DRUG CZAR NOTES SHIFT IN TRAFFICKING TRENDS

MEXICO CITY (AP) -- Mexican and U.S. drug traffickers are facing increasing
competition from their counterparts in Caribbean and Central American
nations, the U.S. drug czar said in a review of trends in the narcotics trade.

Mexico remains the leading route for cocaine shipments into the United
States, but traffickers in Jamaica, Haiti, the Dominican Republic and
Panama are rapidly gaining ground, Barry McCaffrey said Wednesday.

Meanwhile, U.S. drug gangs have been pushed out of the wholesale domestic
trade by Dominicans, Colombians and Mexicans.

"The gringos just can't compete," said McCaffrey, who also noted that U.S.
traffickers are more easily detected and are less likely to pile up the
proceeds in accounts hidden abroad.

"The problem with the foreigners is that some kid from Colombia gets a
15-year sentence, that has less significance because he's got $200 million
somewhere else."

While the top U.S. drug policy officer praised Mexico's efforts to stop
maritime cocaine shipments in the Pacific -- the main route for the drug --
he said during a three-day visit to Mexico that there are warning signs
elsewhere in the region.

"There's a lot more (cocaine) showing up in Haiti, the Dominican Republic,
the Jamaica axis," he said. Drug "overflights in Cuba dropped dramatically
over the last six months."

With U.S. troops out of Panama for the first time in nearly a century, drug
trafficking is increasing in that country, which shares a border with
Colombia, the region's leading drug producer, he said.

Meanwhile, McCaffrey got an idea of the perseverance and inventiveness of
drug traffickers Thursday while he was inspecting Mexican efforts to "seal"
its borders and coasts against drug shipments.

A small plane disguised with military markings and loaded with a half-ton
of cocaine, flew into Mexican airspace about 30 miles from where McCaffrey
was touring inspection and police facilities in Huixtla, near the
Guatemalan border.

Federal police seized the four-seat Cessna 210 after it landed at a small
airfield in the central state of Morelos. They found the cocaine and
arrested the two Colombian pilots.

McCaffrey is in Mexico for talks with Mexican leaders that focused on the
June 1 implementation of the U.S. "drug kingpin" law, which will allow for
the freezing of U.S. assets of foreigners linked to drug trafficking.