Ukraine Supplying Planes to Colombia Drug Traffickers

By WILLIAM C. REMPEL and CRAIG PYES

Feb. 20, 1996 12 AM PT

SPECIAL TO THE TIMES

KIEV, Ukraine —

The Ukrainian government, through its state-owned aircraft factory here, is engaged in a series of business deals with the Colombian cocaine cartels, selling and leasing a small fleet of Soviet-designed military cargo planes to drug traffickers, The Times has learned.

The Antonov-32Bs, twin-engine turboprops regarded by U.S. anti-drug officials as “the ultimate smugglers’ plane,” have been employed along traditional drug routes from Colombia, Peru, Panama and Mexico, according to U.S. and Colombian law enforcement sources and former partners in the Ukrainian aircraft ventures.

The Antonov aviation factory, which operates under the authority of Ukraine’s Ministry of Machine Building and Defense Conversion, retains legal ownership of at least six of about a dozen Antonovs known to be operating in Colombia. As a result, the now-ailing state-owned factory stands to profit from what appear to be continuing business arrangements with traffickers.

“It would be like [in the U.S.] NASA selling rockets to drug lords,” said an American source familiar with the Ukrainian transactions.

The United States has privately warned Ukraine that drug runners are acquiring its planes and has urged Kiev to “be very careful whom you sell them to,” a senior Clinton administration official in Washington said. Equipping drug traffickers with planes that increase their capacity for delivering cocaine to U.S. markets is a threat to U.S. national security interests, the official said.

Despite the warnings, however, American sources say there are few signs of official action by Ukraine to reverse the deals. In fact, at least six new sales were still pending last month, a Colombian aircraft broker involved in the transactions said in an interview.

The planes are flown by experienced Ukrainian and Russian pilots who also assist in training local flight crews.

U.S. officials say they are unsure how many Antonovs are actually operating in Colombia either in legitimate or illicit trades. Colombian aviation records reviewed by The Times show nine are registered, but Colombian national police say they have spotted at least 12. Canadian authorities documented the transit of 20 Antonovs through their airports last year alone; all of those planes are now believed to be in Colombia, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. law enforcement officials believe the unaccounted-for Antonovs also ended up in the hands of traffickers.

Ukraine’s military cargo planes first entered the civilian market in Panama with three sales in 1992. Those planes are now the subject of a criminal investigation by Ukraine’s Security Service, which has linked the aircraft and Ukrainian pilots to alleged drug smuggling and money laundering between Panama and Colombia. Ukraine is trying to repossess those planes, alleging “unauthorized transfers of state property.”

Interviews in Panama and Ukraine also show that those first Antonovs were owned, in part, by a company made up of Panamanian government officials responsible at that time for regulating civil aviation. Some were secret partners in the company, according to former business associates.

Drug Cartels’ Reach

The Ukrainian state factory’s links with drug-trafficking air cargo firms in Latin America--and the involvement of Panamanian officials--demonstrate not only the reach of wealthy international drug organizations into public offices around the globe, but the vulnerability of weak ex-Soviet economies to exploitation by organized crime.

Furthermore, the story behind the AN-32Bs’ appearance in the drug trade reveals the constantly changing tactics and strategies of the cartels’ covert transportation wing, which continues to operate despite a publicized string of high-level arrests and international law enforcement pressures.

A three-month Times investigation into the Antonov deals also found that:

* The Kiev Antonov factory is represented in Colombia by a Bogota-based leasing company run by a man who has been identified by the DEA as an intermediary in purchasing aircraft that went to traffickers.

* In the spring of 1993, Colombia’s Cali drug cartel specifically asked about the plane’s ability to make cocaine airdrops over Mexico, according to a Ukrainian businessman who says he met twice in Panama with a Colombian introduced to him as the boss of Cali’s air transportation operation.

* The Antonov most recently registered in Colombia was leased late in September to a company that, shortly after the contract was signed, lost another of its large planes when it crash-landed near the southern tip of Baja California transporting an estimated 10 tons of cocaine.

