COLOMBIAN DRUG CARTELS EXPLOIT TECH ADVANTAGE

BOGOTA, Colombia - A new generation of Colombian drug traffickers,
light-years ahead of the traditional Medellin and Cali cartels in using the
Internet and other modern technology, has sharply increased cocaine
production and smuggling in the past two years despite growing budgets for
law enforcement, according to senior U.S. and Colombian intelligence
officials.

These officials in the United States and Colombia said the nimble new
organizations and their high-tech gear are reversing the gains of earlier
years that crippled the older, better known cartels. Despite having more
resources than ever before, the officials acknowledged that they are
finding out little about the new organizations that now control the
multibillion dollar business of producing cocaine and heroin in Colombia
and moving it, mostly through Mexico, to consumers in the United States.

"It is a whole new generation of traffickers who have carefully studied and
learned from the mistakes of the groups that went before them," said Gen.
Rosso Jose Serrano, director of the Colombian National Police who oversaw
the dismantling of several major drug cartels. "They maintain an extremely
low profile, they mix their licit and illicit businesses, they don't carry
out terrorist acts and they operate in small, autonomous cells. They are
much harder to fight than previous groups because they are much harder to
find."

Unlike the previous organizations, the new Colombian traffickers contract
out most of their jobs to specialists, who work on a job-to-job basis
rather than as part of an integrated structure that would be easier to
detect, the sources said. Most Colombian cocaine is sold in bulk to Mexican
drug trafficking organizations, which also have undergone major changes in
the last several years. They assume the risk of transporting it to the
United States and distributing it.

"When you take out the leadership of an organization now, you find that
underneath there is really not an integrated structure," one U.S. official
said. "It is smart guys going through their Rolodexes and calling up people
for specific jobs. . . . They are smarter, less visible and cause us all
kinds of trouble."

While increasing in sophistication, the traffickers have greatly expanded
the cultivation and improved the quality of coca 96 the raw material for
cocaine 96 in Colombian territory controlled by Marxist-led guerrillas or
right-wing paramilitary groups. A senior U.S. Justice Department official
said the estimate that Colombia produced 165 metric tons of cocaine in 1998
"will at least double and maybe triple" in 1999.

At the same time, the official said, cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia
has declined because coca cultivation has dropped significantly in both
countries. Until two years ago, Colombian drug cartels relied heavily on
coca grown in Bolivia and Peru to produce cocaine, but they now grow more
high-grade coca than either of the other two Andean nations.

This means, according to U.S. and Colombian officials, that overall
estimates of cocaine production in South America may not increase as
dramatically as the estimates for Colombia alone, but that, after years of
decline, overall drug production is rising significantly and more cocaine
than previously estimated is moving into the United States.

Colombian drug traffickers now control most cocaine production from the raw
material to the finished product, giving them more control of the
drug-making process and enhancing their profits when the finished cocaine
is sold to Mexican delivery specialists.

The boom in Colombian cocaine production comes as the United States has
ratcheted up aid to the beleaguered government of President Andres
Pastrana. In 1999, the United States provided Colombia with $289 million in
aid, mostly to the police and military to fight drug trafficking. The
Clinton administration is preparing to request a supplemental bill early
next year of at least an additional $1 billion over the next three years.

Unlike the previous waves of drug traffickers, who were allied mostly with
far-right paramilitary squads, the current leadership is prospering by
dealing with all sides in the Colombian conflict.

Most coca is grown in the southern and western regions, where the
government has no real presence and where the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC) makes millions of dollars by protecting the coca fields,
taxing cocaine production and guarding laboratories and airstrips.
Paramilitary groups allied with the army also profit from the cocaine trade
by protecting trafficking routes and running laboratories in areas they
control.

The clearest window into the changes and growth in Colombian and Mexican
drug trafficking structures was provided by Operation Millennium, a joint
U.S.-Colombian operation that netted 31 drug traffickers last month,
including several identified by the Drug Enforcement Administration and
Colombian police as kingpins who moved more cocaine than Pablo Escobar of
Medellin or the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers in Cali.

Among the most important, according to the DEA, were Alejandro Bernal,
Fabio Ochoa and Orlando Sanchez-Cristancho. Sanchez-Cristancho, wanted for
murder in Colombia, is in custody in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla. The man
identified as the group's main Mexican operative, Armando Valencia, has
eluded arrest.

