Tentacles of Latin Drug Lords Extend Well Beyond Borders

In the Latin American nations that are the worst-case showcases of sinister drug cartels, the wealth, firepower and agility of the traffickers enable them to overwhelm almost every sector of society.

Not only do drug lords finance guerrilla armies that have driven government forces out of large areas of Colombia, they have so warped social attitudes that hit men pray to their own patron saint before they go out to do a job. Not only do Mexican cartels buy politicians and police, their tentacles allegedly extend into the banking system, the Roman Catholic Church and even show business, judging from indications that this week’s assassination of a popular game show host in Mexico City might have been drug-related.

As a result, Latin American journalists find themselves virtually alone on the front lines of a war. Covering drugs is no longer just a journalistic beat; it becomes a crusade, and sometimes a suicide mission.

The globalization of crime in the 1990s showed how rapidly and insidiously drug gangs invade new turf, agreed a panel of veteran journalists from Latin America, Europe and the United States who met here this week at a seminar on drug trafficking and the media.

Colombia and Mexico are on the far end of a continuum, but such disparate nations as Argentina, Ireland and the United States may be closer than they realize, the journalists agreed.

“Mexico is the perfect example that there is a path,” said Cesar Romero, the correspondent in Washington for Mexico’s Reforma newspaper. “Yesterday was Colombia. Today is Mexico. Tomorrow could be Argentina.”

In fact, U.S. and Argentine authorities worry about this country’s vulnerability: Money-laundering thrives in a prosperous economy. Mafia-related corruption scandals here bring down political figures and corrode entire police forces. A two-year wave of violent crime is blamed partly on the rising presence of cocaine.

The threat to this most European of Latin American nations was brought home in the comparative example offered by Paul Williams, an Irish investigative journalist who told the story of his slain friend and colleague, Veronica Guerin.

Starting in the mid-1980s, Williams and Guerin took the lead in documenting the rise of heroin traffickers in Ireland and an accompanying surge in street violence. Political leaders largely ignored the phenomenon; police chiefs accused the journalists of sensationalism. That changed in 1996, when a hit man gunned down Guerin at a traffic light.

“It was a tragic vindication of what we had been writing about for 12 to 15 years,” said Williams, who has a degree in criminology and has gone undercover to infiltrate drug gangs. “The government started to do something.”

The death of Guerin connects Ireland to places such as Colombia, one of the most dangerous countries for journalists. So does the global reach of traffickers: Dublin gangsters have allied themselves with Russian and Colombian gangsters to speed the flow of cocaine into Europe from the west and heroin from the east, according to Williams.

Displaying enormous courage and investigative skills, journalists in the worst-hit nations end up doing more than police and prosecutors to bring down gangsters and their corrupt government allies.

For all the heroism and tenacity, however, the media are by no means immune. Drug lords have literally bought the services of top journalists in Colombia and taken over newspapers in Mexico, adding the potent weapon of the press to their arsenal, the panelists said.

This tragic panorama seems comfortably far from the United States, the world’s top consumer of illegal narcotics. But many Latin Americans find the U.S. view of drug mafias as a shadowy foreign threat to be disturbingly naive.

The panelists cited the cases in which renegade U.S. authorities have been discovered aiding the smuggling of drugs across the U.S.-Mexico border.

They suggested that those cases are the tip of the iceberg.

Urging U.S. journalists to take a closer look at drug corruption at home, Romero said: “It’s as if it were a magic phenomenon, as if there were only one side of the border. The corrupt Mexican police help move the drugs to the border, and the rest happens by magic.”

--- UNPUBLISHED NOTE --- This story has been edited to reflect a correction to the original published text. Veronica Guerin was killed in 1996, not 1994. --- END NOTE ---