Ukraine Investigation

The Ukrainian Security Service inquiry into the original Panama deals began last year as a local tax probe that quickly led investigators to allegations of drug smuggling and money laundering.

It is a politically sensitive inquiry that is also raising questions about whether some in the Kiev government may have received secret payoffs to let the planes leave the country, according to sources familiar with the Ukrainian investigation.

Last summer, Ukrainian Security Service officials sought U.S. law enforcement assistance in locating the Panama planes and were informed by U.S. agents that additional Antonovs had also been sent to Colombia, where they had ended up in the hands of known and suspected drug traffickers.

Various Ukrainian government agencies have routinely approved the deals and authorized export of the state-owned planes, according to an official of the Transportation Ministry here who said he examined records of the transactions at the request of The Times.

“The factory cannot sell planes without [state] permission,” said Viktor Reznik, chief of the air registry for Ukraine’s Transportation Ministry.

A spokesman for Ukraine’s Foreign Ministry promised “active cooperation” with the United States against traffickers and expressed chagrin over links between the Antonov planes and drug trafficking. “Our state is interested that our companies and vessels are not involved in illegal trade of narcotics,” said the spokesman, who asked not to be named.

Yuri Shcherbak, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United States, said Sunday he had forwarded additional questions from The Times to authorities in the Ukraine. He said he would respond when he heard from those authorities.

The Antonov factory is a prime economic asset of the financially ailing Ukraine, and sales of its aircraft are vital to the young nation’s stability and national security. Besides the light cargo class AN-32B, the factory manufactures more than 100 kinds of aircraft ranging from small crop-dusters to the world’s largest cargo jet, the AN-225 Mriya.

Interviewed in his Kiev office, Reznik said: “If our planes are used by traffickers, it will be very troubling to us. . . . But how can a factory, having sold a plane, know it will be used to transport drugs?”

The cartels’ move into former Soviet aircraft is an ironic result of the DEA’s highly successful but unheralded “Operation Emerald Clipper,” a 5-year-old Phoenix-based crackdown on airplane sales to traffickers. Its effectiveness in the United States has driven traffickers to aircraft markets in Europe and the former Soviet Union.

The Antonov, which was used by the Soviet military to haul cargo and drop paratroopers, can easily carry 6.5 tons of cocaine and has the ability to make precision airdrops. It is relatively cheap, selling new for $800,000 to $2 million, a price similar to that of older American planes. And unlike American aircraft, the Antonov offers an illicit bonus: For now, at least, anti-drug agents are unable to monitor Antonov transactions through traditional databases available in the West.

The CIA predicted nearly two years ago, in a report on trafficking aircraft, that smugglers would turn away from traditional drug-running planes and try to “gain access to Russian-made cargo aircraft like the AN-32 and [the larger] AN-72/74.”

Now, says one U.S. agent, “I believe these planes are going to take over the cocaine industry.”

Cartel Shopping Spree

How the cartel came to put the Antonov at the top of its shopping list of cargo planes is a story, told through court records and interviews, that began in 1991 with what would turn out to be an enormous tactical error by one drug lord.

It was the day that two cartel thugs from Miami barged into a Scottsdale, Ariz., aircraft broker’s office demanding a half-million-dollar refund on a plane that had not been delivered as promised. They vowed to cut off the finger of an employee every day until their money was returned. Shaken employees called police, who brought in the DEA.

The investigation led to Operation Emerald Clipper and U.S. law enforcement’s first systematic assault on the cartel’s covert aviation network. The operation’s brash motto: “Kicking ass, taking planes.”

“You always hit the top-level traffickers when you’re tracing airplanes because they’re the ones who have them,” said Richard L. Canas, who heads the Phoenix DEA office.

Phoenix and Chicago DEA agents, working with federal prosecutors, led a series of investigations that resulted in dozens of aircraft forfeitures. They also provided major intelligence breakthroughs.

They discovered, for example, that the cartel air wing is made up of scores of air cargo companies that are run by 20 to 30 Colombian air transport specialists. These experts arrange logistics for international cocaine deliveries for a handful of upper-echelon traffickers.

