DRUG BOSSES OFFER BRIBE OR BURIAL - OR BOTH

NEW YORK - Plata o plomo - "silver or lead." That's the message the drug
lords send time and again to police, soldiers, legislators and journalists
up and down the north-south axis through which narcotics pour into the
United States from Mexico, Panama, Colombia, Bolivia and Peru.

It's a blunt way of saying: "Either you take our payoff money and do what
we want, or we kill you."

Sometimes, ofttimes, they do both.

This is the stark reality. It's not just in those countries below the U.S.
border whose national ethos is being corrupted and wrecked by drug thugs
feeding mostly American demand. It's also on our side of the border.

In small U.S. towns and counties all over the southern parts of Texas, New
Mexico, Arizona and California, the pernicious influence of "silver or
lead" is spreading.

The cold consequences of this phrase are driven home again with the
discovery of a secret burial ground for drug-gang victims in Mexico, just
across the border from El Paso, Texas. A hundred or more graves are
believed to be there, some of the victims U. S. citizens - all killed
because they wouldn't take bribes, or did take them and then didn't
deliver, or were suspected of talking about what they knew.

These aren't the only such secret graves in Mexico. The country, especially
northern Mexico from the Pacific to the Gulf, is filled with them,
according to knowledgeable lawmen and journalists on both sides of the border.

"What many Americans still don't seem to grasp is that illegal drugs are a
$59-billion-a-year business," says Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the man who
spearheads the U.S. anti-narcotics effort.

Another high-ranking law-enforcement officer told me, "That kind of money
buys influence, it buys people, and it gets its way to an ever-increasingly
dangerous degree - not just in Mexico and other places to the south
shot-through with narcotics traffickers but also, sometimes in some places,
in our own country."

"It is foolish and dangerous for the American public at large not to know
this," he said. " Maybe this latest news out of Mexico and the pictures of
the digging up of the graves near El Paso will be a wake-up call. But,
frankly, I doubt it. Public interest in the drug war seems to have waned
now. ..."

Contrast this with the fact that marijuana use among American youngsters
between the ages of 12 and 17 doubled in the past six years (before a
recent slight downturn), according to U.S. government statistics. Many see
marijuana as a "gateway" to drugs such as cocaine and heroin.

That may be why cocaine and heroin have been flooding into the United
States in record amounts in the late 1990s. Heroin sales, especially, have
boomed as a much more potent and lower-priced strain of the drug has hit
the streets in quantities unknown before.

The main cocaine and heroin routes into the United States are believed to
no longer run through the Caribbean, although traffic on that route remains
heavy. Northern Mexico is the preferred trail now, particularly
northeastern and midwestern Mexico, which lie below Texas, New Mexico and
Arizona.

And now, increasingly, cocaine and heroin not routed through Mexico from
Colombia, Bolivia and Peru is shipped directly to California, Oregon and
Washington. These Pacific routes have been developing fast as
law-enforcement heat was turned up on the more traditional paths through
the Caribbean.

And on it goes in the dark, increasing dangerous world where it's "silver
or lead."