DEA USED INACCURATE DATA IN TOUTING SUCCESS OF DRUG FIGHT

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico -- The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration used
inaccurate figures to tout the success of a 36-nation "major takedown" of
drug traffickers last fall in the Caribbean and Latin America, a Knight
Ridder Newspapers investigation has determined.

The agency's scorecard on Operation Libertador reported 2,876 arrests, but
Knight Ridder found that agency officials have no evidence to support
hundreds of them. Hundreds more were routine busts for marijuana
possession, and some drug eradication figures are double-counts of a State
Department program to burn marijuana plants.

And although the agency said $30.2 million in criminal assets was seized in
the operation, $30 million of that was confiscated four weeks before the
operation began.

The official who masterminded the exercise -- who now heads the agency's
international operations -- admitted some discrepancies but said the
international cooperation that Operation Libertador promoted is what counts.

Michael S. Vigil, then head of the agency's regional office in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, described the operation as a "tremendous success."

Operation Libertador, the fourth U.S.-led regional drug crackdown since
1998, intended to engage U.S., Caribbean and Latin drug authorities
simultaneously in what the agency called "an attempt to dismantle
top-echelon traffickers in the region."

However, the agency's internal documents and interviews with drug agents
and officials from the participating countries show that:

The agency could not account for 375 of the 2,876 arrests attributed to the
operation. For most of the rest, it simply accepted whatever numbers
participating countries reported.

The largest number of arrests -- 996 -- were in Jamaica, where authorities
said most of them were for misdemeanor marijuana possession.

Much of the marijuana interdiction credited to Operation Libertador
consisted of plants that had been burned in Jamaica and already counted as
part of the State Department's Operation Buccaneer, which had been under
way since 1982.

No one cared much about drug intelligence-gathering. The agency did not, as
a rule, ask for the names of those arrested, the outcomes of their cases or
what happened to their drugs and cash.

DEA spokesman Michael Chapman said the agency saw no problems with
Operation Libertador or its operations accounting system.

"Everything was done properly and aboveboard," Chapman said after
discussing Knight Ridder's findings with Donnie Marshall, the agency's
head. Marshall declined to be interviewed.

Chapman said the agency would "stick by the reported arrests, because those
were the numbers that were called in" by foreign law-enforcement officials.

Vigil, the overseer of Operation Libertador and three previous regional
anti-drug initiatives in the Caribbean, said the names and numbers were not
important.

"The key here is that we have 36 countries that put aside cultural,
political and economic differences to come together," he said. "You can't
argue with the success of these operations, and the fact that we're
developing international coalitions, I think, speaks for itself."

Operation Libertador began at 6 a.m. Oct. 27 and ended at midnight Nov. 19.
Nearly every nation in the Caribbean participated, including Haiti and the
Dominican Republic, along with major Latin American cocaine-trafficking
countries such as Colombia, Bolivia and Mexico.

The biggest fish credited by Vigil and agency documents to Operation
Libertador was alleged trafficker Martires Paulino Castro, whom Dominican
police arrested with 23 associates. Seized in the process were $30 million
in assets and 360 kilograms of cocaine.

The agency's own records contradict that claim, however. Vigil's office in
San Juan first reported Paulino's arrest Sept. 29, nearly a month before
the operation began. Vigil said Paulino's inclusion was justified because
Paulino had been identified in a "targeting package" -- a list of suspected
drug traffickers -- that was provided to Dominican officials in the
planning stages of the operation.