DECADE AFTER SUMMIT, DRUG WAR RAGES

It was heralded as a historic affair.

President George Bush came to San Antonio in February 1992 to host a
two-day international anti-drug summit. At its conclusion, the heads of
state of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Venezuela and Mexico stood
shoulder to shoulder in front of the McNay Art Museum and vowed to rid the
hemisphere of the illicit trade in cocaine, heroin and marijuana.

"Make no mistake," Bush intoned for the hundreds of journalists assembled
to record the moment. "Defeat the traffickers we will."

But while years of effort and billions of dollars have been expended, 10
years later that goal remains elusive.

While thousands of acres of coca and poppy crops have been eradicated in
parts of South America's drug-producing nations, peasant farmers elsewhere
have picked up the slack. Tensions between Colombia's government and its
drug-profit-financed rebels have erupted in warfare.

Border bloodshed

Traffickers in Mexico, once mostly shippers for Colombian cocaine, have
become increasingly involved in the violent trade. Bloodshed marks the
skirmishes among rival factions, particularly near the U.S. border, while
addiction levels in the Mexican interior are climbing.

Two of the leaders who stood with Bush in San Antonio -- Mexico's Carlos
Salinas, and Peru's Alberto Fujimori -- have fled their respective
countries under allegations of corruption and ties to drug lords.

And in the United States, illicit substances still are readily available on
city streets, at lower prices and higher potencies than ever. Rural areas,
too, are seeing the climbing rates of drug addiction, particularly to
Mexican-made methamphetamine.

"As a nation, by most reasonable standards we are losing the drug war,"
said Bill Piper of the Drug Policy Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit
that favors treatment-based strategies. "The rhetoric has changed, but the
reality of where we spend our money has not."

After 30 years it finally has become commonplace for politicians to talk
about treatment and balanced, holistic approaches to the problem, Piper said.

In his proposed $19.2 billion drug control budget for 2003 announced last
month, President Bush called for $3.8 billion for treatment and prevention
programs, a 6 percent increase from this year's budget.

He decried the drug-related deaths of 20,000 Americans annually, and called
for "compassionate coercion" from friends, law enforcement and religious
groups to get addicts help early on, rather than continuing to drain the
nation's healthcare system of billions of dollars annually.

While welcome, treatment advocates say that sum is dwarfed by what
Washington puts into the interdiction side of the equation.

The president has called for $731 million in counternarcotics aid to
Colombia, up from $625 million this fiscal year. That's in addition to the
$1.3 billion appropriated during the Clinton Administration for eradication
and interdiction.

The conservative Heritage Foundation criticized the plan for treating the
narcotraffickers and rebels as separate problems despite the interwoven
nature of their activities, and for doing little to strengthen the
governments of the region.

On Feb. 20, President Andres Pastrana, whose term is up in August, broke
off three years of peace talks with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia, or FARC. The nation's main rebel group, FARC was founded 38 years
ago, ostensibly to promote agrarian reform and social equity.

But following the 1998 cease-fire in which Pastrana ceded southern Colombia
to the 20,000-strong group, the FARC fomented further coca cultivation to
fund its activities.

The government ended peace talks after the FARC kidnapped a senator last
month, and about 100 rebels and government soldiers have been reported dead
in the fighting since.

John Walters, U.S. drug czar since December and a former protege of Bill
Bennett -- the tough appointee of President George Bush who pioneered the
job's warrior mindset -- has suggested easing the legal restrictions to
allow anti-drug funds in Colombia to be used for more direct military
efforts against the rebels.

In recent days, Secretary of State Colin Powell has mulled such an option.

In this post-Sept. 11 era, some worry America is about to be drawn into a
major military intervention in South America.

"The firewall between the war on drugs and the war on terrorism is in
danger of eroding," said Michael Massing, author of "The Fix," a critical
study of the U.S. war on drugs.

"I'm not against intervention when it seems like it can achieve something
at not too high a cost," he said. "I don't see a military solution for the
U.S. in Colombia."

Colombia's neighbors, meantime, are lobbying Washington to re-confirm the
Andean Trade Preference Act, a 1991 agreement that expired last December
which gives imports from Peru, Colombia Ecuador and Bolivia preferential
tariff treatment in the United States.

