TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/022089/02208900.037

Text File | 1990-09-17 | 6KB | 101 lines

WORLD, Page 44

DRUGS

The Chemical Connection


    Shortly after dawn, five helicopter gunships took off from the
Palanquero military air base southeast of Medellin. Thirty minutes
later, skimming over the treetops of the Colombian jungle, the
clattering swarm descended on a ranch outside the Magdalena River
town of Puerto Triunfo. Thirty members of Colombia's elite National
Police antinarcotics unit jumped from the copters and began
searching the grounds. Their eventual payoff: discovery of three
complexes containing eight cocaine laboratories. After the raiders
methodically burned chemical dumps and bunkhouses, a five-man
explosives team blew up brick buildings, generators and 15,000-gal.
chemical holding tanks.

    So began Operation Primavera, the latest effort by Colombian
authorities to destroy the massive cocaine-processing industry that
thrives under the green canopy of the country's jungles. By the
time the ten-day campaign ended last week, Operation Primavera had
become the most successful bust of coke labs in Colombian history,
netting a total of 26 plants capable of producing 6.6 tons of the
addictive white powder a week. Though the plants never achieved
that level of production, the potential output is about three times
the demand of the U.S. market. Boasted a senior police official:
"This is a bullet to the heart of the cocaine mafia."

    Police confiscated about 1.3 tons of cocaine in base and
finished form. But what left law-enforcement officials gloating was
the seizure of unprecedented quantities of chemicals used in the
manufacture of cocaine. The cache included 417,095 gal. of ether
acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and 95 tons of potassium
permanganate -- enough chemicals to make 104 tons of cocaine, a
third of the estimated annual cocaine output of Colombia, Bolivia
and Peru combined.

    Those seizures underscore a little noted but crucial fact of
life in the $130 billion cocaine business: the drug trade is a
two-way street. The cocaine flows from mostly Third World producers
to the U.S. and other industrialized nations, but the chemicals and
other materials needed to turn coca leaves into cocaine flow from
the industrialized nations to the Third World. By participating in
this Faustian technology transfer, the drug-consumer nations are,
in effect, providing vital raw ingredients for the scourge that
bedevils them and that they often blame exclusively on
coke-producing countries. "Look at all this equipment," said a
Colombian police commander last week, surveying the ruins of a coke
lab. "It's almost all from the U.S. And these chemicals come from
all over the world. All Latin America supplies are the coca leaves
and the labor."

    The site of Operation Primavera's first strike was Finca la
Brasilia (Brazil Ranch), reportedly owned by Alberto Toro,
brother-in-law of the notorious coke lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria.
Early last week the raiders descended on Hacienda Napoles, the
grandest -- and gaudiest -- of Escobar's several country estates.
The helicopters landed to the trumpeting of three caged elephants,
part of a private zoo maintained by the drug kingpin. Not found was
Escobar, one of the world's most wanted criminals, who has eluded
Colombian authorities dozens of times.

    The chemicals seized during Operation Primavera were stored in
standing tanks or 55-gal. drums. In some cases the drums were
stacked 15 ft. high, creating Andean peaks of testimony to the
proportions of the smuggling operation. Ethyl ether, for example,
is essential to the final processing of cocaine base into a white
hydrochloride powder. The manufacture of ethyl ether has been
outlawed in Colombia, and importation is closely regulated. A
55-gal. drum of ethyl ether that sells for $500 in the U.S. fetches
more than $12,000 in Colombia. Says Alfonso Barragan, president of
the Colombian Society of Chemical Engineers: "The Colombian black
market in chemicals probably has a higher profit margin than that
of cocaine itself."

    The contraband chemicals are not all from the U.S., or even
from other industrialized nations. Much of the ethyl ether was
manufactured in Brazil. The potassium permanganate, normally used
as a water purifier, came from China, which is the world's leading
producer.

    Since Brazil and China are among the majority of countries that
have few regulations governing the foreign sales of chemicals,
tracing the path of the seized materials will not be easy. But
chemicals manufactured in the U.S. may be another matter, at least
in the future. Last year the U.S. passed a new law, which will take
effect in the next few months, requiring closer supervision of the
overseas sales of chemicals used in the production of cocaine,
including ethyl ether and acetone.

    Authorities may be able to trace at least some of the
U.S.-produced chemicals seized in Colombia over the past two weeks.
The contraband included containers marked with the logos of Dow
Chemical Co. and Union Chemical Corp. Both companies are among
major U.S. chemical producers who have agreed to cooperate with the
DEA in seeking to ascertain the final destination of the chemicals
before allowing them to leave the country. In the case of the
chemicals seized in Colombia, however, most of the batch numbers
on labels had been scratched off by knife blades. Given how
successful drug lords have been in using a dizzying tangle of
middlemen and front companies to hide their activities, law
enforcement officials may never be able to halt fully the chemical
side of the drug trade.