CHILE, ARGENTINA NEWEST ENTRY PORTS FOR DRUGS

ARICA, Chile - Authorities are basking in the glow of success after
scoring the third-biggest cocaine bust in the world, but the
implications of the 9.7-ton capture are beginning to sink in.

U.S. and Latin American anti-drug officials say Chile and its neighbor
Argentina have become the target of a new strategy by Colombian
traffickers to smuggle drugs into the United States and Europe.

Officials in the region have been aware of the trend for more than a
year, but they say the Jan. 16 seizure in the northern port city of
Arica has driven home the dimensions of the problem.

"A capture of this magnitude is very surprising," said Arica's acting
customs administrator, Mario Arameda. After receiving a U.S.
intelligence tip that led to the seizure, "we knew it would be a big
shipment, but `big' to us is maybe 500 kilos (1,100 pounds). Nine tons
of cocaine is gigantic."

As demonstrated by the bust, drug-trafficking organizations are
sending large shipments to South America's economically bustling - and
largely drug-free - Southern Cone region to evade detection and
capture, U.S. officials said.

The diversion strategy means the United States could have to establish
a much broader and more expensive narcotics-intervention capability
that, until now, has focused primarily on blocking northbound
smuggling routes through the Caribbean and Central America.

It also means nations such as Chile and Argentina could become
increasingly vulnerable to the same corrupting effects of the drug
trade already in evidence across Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

The most recent example of the new trafficking strategy is the cargo
ship Nativa, a Colombian-owned vessel that U.S. intelligence
satellites reportedly followed closely after it left Turkey on Nov.
11, passed through the Panama Canal in December and then called at
Corinto, Nicaragua. The ship, carrying a cargo of steel rods, then
turned southward, only to make a curious stop alongside another,
unidentified vessel in the Pacific off Ecuador before heading to Arica.

Chilean naval Cmdr. Michael Manley said he ordered the ship detained
in Arica on Saturday after noticing numerous safety violations on
board, irregularities on the ship's manifest and an unusual mixture of
crew members from Colombia, Russia, Ukraine, Germany, Venezuela and
Peru.

Within hours, Chilean authorities received information from U.S.
intelligence sources that a large shipment of drugs could be aboard
the Nativa. A thorough search of the ship and interrogation of its 20
crew members yielded nothing.

On a hunch, a welder cut through a 2-inch-thick steel cargo-hoist
mast. Inside the 8-foot-diameter hollow mast, investigators discovered
9.7 tons of cocaine wrapped in hundreds of pillow-sized plastic packets.

The street value of the cargo was valued at $600 million to $900
million.

The Kolpin, another cargo ship owned by Punta Arenas, the Colombian
company that owns the Nativa, was detained last week in the port of
Valparaiso, Chile. Marcelo Albarran, spokesman for Chile's maritime
authority, said customs agents, police and military personnel combed
the ship for drugs but found nothing.

Manley, a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., said
he believes a possible strategy of traffickers is to send large
shipments southward in hopes of sneaking the illicit cargo past
Chilean inspectors, who have an international reputation for being
rigorous.

With a Chilean inspection stamp, he said, shippers "have a sort of
passport" that makes them less vulnerable to searches in the United
States and Europe.

A U.S. law-enforcement official, who asked not to be identified, said
it is the clean reputation of countries like Chile and Argentina that
makes them more attractive as transit points for drugs.

A cargo container carrying an Argentine certificate of origin, he
said, is far less likely to be inspected on arrival in the United
States than would a similar container shipped from Colombia or Peru.

Human smugglers, known as "mules," who try to hide drugs in personal
articles or swallow large quantities packed into condoms, are less
likely to be stopped in Miami if they arrive on a flight from Buenos
Aires instead of Bogota, he added.

As an initial step in foiling such a strategy, the official said, the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration began training in 1999 an elite
Argentine unit, known as the Northern Border Task Force, whose job is
to intercept large shipments of drugs heading southward from Colombia
and Peru via southern Brazil and Paraguay.

A 1999 State Department report also identified Chile and Argentina as
increasingly popular transit points because of their bustling commerce
with the United States and Europe and because of their close proximity
of drug-producing countries.

Until this week, perhaps the biggest scare Chile has had regarding
drug-trafficking activity was the revelation in 1997 that Mexico's
biggest cocaine trafficker, Amado Carrillo Fuentes, had been planning
a large-scale move into Chile. The plan was exposed and several
arrests were made after Carrillo, head of the so-called Juarez cartel,
died during plastic surgery in July 1997.

Rene Lobos, chief of counternarcotics operations at Chilean customs in
Arica, insisted his nation should not be regarded as a "country at
risk." But he added that trafficking organizations are using "an
increasingly sophisticated methodology" to ensure their cargo reaches
its intended destination, and that the attempt with the Nativa could
be just one of the ways they are testing the waters.