FARMERS TRADE BEANS FOR COCOA

TAMPA, Florida-A lot has changed in the mountains of Colombia since a
certain bean farmer roamed the jungles with his donkey.

Where on earth is Juan Valdez? You remember him: the Colombian cafeteros,
or coffee farmer, who hand-picked his coffee beans in television
commercials in the 1960s and '70s.

He disappeared from TV around the time coca leaves replaced coffee beans as
Colombia's dominant cash crop.

Though an ad man's fiction, Valdez personified Colombia's 300,000 coffee
farmers, many of whom have made the transition to coca farmer in pursuit of
a piece of the fortune to be made from the cocaine trade.

They are the production workers in an illegal business so rich it bankrolls
sophisticated smuggling equipment that can all but negate the best U.S.
military surveillance devices.

The cocaine business turned golden in Colombia in the 1970s as demand for
the drug began rising in the United States and Colombia's new drug
entrepreneurs made all the right moves.

First, growers began switching from coffee to coca. Then a monopoly formed:
the Medellin cartel, named for the city of its origin in the Colombian
mountains. It was made up initially of ruthless chance-takers like its most
notorious leaders, Carlos Lehder and Pablo Escobar.

Lehder was the first to devise ingenious ways to smuggle big cocaine
shipments into the United States. But he had a penchant for violence that
eventually brought him down, according to the U.S. Justice Department.

Lehder was suspected of the 1984 assassination of Colombia's justice
minister, which outraged the Colombia government. He was captured and
turned over to the United States, where he was convicted in 1987 of drug
trafficking and sentenced to 135 years in prison.

Escobar succeeded Lehder as the Medellin cartel's head. He invested in new,
sophisticated smuggling techniques: airplanes, cargo ships and high-tech
communications gear that stumped Colombian and U.S. military forces.

But Escobar also was reckless - he allegedly masterminded the 1989 bombing
of an airliner that killed 110 people. And he subsequently became the
target of an intensive manhunt that ended in Medellin in December 1993 when
police gunned him down.

Escobar's death and Lehder's imprisonment broke the back of the Medellin
cartel, and the power passed in the early 1990s to another syndicate in the
city of Cali, about 200 miles south of Medellin.

The Cali cartel treated cocaine as a business. Its leaders stayed away from
open violence and tried to pass their operation off as a legitimate
business enterprise, Justice Department documents say. It generated
billions of dollars in revenue.

But in June 1995, five of the cartel's major leaders were arrested, and the
organization began sliding into decline.

Most recently, splinter groups have been vying with the cartel for control
of the cocaine trade. And a new drug crop has been planted - opium poppies
for the manufacture of heroin, which has been making a resurgence in the
United States.

"Now, independent groups of traffickers ... have replaced the highly
structured, centrally controlled business operations of the Cali group,"
William Ledwith, chief of international operations for the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Administration, told Congress two years ago.

And with this, the industry has become harder to penetrate.

In addition, leftist guerrillas are providing military-style protection to
the farmers and processing houses in exchange for a large cut of the
profits, U.S. intelligence experts say. The rebels are using the
protection money to bankroll their revolution.

All this means the product is most at risk in transit.

Smugglers are an innovative lot. They become better mice every time the
government throws better mousetraps at them.

They now use airplanes to scout shipping lanes. They have speedboats that
can leave the quickest U.S. Coast Guard cutter in a spatter of spray. They
have sophisticated radar to monitor the opposition and state-of-the-art
communications equipment to talk among themselves untapped.

There is always a new wrinkle in the smuggling game.

Last year, authorities found a submarine under construction in the
mountains near Facatativa, Colombia - 8,000 feet above sea level and 210
miles from the coast. It could have ferried 150 tons of cocaine per trip to
the United States - under water, and beyond detection.

Submarines, high-tech aircraft, sophisticated communications scrambling
devices and superfast boats. Agribusiness in Colombia has come a long way.
It wasn't that long ago when Colombia's money crop came to market on the
back of a burro led by a gentle, kindly farmer.