These little-known transportation bosses, some of whom call themselves “the brain trust,” according to investigators, are extremely powerful and continue to operate unaffected by past arrests of key Cali cartel leaders.

Emerald Clipper investigators also identified significant trends in air trafficking tactics. Before 1991, for example, the cartels favored Aero Commanders, the executive-sized twin-engine turboprop models costing about $1.5 million used and capable of carrying more than half a ton of cocaine per flight. Shipments were delivered by swarms, or convoys, of up to a dozen planes.

Agents said they were stunned to find that more than half of those Aero Commander models operated in Colombia. Emerald Clipper, with manufacturer assistance, targeted transactions involving that plane, interrupting sales and forcing forfeitures of aircraft and money when they were traced to drug profits.

The cartel countered by buying up Convair 580s that cost no more than the Aero Commanders but carried up to five tons. When federal agents caught on to those transactions and traced some of the purchase money back to drug couriers in New York and Chicago, more planes were seized.

The cartel again countered with even bigger planes--used Boeing 727s and French-made Caravelle cargo jets. Those planes could carry eight to 10 tons--and much more if stripped down and overloaded. And cartel aviation agents moved their shopping trips offshore, to safer markets in Europe where they tried to buy up every used Caravelle still flying.

But it was impossible to disguise the true purpose of older 727s and Caravelles because the legitimate Colombian air cargo market needed smaller, medium-range planes.

“If you had one of those planes, it was like wearing a sign: ‘I’m a trafficker,’ ” one U.S. official said.

History Plays a Hand

The cartel was still looking for the perfect cargo plane based on price, performance and availability free of the increasingly frustrating and costly DEA interference when history played a hand.

The collapse of the Soviet Union in December 1991 left its former defense industries in a desperate state. The Antonov aviation complex in newly independent Ukraine suddenly lost its primary customer: the Soviet military.

Hundreds of unsold planes clogged ramps and tarmacs, among them AN-32Bs perfected under war conditions in Afghanistan, where they had to operate at high altitudes and in a sometimes hot climate.

Unfinished airframes waited on assembly lines for parts the factory could no longer afford to stock. Ukraine’s biggest employer had no orders to support about 30,000 workers in the giant manufacturing and design complex.

It was only a matter of time before struggling aircraft makers, wealthy traffickers and entrepreneurial middlemen would find each other.

But it was not the Colombian cartel that first sent a team of buyers to Kiev. It was a group of Americans--with a get-rich-quick scheme and a picture of former President Reagan--who came in the summer of 1992.

The Americans proposed an audacious venture to turn Panama into a huge air cargo hub serving North and South America. And they picked the cheap and readily available Antonov to launch their plan.

The American venture, however, ultimately was hijacked by Colombian cartel interests with their covert agenda to put the versatile planes to use in the lucrative drug trade.

Through a series of complex business deals and old-fashioned double-crosses, the Americans were shoved aside and--Ukrainian and U.S. law enforcement agents allege--the planes were put into the service of Colombian traffickers operating out of Panama.

An American Dream

Rio Hato, once a busy U.S. military airfield about 75 miles southwest of Panama City, today more closely resembles a ghost town, with vacant buildings and silent runways.

But in 1992, it also resembled a pot of gold to the little team of rainbow-chasing Americans with a grand plan to turn the base into a giant international air cargo terminal. Teaming up with Panamanian officials, they envisioned operation of a new cargo airline with more than 100 planes.

The plan’s chief promoter was Ralph Van Sky, a Miami deal-maker who represented himself as a millionaire financier while working out of an office in his dining room and, as court records show, being pursued by creditors from Florida to Colorado.

He was joined by a Miami businessman whose air of success seemed unaffected by the fact that his landlord said he was chronically in arrears on his office rent. The suave Carlos Benitez, a prominent Dade County Republican and Cuban American activist, kept a prized photo of himself with Reagan. It was part of the Rio Hato investment prospectus. Not disclosed, however, was the fact that the national finance committee for Reagan’s 1984 presidential campaign had complained that he misused Reagan’s name in raising funds for unauthorized causes.