Bush is scheduled to meet with Peruvian President Alejandro Toledo in Lima
March 23 to discuss hemispheric trade, and those nations are hoping for a
resumption of the agreement which they say helped to create 140,000 jobs,
counterbalancing to some extent the losses suffered by farmers abandoning
coca crops.

During that visit, Bush is expected to announce the resumption of the
region's aerial interdiction efforts, one of the achieved goals of the 1992
summit that was halted last spring after the Peruvian air force, in
conjunction with the DEA, accidentally shot down a plane carrying U.S.
missionaries, killing a mother and her baby girl.

While the DEA was busy focusing on South America during the mid and late
1990s, Mexican traffickers were picking up more business for themselves,
said Eric Olson, senior associate for Mexico at the Washington Office on
Latin America.

"The Mexican dealers had been minor players," Olson said. "They began
demanding 20 to 30 percent of their payment in drugs rather than cash, and
have become just as powerful as the Colombians."

The reputed shooting death last month of Tijuana kingpin Ramon Arellano
Felix and Mexican authorities' capture Saturday of Benjamin Arellano Felix,
suspected of being the Tijuana cartel's leader, may put a crimp in
trafficking on the West Coast, Olson said. But it surely will be taken up
by someone else, he theorized.

"It's the 'Squeezing the Balloon' theory: you focus in one place, and the
trade just pops out somewhere else. Then you have these circular arguments
about whether it's a success or a failure," Olson said.

Cutting money flow

While intervention in Colombia may be hastened because of Washington's
heightened anti-terror mood, money laundering enforcement has received a
much-needed jump start, said Charles Intriago, publisher of the Miami-based
newsletter Money Laundering Alert.

While he worried that many of the USA Patriot Act's money laundering tenets
are overzealous, he lauded the Treasury Departments prompt issuance of
regulations explaining the act's provisions.

"It used to be years would go by without them acting on the statutory
mandates. September 11 has created urgency," he said.

Just last month, Treasury declared a luxury resort and string of pharmacies
just south of Tijuana off-limits to Americans -- on penalty of a $1 million
fine -- because U.S. authorities believe the businesses are owned by the
Arellano Felix family.

On the U.S. front, critics complain the federal budget puts about
two-thirds of its spending on the supply side, and one-third on the demand
side. Ideally, they said, that ratio would be reversed, or at least
something more like a 50-50 split.

Even at the prevention end, the lion's share of dollars often goes to
big-budget advertising programs geared more to voters than to swaying drug
users, the Drug Alliance's Piper said.

Two controversial television ads drawing a link between teen-age drug users
and terrorists aired during the Super Bowl for a price tag of $3 million.

"Nancy Reagan was the first to try that approach," Massing said. "It's more
of an ideology than a successful strategy."

Nonetheless, there have been some prevention successes, though some
observers contend they're not necessarily a cause-and-effect link to
anti-drug programs. Rather, critics say, the success has resulted from
increased law enforcement.

Murder record

In the early 1990s, San Antonio set murder records as a result of often
drug-related gang violence, said Bexar County Judge Nelson Wolff, who was
mayor during the drug summit here.

In the wake of the drug summit, the Alamo City received a federal $1.2
million "Weed and Seed" grant that helped to "weed" out criminals and seed
positive activities for young people as alternatives to drug use.

The aid wasn't an outcome of the conference, but Wolff still credits the
program with helping to cut the homicide rate in half, to last year's 100
killings.

"We still have problems, but not nearly of the scale back then," Wolff
said. "It was a real horrible time."

Sufficient treatment options, however, remain a challenge, especially for
new mothers trying to kick drug habits, said Ed Baca, director of Healthy
Start, a program of the San Antonio Metropolitan Health District that helps
connect poor families with community services.

The Patrician Movement has just 15 spots available for women with children
younger than 5 years old. A similar program that served a dozen more
families on the Southwest side folded in 2000 after federal and state
funding dried up, Baca said.

"The Fix" author Massing, who has studied drug treatment around the
country, called lack of access to treatment a national crisis, and services
for women with children are the weakest link in that chain.

"Particularly with (the cheap cocaine derivative) crack, you have many,
many more women who hit bottom. When they look for help, there is so little
available," he said. "We need a massive redirection of focus, to put our
resources at the point where most good: in treatment and prevention."