POLICE ARREST MANY, SEIZE DRUGS

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico - Smashing cocaine laboratories and burning
marijuana fields, police in 32 countries and territories have arrested
thousands of suspects and seized tons of drugs in three weeks of
U.S.-orchestrated raids, officials said Tuesday.

Police arrested 2,876 people and seized more than 20 tons of cocaine
during the operation, said Michael Vigil, Caribbean director of the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, which coordinated the raids.

The Oct. 27-Nov. 19 operation was the third and biggest in a series of
raids that began last year, officials said at a news conference in San
Juan.

Police did more than 39,000 searches and raids, seizing 29 tons of
marijuana and 82,170 tablets of ecstasy, dismantling 94 drug factories
and confiscating 197 guns. They seized 100 tons of chemicals for
drug-making and burned more than 9 square miles of fields of
marijuana, heroin poppy and coca plants used for making cocaine,
official said.

The most recent raid netted a number of suspected drug kingpins,
agents said.

In the Dominican Republic, police arrested Martires Paulino Castro,
whom they accuse of running a network that stretched from St. Maarten
to New York and shipped up to 4,400 pounds of Colombian cocaine to the
United States each month.

Dominican officials also arrested Julio Morales Martinez, who is
accused of smuggling cocaine to New York and New Jersey in shipping
containers filled with lettuce, tomatoes and plantains.