Robert Pinkhasov, the third member of the group, was a 1987 Soviet emigre and former Aeroflot flight engineer who dreamed of opening a Miami Beach deli and selling Antonovs on the side. By then a U.S. citizen, he still had contacts in Ukrainian aviation and government circles.

In the summer of 1992, their small entourage arrived in Kiev to Ukrainian VIP treatment--an airport welcome by political dignitaries, a chauffeured car, food, drink and access to key government officials.

Van Sky laid out the Reagan photo and another showing the Americans with the director of Panama’s civil air authority, Zosimo Guardia. Van Sky said he knew the Panamanian personally, and that everything would go smoothly.

His business plan showed an astounding 100% return on investment in one year. And the Americans talked about eventually buying 50 Antonovs--maybe more--at $1 million a plane.

“Everything looked very nice,” said Victor Kudimenko, a post-Communist financier to whom Kiev government ministries had steered the Americans. He, in turn, had organized a small group of politically connected Ukrainian investors to finance Antonov purchases from the factory.

The Ukrainians were so impressed that they immediately signed a contract committing the first plane to service in Panama for no money down, with payment to come out of the proceeds of the plane’s anticipated cargo-hauling revenues. The state-owned factory agreed to sell more planes, Kudimenko said.

The first AN-32B flew out of Kiev a few days later--its original Soviet registration number-- CCCP-48072--still stenciled to its fuselage, bound for Panama.

But the Americans’ dream of a super cargo terminal was dashed almost from the moment the Antonov arrived in Latin America in the summer of 1992.

Power Play

In a power play orchestrated a few days later by their Panamanian partners, the Americans were dumped. The Panamanians and Ukrainians shared ownership of the Antonov. That plane--and, later, two more like it--were leased to a new air cargo company, Aerovias Las Americas.

To Kudimenko, manager of the Ukrainian interests, his deal was basically a simple partnership between his group and Panamanians connected to the local government. The Ukrainians provided the planes as their share of the investment, and the Panamanians provided official favors.

Kudimenko said he became suspicious when he returned to Panama in the spring of 1993 to check on the Ukrainians’ investment. Not only were Aerovias’ books in total disarray--”They kept no books!” he said--but he found the planes making unusual night flights to and from Cali.

Kudimenko said the Ukrainian flight crews told him they suspected they were running drugs and cash. One night at the airport a small parcel was delivered by one of the Antonov flights from Colombia. Kudimenko said he was told it was worth $1 million.

“I did not ask what was in it because it was clear I should not,” Kudimenko said.

He said he took his fears that the company was running drugs to one of his Panamanian partners, a government official, who Kudimenko said dismissed his warning as “impossible.”

To the Ukrainian investors, however, one thing was clear: They weren’t seeing any profits. According to Kudimenko, they faced losses of about $2.5 million in aircraft and equipment for which Aerovias had not reimbursed them.

Confronted by an emerging financial debacle half a world from his Kiev home, Kudimenko set aside his concerns about possible drug connections.

He said an executive of Aerovias offered to introduce him to “the boss of the transportation department of the drug cartel,” and he agreed.

Kudimenko says he explained to the executive at the time: “I want to live in peace. I don’t want to carry drugs, [but] what others do with the plane I don’t need to know.”

A Deal Over Dinner

The recollections of the participants don’t dovetail on all details. But they agree that negotiations to buy Antonovs from Kudimenko were held in Panama. And to Kudimenko, it was clear what the planes would be used for.

By his account, Kudimenko met two Colombians over dinner and a bottle of Scotch one evening in the spring of 1993 at Panama City’s fashionable Plaza Patiya Inn, taking the table nearest the band. Loud Latin music provided extra privacy for their conversation. Almost immediately, the subject was drugs and Antonovs.

He said the Colombians were a 50-ish man called “Capitan Silva” and a younger man in a red shirt who was introduced as the chief of the Cali cartel’s air transport department.

