SEA LANES CROWDED WITH DRUG-SMUGGLING BOATS

MIAMI -- Cut off from traditional air routes, South American drug
traffickers are now shipping more cocaine and heroin by sea into
Central America and then overland in trucks, cars and backpacks to the
United States, the U.S. anti-drugs chief said.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, head of the Office of National Drug Control
Policy, said efforts to combat narcotics smuggling had largely shut
down drug flights into Mexico, forcing traffickers to use small boats
in sea lanes along the Pacific and Caribbean coasts.

"The principal drug smuggling threat to America is now noncommercial
maritime (smuggling) in the eastern Pacific and the western
Caribbean," McCaffrey said after meeting with top security officials
from Latin America and the Caribbean.

"It isn't a giant banana ship. It's fishing trawlers, fast boats, you
name it.

"Once it's in Mexico it goes 18-wheeler truck, privately owned car,
backpacks, mules. If you told me someone was paragliding across the
border with cocaine, I'd believe it."

McCaffrey was in Miami to discuss international security issues and
hemispheric cooperation with 150 officials from 29 Latin American and
Caribbean countries and territories, including the defense ministers
of Paraguay, Uruguay and Honduras.

McCaffrey said cocaine production dropped dramatically in Andean ridge
countries in the past few years. He said coca cultivation in Bolivia
is down 55 percent and in Peru down 66 percent since 1995.

But he said cultivation in Colombia is out of control -- with that
country producing 70 percent of the world's coca.

"Colombia's cocaine production went up 140 percent in two years.
Unbelievable," he said. "Last year, Colombia produced 520 metric tons
of cocaine. Ninety percent of the cocaine in America last year
originated in or transited through Colombia."

Last month, the United States endorsed the anti-drug efforts of
Colombia despite the increase in coca production.

U.S. officials gave Mexico and six other Latin American nations on its
list of major drug producing countries a clean bill of health in its
annual assessment of their level of cooperation in the drug war.

McCaffrey said the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, shared by the
Dominican Republic and Haiti, is the transshipment point for about 15
percent of the cocaine arriving in the United States.

Haiti, the poorest nation in the hemisphere, is in the throes of a
three-year political crisis and its fledgling police force is
struggling to rein in crime as political violence escalates.