Colombia’s Drug Cartels Give Way to Smaller, More Flexible Traffickers

The legendary figures who controlled the international cocaine trade through cartels named after Colombian cities are jailed or dead.

But the flow of drugs from Colombia to the United States goes on. The $7-billion industry has been taken over by smaller, more flexible, less structured--and less efficient--organizations, according to police and other experts.

“The cartel that coordinated everything from production to delivery no longer exists,” said Col. Benjamin Nunez, head of the elite police division here that tracks down and arrests drug lords.

Instead, the narcotics trade is now made up of specialized organizations that form shifting alliances to move illegal drugs from the South American jungles to the streets of the United States. They are run by cautious, middle-aged men who learned the business as low-level operatives in the Medellin and Cali cartels.

After seeing their audacious bosses fall, their goal is to minimize risk. But reducing risk also reduces profits, preventing them from building the sort of financial empire that Pablo Escobar controlled from Medellin or the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers ran here.

“We have dismantled their economic structure,” Gen. Luis Enrique Montenegro, deputy chief of the National Police, said in an interview in Bogota. “Without liquidity, they can do nothing.”

Nevertheless, drug rings manage to get their products to the United States. Colombia--long the major supplier of cocaine to the United States--has even increased its share of the U.S. heroin market, becoming the most important source of the heroin sold in New York, according to a recent U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration report.

Still, police here say they believe that they are forcing drug traffickers to “subcontract” more of their operations, cutting into their profits to an extent that will eventually drive them out of Colombia.

“We are going to pulverize them--because the more pulverized they are, the less powerful they are,” Nunez, the police colonel, said.

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The cartels introduced coca bushes, from whose leaves cocaine is produced, into Colombia from Peru and Bolivia. Having production in Colombia allowed the cartels to better control their supply sources. Some cartels even owned coca fields, according to police.

They ran the laboratories that turned the leaves into paste and then cocaine crystals. Then they bought planes and boats to send the pure cocaine to the United States.

And they reaped all the profits, so much money that planes and boats became disposable--wrecked without hesitation in the effort to deliver their precious cargo.

Foreign diplomats insist that jailed drug lords continue to run their empires from prison. But Colombian police and drug experts reply that no one is running those organizations because they no longer exist.

“There was what we called the second generation,” Nunez said. “Pablo Escobar’s nephew Juan Carlos Escobar and Juan Carlos Ramirez. But they have turned themselves in now.”

Alberto Rangel, a national security advisor to Colombian President Ernesto Samper, said: “The fall of the big capos [bosses] has encouraged the growth of medium and small traffickers. There is a much wider base of participation” in the drug trade.

A combination of pressure from guerrillas and paramilitary groups that operate in coca-growing regions and a desire to avoid the risk and cost of keeping inventories on hand has persuaded drug traffickers to leave production to peasant farmers, said Armando Borrero, a former Samper security advisor.

“The guerrillas forced the capos to process base [paste] in the region to benefit the peasants” because paste sells for a higher price than unprocessed leaves and is more easily transported, he said.

“They have expanded into other phases and even control laboratories,” he said of the guerrillas.

Instead of having a steady supply of coca paste from fields they control, drug traffickers must now gather up paste--the first stage in refining cocaine--from different sources at whatever the market price happens to be, according to police. Through crop-spraying and other eradication measures--which have provoked violent protests by coca farmers and a guerrilla offensive that has left more than 100 soldiers, police and insurgents dead in recent weeks--police are trying to drive coca-growing out of Colombia. “We are going to push them back across the border,” Nunez vowed.

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Meanwhile, traffickers refine paste made from coca leaves into cocaine crystals--pure cocaine--then contact each other to put together a shipment.

The most coherent of these ad hoc groups has been dubbed the Northern Valley organization by police because its leaders live in small cities at one end of the rich Rio Cauca Valley.

The Henoa Montoya clan, based in Cartago, which is closest to coffee country, is headed by older brother Arcangel, 44, according to Nunez. Another group is allegedly run by Diego Leon--at over 50 years old the eldest of the suspected traffickers, according to police.

At 36, Carlos Alberto Renteria is the youngest. Efrain Antonio Hernandez, 48, is the fourth suspected major trafficker, Nunez said.

“They are the classic profile of drug traffickers,” he said. “People from humble backgrounds who got rich and have a lot of money, but not much taste. They buy ranches and make the houses fancy or a discotheque that is plush for the cities where they live.”

All learned the cocaine base collection routes working for the Cali cartel, Nunez said. But unlike the cartel, they do not have the international contacts to ship cocaine, he added. They rely on middlemen who are as likely to smuggle heroin or marijuana as cocaine, he said.

“They have incorporated their goods into the coastal routes” originally developed for marijuana, Rangel said. Those smugglers are looking for new products because much of the marijuana trade has been lost to U.S.-grown competition.

Borrero, the former security advisor, said as law enforcement throughout the Caribbean has cracked down on smuggling, Colombian traffickers have become increasingly dependent on Mexican organizations to ship their product to the United States.

“Mexico has become the preferred route for Colombian drug traffickers,” he said. “The Mexican capos are becoming more important.” They jealously guard the border routes originally developed to smuggle heroin and marijuana and have cut the Colombians out of that part of the business, he said.

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Passing the drugs through so many organizations has made operations less efficient and easier to detect, Nunez said. “That is why so much more is confiscated now,” he said. Other experts, however, believe that more drugs are being confiscated because more are being shipped.

With less money and power, the new drug traffickers are also less able to hide from the law. Police were embarrassed during the 1980s when Escobar waged a war of terrorism until he negotiated terms for his surrender. They were further shamed when Helmer “Pacho” Herrera, the last alleged leader of the Cali cartel to remain free, eluded them for two years before turning himself in last month.

Nunez vowed that that will not happen with today’s suspected drug traffickers. “We know where they are at all times,” he bragged. “We are just waiting for the arrest warrants.”

As they wait, police are gathering evidence against the suspects and compiling extensive lists of their property--ranches, houses, discotheques and office buildings.

In fact, the most recent arrests by Nunez’s elite corps have been meticulously timed, multi-city sweeps that included confiscation of property. For example, when Jesus Amayak Russa, the alleged leader of the Atlantic Coast cartel, was arrested earlier this year, police raided property in three cities and detained four other suspected members of his organization.

“Our mission is to capture the last narcotics trafficker,” Nunez said. “We realize that is probably going to take a long time.”