The Colombians “asked me many technical questions about the aircraft’s performance,” Kudimenko recalled during a recent interview in his Kiev residence. He said the younger man spoke no English, so most of the conversation and negotiations were through Silva.

“They wanted to know about the cargo capacity. [The man identified as the Cali boss] wanted to adapt the aircraft so it could carry drugs to Mexico and drop it from the air. He wanted to fly from Bogota to Mexico and return without landing . . . so we talked about adding internal fuel tanks,” Kudimenko said.

In fact, the plane was ideally suited. With its distinctive high-mounted engines, it is capable of using short, unpaved runways. Its normal range, depending on weight, is 750 to 1,500 miles, flying at 30,000 feet and 330 mph.

With extra internal fuel tanks installed to permit a nonstop round trip to a Mexican airdrop zone, Kudimenko said, cargo capacity would be limited to a still-significant four tons, instead of the normal 6.5 tons.

The plane’s versatility also makes it useful not only for running long-range smuggling routes into Mexico--with airdrops or landings--but also for serving the isolated jungle factories in the Peruvian Andes where coca paste is produced and shipped out to cocaine refining centers.

According to Kudimenko, the Colombian in the red shirt was willing to pay up to $2 million for a new plane--a bit extra to expedite the deal. Kudimenko said he was offered a $10,000 cash advance to start lining up the proper permissions in Ukraine.

Kudimenko was agreeable, and he met the pair a second time a month later. But nothing came of the deal, he said. They did not meet again, and he never got the advance.

“I think they had no need [to buy] an additional plane at the time, because they were already using our aircraft,” Kudimenko said.

Kudimenko’s Panama investment eventually collapsed. He sued for damages in Panama late in 1993. A year later, Aerovias was defunct and some of its shares dispersed. Kudimenko said he was warned by an ex-Panamanian partner against pursuing litigation because it could be dangerous for him.

Thereafter, Kudimenko gave up trying to salvage his investment and returned to Ukraine. Later, his Kiev-based investment company closed, a financial victim of the Panama deal, he said.

But within a year, a new Antonov migration to Colombia was underway, this not only from Ukraine but also from Russia and Moldova. And leading the market shift was a “Capitan Silva.”

Colombian Operation

From the second floor of a pale, unpretentious office building in northern Bogota, Luis Silva Quintero operates Meruc Aviation Leasing, a company with its corporate headquarters a mail drop in Plantation, Fla.

By appearances, it is a modest business. Silva claims Meruc is the exclusive factory representative in Colombia of Ukraine’s Antonov manufacturing giant. Colombian records show that all but one of the officially registered Antonovs operating in the country were brokered by Silva. In addition, the company has imported more than 20 former Soviet military helicopters from Russia.

The 50-ish pipe-smoking pilot is introduced to visitors as “Capitan Silva.” Yes, he knows Kudimenko. Met him in Panama in 1995, he says. But he denies that they talked about Antonovs in 1993, as Kudimenko described.

Silva takes credit for being the architect of Colombia’s growing Antonov fleet.

“The factory is my partner,” he says, summoning a gray-haired man from the outer office.

Alexander Pototskii, introduced as the chief mechanic on leave from the Kiev factory where he has worked for 35 years, says that Silva has an exclusive business arrangement with the Antonov factory. He claims to be living proof.

According to Silva, the Antonov plant initially provided the planes for lease to create a market. Meruc provided the customers; they split the lease fees.

In Kiev, the aviation registry’s Reznik said that Transportation Ministry records show that the Ukrainian planes brokered by Silva’s Meruc are still legally owned by the Antonov plant.

“They are Ukrainian planes,” he said.

And Silva says business is good. Six new planes are on order. But with Ukraine’s economy in crisis and the factory unable to buy parts to finish assembling aircraft, Kiev wants to shift from slow-return lease deals to cash-in-advance sales.

Silva retrieves a fax in Cyrillic lettering just sent from the factory that shows, he says, that the factory is raising the price of new Antonovs to $3 million, an indication that the Colombian market is growing. That is double the price for the initial Colombian order of one plane.

