INSIDE THE COLOMBIA COCAINE MARKET

Forty minute before our flight home, WHIO reporter Don Mills and I are
sprawled on the busy sidewalk in front of the Bogota Airport looking for
drugs planted in our luggage.

Paranoia can be a healthy thing in Colombia.

The week before we'd gone to sea with Coast Guard landing parties off South
Florida and climbed through tramp freighters with Customs agents at the
Port of Miami. We'd seen how resourceful drug smugglers can be in hiding
contraband and how violent they can be in getting it back. We weren't
taking any chances.

Colombia currently supplies about 90 percent of this country's cocaine,
according to the U.S. State Department, and a growing percentage of its heroin.

The country's murder rate is eight times that of ours, and it leads the
planet in kidnappings. Civil wars rage in the north and south against
competing drug-financed rebel armies. The Colombia government firmly
controls the central section of the country, including the capital, Bogota.
Some people worry that Colombia's government will fall.

Into this near-anarchy steps the new U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Anne W.
Patterson, a career diplomat. She worked in the U.S. embassy in Lima, Peru,
and helped combat cocaine production in that country. Now most of the
cocaine business is in Colombia, and Patterson's number is to shut it down
there.

'Most of the drugs, most of the cocaine in the world, comes from a very
small area of Colombia,' Patterson said.

'We have a three-pronged strategy to go after this coca cultivation. It
involves aerial interdiction - or spraying - and interdiction on the
ground. It also involves crop substitution.'

Crop substitution means convincing poor farmers in the jungles to grow cash
crops other than the lucrative coca leaf. So far, it hasn't been an easy
sell. And many farmers and rural villages complain that the spraying of
their fields, usually done by American contract pilots with support from
the Colombian military, kills all their crops for up to a year.

'There's so much of it that manual eradication is just impossible, even if
people weren't shooting at you,' Patterson said, 'and they will be shooting
at you.'

The name of the strategy, already approved by the Congress, is 'Plan
Colombia.' It will cost taxpayers about $ 1.3 billion during the next five
years.

'America spends a billion dollars on Valentine's Day candy,' the ambassador
said. 'So if we spend $ 1.3 billion on eradicating cocaine, which costs us
almost $ 100 billion in lost revenue and health care back in the United
States, it doesn't seem to me to be a bad program.'

Plan Colombia is supposed to go beyond stepped-up drug busting. Its goal is
to bolster the country's democratic institutions and the economy. But
there's a lot of opposition to it among Colombians, who accuse Colombian
President Andres Pastrana of giving in to the United States and further
militarizing their country.

Many people in South America and Central America deeply resent the wealth
and power of the United States. And they blame us for the drug problem. One
businessman in Panama said that our hunger for illegal drugs, coupled with
our 'war on drugs,' is destroying the Americas.

Meanwhile, drug production goes on at an amazing pace. In Colombia, about
300,000 acres are under coca cultivation, according to the State
Department. The hundreds of tiny drug labs hidden in the jungle could
theoretically produce more than 500 metric tons of cocaine a year.

The drug labs package cocaine in bricks that weigh 2.2 pounds - one
kilogram. The bricks are often carried by a small boat, called a 'go fast,'
to a transshipment point somewhere in Central America, Mexico, or the
Caribbean islands. Right now, Haiti seems to be the hot spot.

To get drugs over the U.S. border, smugglers hide them in the cargo or body
of a ship, airplane, car, or truck. Or in the clothes, luggage, or body of
a courier. Drugs come in every day, sometimes by the ton, at U.S. seaports
and the Mexican border. Smugglers carry smaller amounts, usually just a few
kilograms at a time, into U.S. airports like Miami.

'We think there is, in any given year, about 300 metric tons of cocaine
consumed in the United States,' Brig. Gen. Jerry C. McAbee of the U.S.
Southern Command said. The Southern Command, headquartered in Miami, trains
Colombian anti-narco battalions and tries to track drug smugglers.

'We pick off about 50 metric tons,' he said. 'So one in seven of what's
coming in is what we're getting.'

Several Customs officers on our southwestern border think the seizure rate
is even worse. They fear that nine out of 10 drug shipments slip through.
And at every step of the way, the price goes up: A 2-pound brick of cocaine
that might sell for a few hundred dollars in Colombia is worth perhaps $
17,000 in Miami and $ 35,000 in Dayton.

Moving illegal drugs within the United States is easy. Police here need a
strong reason to stop and search a vehicle for contraband. Most U.S. police
officers admit that busting a shipment of drugs in transit has more to do
with luck than anything else.

Drugs destined for the Dayton area generally go to Detroit or Chicago first
and are repackaged into smaller units. Drug dollars from Dayton and Troy
and Springfield and thousands of other communities flow back along the
supply routes and out of the United States - growing into the billions, and
disrupting economies across the hemisphere.

Cocaine and Colombia are just part of America's drug problem.

There seems to be no end in sight. In Colombia, where some drug
organizations are said to have more cash than the national government,
bringing even relatively low-level drug criminals to justice can be
difficult and violent - even when the U.S. government gets involved.

'When a narco trafficker is in jail,' says Patterson, 'getting ready to be
extradited to the United States, and he has a hundred million dollars at
his disposal to pay bribes - that's a threat.'

Jim Baldridge is WHI0-TV's chief anchor.