U.S. and Colombian officials found the traffickers were making use of the
latest technology to protect and advance their business. Bernal's operation
kept in touch by using Internet chat rooms protected by firewalls that made
them impossible to penetrate, officials said. In addition, each part of the
operation fed its information on the day's sales and drug movements to a
computer on a ship off the coast of Mexico, the officials said, so that if
one computer were taken down, it would be impossible to trace the rest of
the network.

The traffickers also had access to highly sophisticated encryption
technology, far beyond what law enforcement has the capacity to break
quickly, sources said. One U.S. official said it took some of their best
computers 24 hours to crack a 30-second transmission by the traffickers,
making the exercise pointless. They also used sophisticated cellular phone
cloning technology, stealing numbers that were already assigned to
legitimate users, using them for a short period of time, then moving on to
new numbers.

These new techniques helped the traffickers move hundreds of tons of
cocaine over several years before being detected. DEA officials and
Colombian authorities said Bernal's group, working with Mexican
organizations led by Valencia, shipped 20 tons to 30 metric tons of cocaine
every month to the United States.

Only days before the arrests last month, Barry R. McCaffrey, the Clinton
administration's drug policy director, estimated that a total of 350 metric
tons of cocaine from the entire Andean region was entering the United
States every year. "This group was shipping what previous intelligence
estimates had shown to be everything entering the United States," a U.S.
official said. "Numbers are all estimates, but clearly we have a lot more
coming in than we thought."

The irony, law enforcement officials said, is that many of the changes in
drug trafficking strategy are driven by past successes in bringing down
less sophisticated and more visible drug trafficking organizations.

"We estimate there are several hundred small cartels now operating in an
atomized fashion," said a Colombian intelligence official. "Several of
those groups fed into the organization we dismantled. But there are several
other people out there as big as Bernal, who can put loads together from
small organizations, and we don't even have them identified."

U.S. officials agreed there is little intelligence on the new groups. Until
Operation Millennium, U.S. officials said they had not even heard of
Armando Valencia, one of the biggest drug transportation operators in Mexico.

According to Colombian and Mexican officials, Bernal had a Miami-based
business selling bathroom tiles when, in the mid-1980s, he was taken to
Mexico to do a decorating job for Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the
Juarez cartel. Bernal and Carrillo Fuentes became close friends, according
to Mexican, Colombian and U.S. officials, growing so close that Carrillo
Fuentes was named the godfather of Bernal's twin daughters.

Bernal was arrested in Mexico in 1989 with nearly 1,280 pounds of cocaine.
When he was released three years later, he decided to return to Colombia,
the sources said.

At the time, Escobar's Medellin cartel waged an open war against the state
through a terrorist campaign and high-profile assassinations. Escobar and
most of his top henchmen were killed in 1993. The Cali cartel then emerged
as the premier trafficking structure, buying political influence and
judicial protection. The cartel's dominance ended in 1995, when its leaders
were arrested or killed in a series of police raids.

With few strong leaders left in Colombia, intelligence sources said, Bernal
slowly began assembling specialists from remnants of different
organizations and working with his Mexican connections to assemble a
formidable cocaine pipeline.

Carrillo Fuentes died while undergoing cosmetic surgery in July 1997, and
shortly after that Colombia revived its extradition agreement with the
United States. Fearing indictment and possible extradition if he moved his
drugs directly to the United States, Bernal cut a deal in early 1998 with a
Carrillo Fuentes lieutenant named Armando Valencia, Colombian and Mexican
officials said.

The alliance prospered, according to U.S., Colombian and Mexican officials,
because Bernal and Valencia were able to broker deals with drug trafficking
organizations often at war with each other: Bernal with the FARC and
paramilitaries, and Valencia with the Juarez cartel and its main rival, the
Tijuana-based Arellano-Felix organization. Both leaders were able to remain
undetected by law enforcement officials for years.

One factor in the rapid growth of the Bernal-Valencia organization,
according to U.S., Mexican and Colombian officials, is that Bernal would
pay for cocaine delivered to him in Colombia even before he sold it to
Valencia, thereby removing the risk for small Colombian traffickers. In
addition, Valencia had a reputation for getting his loads safely to the
United States and guaranteeing that he would cover the losses of any load
that was lost or confiscated.

Law enforcement's big break came in December 1998, when the DEA, with a
warrant, searched the south Florida home of Carlos Jaramillo, one of the
organization's top U.S. operatives, according to Colombian and U.S.
officials. The DEA seized Jaramillo's computer and found a host of
information on the group's computer connections.

"It really opened our eyes," said one U.S. official. "What we saw raised
serious concerns that law enforcement won't be able to access traffickers'
communications."

Correspondent Molly Moore in Mexico City contributed to this report.