Silva insists he is very careful about choosing his customers. He conducts what he calls “careful background checks” of clients.

Could any of them be traffickers? He shrugs.

“There is always a risk a company could be dirty.”

Tangled Ties

In 1991, after a Convair 580 was seized with more than five tons of cocaine in Mexico, investigators traced the aircraft transaction through a Dallas broker who, according to court documents, said that Capt. Luis Silva Quintero recommended the buyers to him.

According to Colombian aviation records, some of the companies that have acquired Antonovs through Silva include:

* Selva, an oil service company that employed one of the cartel’s “most accomplished” drug-running pilots, according to a DEA investigator. Selva once had a plane temporarily seized by the Colombian government for transporting cocaine.

* Caricarga, a newly formed cargo company that leases two Antonovs and is trying to acquire another from Selva. Both U.S. agents and Colombian anti-narcotics police are investigating whether the company is a front for high-level Cali trafficker Guillermo Angel Restrepo. During a federal property seizure case in Phoenix last year, a U.S. District Court judge concluded that Angel Restrepo was part of the Cali cartel and had concealed his interests in various Colombian air cargo companies, including Air Colombia and Air Caribe.

In that case, $11 million in aircraft and cash were forfeited by Air Colombia to the United States after the judge ruled that laundered drug money had been used to purchase the planes.

Said a U.S. law enforcement source: “Caricarga took the same address, the same phones, the same beeper numbers as Air Colombia . . . and we were told they have the same owners.”

A man answering Air Colombia’s phones in Bogota said his company also handled affairs for Caricarga, whose planes shared the same facility.

In December, Colombian anti-drug officials said they had delayed approval of the pending Caricarga request to certify its sublease of the Selva plane. Authorities questioned how the cost of the plane could be justified by the firm’s legitimate business revenues.

“In Colombia there are more than 200 airline businesses, but about 30 companies are all the country’s legitimate business can support,” said a Colombian official who oversees civilian aircraft licensing. “Often we see that the [legitimate] income from their businesses doesn’t justify the cost of the planes.”

The most recent Colombian firm to acquire an Antonov, Iberoamericana de Carga, went to the used aircraft market in Central America to acquire an 8-year-old military version of the plane from a Nicaraguan company that the DEA said belongs to Pascual Bravo, who is identified in federal court records in Chicago and Phoenix as a Colombian drug trafficker.

According to records in the Phoenix property seizure case, Bravo and his associates have acquired planes for Air Colombia and other traffickers. Also, law enforcement reports say a company controlled by Bravo sent more than a ton of cocaine to Sonora, Mexico, aboard a Caravelle in March of last year.

Iberoamericana, suspected by the DEA of being a cartel front company, nonetheless late last October was granted a certificate from Colombian anti-narcotics officials allowing it to operate its new Antonov. One week later one of its other cargo jets--a Caravelle--was found in Baja after delivering a load of about 10 tons of cocaine. Law enforcement authorities said the company is trying to acquire two additional AN-32Bs.

Jungle Base

One of Caricarga’s AN-32Bs, its fuselage painted in contrasting purple tones and bearing the Colombian registration number HK-4008, stands on a remote tarmac of Bogota’s international airport, near the old Simon Bolivar Terminal.

The area is dubbed “the Bermuda Triangle” by one prominent Colombian drug runner. Most of the cargo companies there, he says, are owned by traffickers. It is no place for strangers to ask a lot of questions, warns a Colombian anti-narcotics officer, who tells visitors the area is “muy peligroso” (very dangerous).

The Antonov is secured by a high fence and a gate patrolled by three armed men and two growling Rottweilers. In the same enclosure is a plane from another cargo company whose Caravelle was seized 17 months ago in Zacatecas, Mexico, with eight tons of cocaine. And from an unmarked hangar nearby operates Iberoamericana, one of whose planes delivered a similar load to Baja just three months ago.

