SECRET GRAVES AND BULLETS SYMBOLS OF THE DRUG WAR

It's the message of the drug lords: "Plata o plomo," meaning "Silver
or lead." It's sent 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 they do both -- take the
money and kill you anyway.

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

The cold consequences of the 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. A hundred or more graves are
believed to be there, some of the victims U.S. citizens -- all killed
in the name of the drug trade.

Mexico is full of such secret graves, 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-dollar-a-year business," says Gen. Barry McCaffrey,
the man who spearheads the U.S. anti-narcotics effort.

"That kind of money buys influence. It buys people, and it gets its
way to an ever-increasingly dangerous degree," another high-ranking
law-enforcement officer said. "It is foolish and dangerous for the
American public at large not to know this.

"Maybe." he added, "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, and that has caused it also to wane in Congress and at the
White House."

Contrast this with the fact that marijuana use among American young
people ages 12-17 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.

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, increasingly dangerous world where it's
"silver or lead."