LATIN AMERICA PRESENTS HEROIN PROBLEM

Colombia, Mexico Supplant Asia As Leading US Suppliers

SAN ROQUE, Colombia -- Colombia and Mexico have become the dominant
suppliers of heroin to the United States, supplanting Asia, in a trend that
experts and the authorities fear could offset American-backed successes in
a campaign against drugs that has focused mostly on cocaine.

Here in the lush, nearly impassable mountains of Tolima Province, rebels of
Colombia's largest guerrilla group stand watch near muddy footpaths leading
to opium farms that experts say help produce upward of 80 percent of the
heroin that reaches American streets.

From Maine to California, law enforcement authorities report small-scale
epidemics and a rising rate of overdoses from a dangerously potent and
cheap form of heroin. While total heroin use in the United States has not
risen significantly, the drug is appealing to new, middle-class users
because it can be smoked or snorted, rather than injected.

After steadily expanding its market in recent years, white Colombian heroin
now dominates east of the Mississippi; brown Mexican heroin rules to the
west. The pattern signals an alliance between Colombian and Mexican
traffickers, one American official said.

Evidence of the shift from coca to opium poppy can be found across Latin
America, which still produces just a fraction of the heroin made worldwide
- -- mostly in places like Afghanistan, Myanmar and Pakistan -- but the vast
majority reaching American users, the authorities say.

New opium fields have been discovered in Peru, which until recently had
made great strides against coca. Strands of poppies are also increasingly
being spotted along the Venezuelan border, according to Colombian
government officials.

The shift, experts and American authorities fear, could present a new
challenge to aggressive American-financed efforts to fight the illegal drug
trade in Colombia with aerial fumigation of coca, a lowland crop used to
make cocaine. Heroin may provide a potentially important new source of
financing for the leftist rebels and right-wing paramilitary groups that
depend on drug money to wage war. Unlike coca, the plant used to make
cocaine, opium poppies are grown high in cloud-shrouded mountains and in
ever smaller and scattered plots, they say.

When crop-dusters arrive, officials said, traffickers or rebels often open
fire on them. Opium traffickers in Mexico have already shot down three army
helicopters this year in the southern state of Guerrero. Here in rugged
southern Colombia, a one-acre plot belongs to Fernay Lugo, rail thin and
agile, who works, razor in hand, slicing open the pods of his blossoming
poppies to collect the milky gum that is refined into heroin.

He explained how -- day after day, bit by bit, in mountains 7,000 feet up
- -- he tries to accumulate a few pounds, enough to sell for the kind of
profits his slumping coffee plants could never fetch.

He does not ponder who his buyers are, the shadowy men who meet him at a
distant roadside, or their ultimate customers. "When we harvest and sell,
we do not even think where it goes," said Mr. Lugo, 29, the father of two
girls. Though farms here, including Mr. Lugo's own, have been hit by
crop-dusters in the past, he seemed to show little concern.

The skies are rarely clear over southern Tolima, the cloud cover often so
heavy that fumigation planes cannot come in. Farmers also disperse their
poppy crops, Mr. Lugo said, to make them harder to identify by satellite
and reconnaissance aircraft.

In this region, some of the greatest inroads in eliminating poppy plots
have been made not through aerial spraying but from programs that pay
farmers to eradicate the crop and switch to legitimate ones. Still, it is
not hard to find the brilliant lavender and red flowers of the mature opium
plants that so sharply contrast against the monotonous drab green hues of
the legal crops that peasants also grow.

Blanca Ruby Perez, 39, said she and her family lived by poppies, which can
be harvested twice a year and bring far more money than blackberries, corn,
beans and lettuce. "It is much easier to grow than the other crops," she
said, carefully tiptoeing around the small, green leaves. "Look, we have
put no fertilizer on it, and look how pretty it is."