IN THE CARIBBEAN, A 30-YEAR-OLD WAR ON DRUGS SLOGS ON

SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO -- Is the U.S. government winning its 30-year-old war
on drugs?

Consider the recently ended Operation Libertador, which showcased
cooperation between dozens of countries and yielded the capture of an
alleged drug kingpin, as well as the seizure of tons of marijuana and cocaine.

It was "a major takedown," said Michael Vigil, head of the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency's Caribbean operation.

Now consider these sobering words from former Jamaican police Col. Trevor
McMillan, who has watched the drug war breed such corruption in his country
that all its Cabinet ministers were forced into a public denial this fall
that they are in any way involved.

"What the drug war has done is to drive the price of drugs up, so the more
the price of drugs goes up, the more money there is to corrupt people,"
said McMillan, who was fired in 1996 after he started a cleanup of the
police force. "Until we remove the profit out of trafficking, nothing will
change."

This war may slog on for another half century or more, according to the
veterans who have fought it in the trenches -- including Vigil, who has
spent 27 years in the DEA, among them a couple of years in Colombia at the
height of the fight to bring down the Cali cartel.

He tells a reporter in his 20s: "We will be able to win this scourge --
[but] it may not be in your lifetime or mine."

Still, he touts the regional cooperation strategy that he helped develop.
It is a fight largely financed and led by the United States through
multinational operations such as Libertador, which involved 36 Latin
American and Caribbean countries and territories.

Police reported arresting 2,876 people and seizing 20 tons of cocaine, 29
tons of marijuana and 82,170 Ecstasy tablets from Oct. 27 to Nov. 19. They
said they also dismantled 94 drug factories and seized 100 tons of
chemicals for drugmaking.

Among those arrested was Martires Paulino Castro, whose apprehension in the
Dominican Republic ended a two-year investigation in four countries. Agents
say Paulino's 10-year-old network stretched from Dutch St. Maarten to New
York and was capable of moving 4,400 pounds of Colombian cocaine a month to
the United States.

Paulino was arrested by U.S. and Dominican authorities and will be tried in
his native Dominican Republic on drug-trafficking charges.

Alleged drug kingpins like Paulino can be caught, and drug trafficking
disrupted, only "by these [Caribbean] countries working with one another,"
Vigil said.

All-time high

Still, there is growing skepticism in the region about the drug war, which
rankles local nationalists by seeming to cede some sovereignty to U.S.
authorities while not appearing to seriously dent the drug trade.

Three decades after the war began, smuggling is at an all-time high, along
with a rising tide of violent crime and corruption. Many critics say that's
because of the war's heavy emphasis on interdiction and eradication rather
than on efforts to reduce drug use.

Those on the war's front lines contend the situation would be immeasurably
worse if nothing were done.

"We now have guns, ammunition, gang warfare that we didn't have before,"
said Rear Adm. Richard Kelshall, one of Trinidad's top drug fighters.

"See, if we were to stop at all, then this [violence] would just escalate
... " he said. "We don't know what the top limit would be. So we have to be
out there, we have to be vigilant, we have to stop the drugs coming in,
even if we're not actually stopping the full load."

In 1999, more than two-thirds of the estimated 506 tons of cocaine produced
in South America was shipped through the Caribbean -- the first time
Caribbean smuggling outstripped the amount of drugs crossing the porous
Mexican border, the United Nations' Barbados-based drug-monitoring program
says.

Of that, 62,709 pounds of cocaine were seized in the Caribbean, about 6
percent of the estimated amount passing through the area, the U.N. office says.

Critics -- both in the United States and Caribbean -- argue that criminal
organizations flourish because of the drug war, not in spite of it. The
war's focus on enforcement only jacks up prices, which in turn fosters vast
smuggling networks that are well-financed, armed and organized.

"Corruption around drugs has increased significantly," McMillan, the fired
Jamaican police official, said just weeks after the specter of corruption
became a stark public topic in his country.

Rumors that government ministers were caught on tape discussing cocaine
smuggling have swirled around Jamaica since Prime Minister P.J. Patterson
in October ordered an investigation into allegations that his telephone was
illegally bugged along with those of Cabinet ministers and drug gang
leaders with political ties.

Within days of Patterson's disclosure, the police commissioner said
high-ranking police officers were being investigated for aiding Colombian
smugglers.

Jamaica has one of the worst murder rates in the world -- 849 people out of
population of 2.6 million in 1999 -- a reality many blame on drug gangs.
Drug gangs are also blamed for the high murder rate in Puerto Rico.

With shifts in world trade costing the region tens of thousands of jobs and
shrinking export profits, these small island-states have become more
vulnerable than ever to drug lords whose fortunes dwarf those of its
governments and poorly paid law enforcers.

Drug scandals brought down the government of St. Kitts and Nevis in 1994.

Britain dissolved the government of its Turks and Caicos Islands in 1986
after then-Chief Minister Norman Saunders was convicted and jailed in Miami
on drug-trafficking charges. Saunders was reelected in 1995. The same year,
relations with Britain deteriorated after the British governor charged his
territory was rife with drug corruption.

'Balanced approach'

A U.N. report on drug trends in the Caribbean, released in late November,
blames the surge in trafficking in part on "weak states, economic
structures dependent on sectors such as tourism or financial services that
are vulnerable to money laundering, and economic and human networks
connecting the region to drug-consuming countries."

The solution, McMillan and others say, is decriminalizing or legalizing
drugs, then using the money now spent on the drug war to pay for education
and addiction recovery programs that would reduce demand for drugs.

Vigil does not disagree. "We have to look at a balanced approach between
enforcement and demand reduction," he said.

But drug policy is mostly dictated by the United States, where politicians
favor tough anti-drug laws and initiatives.

Solid figures on U.S. anti-narcotics efforts are nearly impossible to nail
down. But the Center for International Policy, a Washington-based think
tank, estimates that in 1999 the United States provided almost $500 million
in aid to countries involved in this year's Operation Libertador. Of that,
only $5 million to $6 million was earmarked to help reduce demand.