovered a ring that shipped ephedrine from the Czech Republic through Switzerland, the Netherlands and Germany to Mexico. The drug dealers had set up front companies in Mexico to import the chemical.

“It is understood that the ephedrine or the final product, methamphetamine, was to be smuggled into the United States,” the board reported.

In all, 50 tons of ephedrine--enough to make 35 tons of speed, or as many as 3.5 billion street doses--were confiscated as a result of the initial investigation. Follow-up by local authorities uncovered clandestine labs in Mexico, and police there have continued to crack down on speed. In coordination with authorities in nations that export the substance, Mexican officials seized 4.7 tons of ephedrine and a small amount of amphetamines after a shootout with suspected drug dealers in February.

But while the narcotics control board was congratulating the Mexicans and the Czechs on their successful cooperation, drug dealers were looking for alternatives. “The road through Mexico no longer seemed so easy to them,” said Quijano, the control board member. “After three or four big seizures, the traffickers began to use Guatemala.”

Last year, Guatemala’s annual imports of ephedrine jumped from 500 pounds to 15 tons, according to law enforcement sources. “It comes in here legally, then heads for the Mexican border,” one official in Guatemala said.

This is not the first time that traffickers disenchanted with Mexico have moved operations to Guatemala. In the late 1980s, when Mexicans made a serious effort to wipe out the opium poppy fields in the western state of Sinaloa, many dealers moved their operations to Guatemala. The western Guatemalan province of San Marcos was ideal: On the Mexican border for easy access to processing labs, it was virtually without roads and full of guerrillas, which would discourage police investigations. By 1988, 5,000 mountainous acres of Guatemala were growing poppies, the same amount under cultivation in Colombia at the time.

But traffickers had not counted on what one law enforcement source called “the visceral reaction” of former President Jorge Serrano. “He wanted drug trafficking stopped, and he was willing to pay a severe political price to do it,” the source said.

Few other sovereignty-conscious Latin American presidents have allowed the level of U.S. involvement in their drug control programs that Serrano permitted. He accepted $2 million a year in direct U.S. assistance for drug enforcement and $2 million more to maintain a fleet of small airplanes and helicopters, flown by U.S. and Guatemalan pilots. They sprayed poppy fields with herbicide, killing the crop. Police were sent into the area--despite the insurgents--to arrest farmers whose neighbors had accused them of growing poppies.

“They were pretty hard-nosed,” one observer said. As a result, fewer than 1,000 acres of poppies were grown in Guatemala last year, while the Colombian total jumped to more than 50,000 acres.

Similarly, when Mexico cracked down on air shipments of cocaine, the Colombian cartels began landing on the 300 private airstrips along the southwestern coast of Guatemala. “Two years ago, cocaine was falling out of the sky and hitting peasants on the head,” joked one law enforcement official.

Then Serrano allowed U.S. agents to install a state-of-the-art radar system that detected planes before they flew over the coast. Eighteen planes were seized in as many months--every plane the radar detected. Now the drug cartels are forced to hide cocaine in freight shipments through ports, a far more expensive, time-consuming and risky method.

After those successes, the failure to halt speed dealers has drug enforcement officials here frustrated. Guatemala has received as much international cooperation as Mexico did. In fact, it was German authorities, alarmed by the sharp increase in their ephedrine exports to Guatemala, who first brought the problem to the attention of their counterparts here.

But police could not take action: Guatemala has no laws restricting ephedrine. “Shipments come from India and Germany,” one law enforcement official said. “In this country, every shipment is legal, so there is no way to turn it off.”

Guatemalan police know which companies are involved in imports and try to monitor shipments to notify Mexican authorities to be on the alert for deliveries. So far, no shipments have been intercepted in that way. “The police are cooperating as best they can,” the law enforcement official said. But without laws barring drug-making chemicals, they can do little.

Further, Guatemalan lawmakers show little inclination to start the long process of passing needed restrictions, certainly not until a new National Congress, to be elected in November, takes office, sources said.

The lag time between a drug’s appearance and the development of laws to control it is part of what makes synthetic drugs so attractive to dealers--and such a threat, Quijano said.

“We have to change our attitude about drug enforcement,” he said. “The great danger is no longer opium, but designer drugs, synthetic drugs that have similar effects, but are not opium.”