One morning in December, HK-4008 rolls out, powers into the air and banks toward the jungle. Flying an Antonov is very demanding. It handles like an old Mack truck with no oil in the bearings, says a U.S. military analyst who has piloted an AN-32B. “You need to be strong like a bull. You can shake your eyeteeth out flying that thing,” he said.

Just 15 minutes by air from the cool, drizzly highlands of Bogota is the small airport of Villavicencio, sweltering gateway to los llanos, a vast savanna bleeding into the Amazon jungle.

This is the forward base of the Antonovs that are used by cargo companies to serve the oil and mineral industries and to supply isolated jungle communities. It is also a vast, lawless territory where the drug cartels conceal the laboratories that convert Peruvian coca paste into finished cocaine.

The airport is a modest complex with a single runway. There is a small terminal and a dozen cargo hangars, among them the facilities of Caricarga, Air Colombia and Selva.

A National Police captain strolls from one end of the runway to the other, pointing out planes and companies suspected of narcotics trafficking as well as running drugs and munitions to guerrillas.

He is followed by a bodyguard, a short, dark and wiry man with a crew cut and curved sunglasses who nervously clicks the cap of a Gatorade bottle with one hand and rests the other on his holstered 9-millimeter Beretta.

Back in the police substation, the captain sweeps his hand over a map of the region and expresses the utter hopelessness of his task.

Los llanos and the jungle cover more than half of Colombia, he explains, but there is no police or military presence in 95% of the territory of those regions. The closest thing to authority there is the narco-guerrillas who guard the cartel labs in return for cash and arms.

The captain runs his finger across an expanse of color indicating jungle on the map. He stops at a tiny dot denoting the jungle town of Miraflores.

It is little more than a runway bordered by houses, he says. The population might support a few cargo flights each week. Yet there are at least 15 to 20 cargo planes flying there every day.

Miraflores, he says, is the supply depot for the jungle cocaine labs.

When asked which of the Villavicencio cargo companies fly to Miraflores, he does not hesitate:

“All of them.”

Times staff writer Rempel reported from Ukraine, special correspondent Pyes from Panama and Colombia.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Drug Lords’ Wings of Choice

On the lookout for the perfect cargo plane based on price, performance and availability, Colombian drug lords have hit on the Ukainian-built Antonov 32B. The plane was once used by the Soviet military to haul cargo and drop paratroops during the Afghanistan war.

Favorable Features of the AN-32B:

* Can easily haul 6.5 tons of cocaine

* Designed to make precision airdrops; tested under wartime conditions

* Has good performance in a hot climate

* Inexpensive; sells new for $800,000 to $2 million, a price similar to that of older American planes

* Able to take off and land on short, unimproved runways like those found in the jungle

* Normal range, depending on weight, is 750 to 1,500 miles, flying at 30,000 feet and 330 miles per hour. Extra fuel tanks permit a roundtrip air drop as far as northern Mexico

* So far, it is free of frustrating and costly interference by U.S. drug agents. Sales and leases involving the Antonov don’t show up in traditional databases, so agents have been unable to monitor transactions.

Cocaine airways

Cocaine from the Colombian cartels begins in the coca-growing regions of Peru, proceeds through jungle processing plants in Peru and Colombia and is dropped at locations throughout Mexico for smuggling to other global destinations. The range of the cartels has been greatly enhanced by the use of twin-engine turboprop aircraft.

****

How cartel transportation evolved

The Colombian drug cartels have used a variety of aircraft to get drugs to North America. They began with U.S.-built planes but switched to foreign aircraft when U.S. narcotics authorities proved to be adept at tracking down and seizing the planes.

Note: Planes not drawn to scale

1. From 1985 to 1991

* Aero Commander

* At one time, more than half of the world’s U.S.-made Aero Commander turboprops operated in Colombia

2. From 1989 to 1991

* Cessna Conquest II

1989 to 1991

* King Air 200/300

3. From 1991 to 1992

* Convair 580 turboprop

* Cost no more than the Aero Commander but carried up to five tons

4. 1992 to 1993