LATIN AMERICAN DRUG CARTELS SAID TO EXPLOIT GAP IN US INTERDICTION

CARACAS, Venezuela -- The withdrawal of the United States from military
bases in Panama, combined with the refusal of Venezuela's new government to
allow its airspace to be used for U.S. surveillance and pursuit flights, has
created a huge gap in regional anti-drug interdiction that trafficking
cartels are exploiting, say U.S. officials.

The weakness has emerged since May, when the United States returned Howard
Air Base, from which 2,000 anti-drug flights a year had been operating, to
Panama, as required by the Panama Canal Treaties.

Three alternate sites have been found, but they either are not yet able to
function at full capacity or their effectiveness has been sharply limited by
political considerations.

"These are very clever people, and they are watching us very closely," Gen.
Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House's Office of National Drug
Control Policy, said of the drug cartels during a four-nation South American
tour in late July. "So if you have an enormous hole in the middle of the
equation, it will have a fundamental change on the effectiveness of these
solutions."

In a telephone interview from Washington, one Pentagon official expressed
hope that "by the end of the year, we should be up to 85 or 90 percent" of
the flight capacity that existed before the end of operations in Panama. The
official would not estimate the number of drug shipments now getting through
as a result of the problem, but conceded that at the moment, interdiction
efforts are "not doing so well in the source zone." Still, said Bruce
Bagley, a professor at the University of Miami who is an expert on the Latin
American drug trade, the United States "is not without other assets that can
be used," in the area, like satellite photography. "Although it is a
setback, it is not a disaster," Bagley said of the Venezuelan policy.
"Colombia is the principal focus of growing and processing cocaine now, and
the lack of rights to overfly Venezuela does not inhibit efforts as
significantly as many analysts in Washington have suggested."

Bagley said that although interdiction "doesn't work very well" and is
"barely a holding action," the alternative is "to do nothing, to give up."
Venezuela is not a grower of coca, the raw ingredient for cocaine, or heroin
poppies. But it shares a long, poorly patrolled border with Colombia, which
produces 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States, and more
than 100 tons a year of that drug were estimated to have passed through
Venezuela last year, before flights were banned.

The United States had hoped to negotiate an agreement with Panama that would
have allowed the use of Howard into the next century . But after announcing
in December 1997 that such an accord had been reached, Panamanian President
Ernesto Perez Balladares reneged.

In an effort to close the gap, the Netherlands in April agreed to grant the
United States ground and air access to and use of selected airfields in the
Dutch colonies of Aruba and Curacao, which lie just off the Venezuelan
coast. A similar agreement has been signed with Ecuador, which allows U.S.
drug surveillance planes to fly from a military base in the coastal city of
Manta. The Manta flights are intended to monitor drug trafficking up the
Pacific coast of South America to Mexico, which is the main drug route to
the United States. But the runway there is neither long enough nor can it
take the weight of sophisticated electronic surveillance aircraft. That
makes flights from the two Dutch-held islands "extremely important," a
Pentagon official said. Without overflight permission from Venezuela,
though, the flights from Aruba and Curacao are of limited use.

"We want this to be a truly multilateral effort," said Niek van Zutphen, the
Dutch ambassador in Caracas, referring to aerial surveillance and
interdiction. "If you leave one weapon so explicitly unused, you give
yourself a handicap and make things very easy for the other side."
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, a 45-year-old former army colonel who took
office in February promising a social revolution, has stated explicitly that
he will not countenance what he regards as a violation of his country's
sovereignty.

"Venezuela is historically very zealous about everything occurring on these
two islands, because we consider that it affects our national security,"
said Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel in an interview. He
added: "We cannot accept that planes leave from these bases," and said he
"absolutely ruled out" any possibility that Venezuela will change its
position. Rangel noted that the Chavez government has cooperated with the
United States in other areas of the anti-drug war, including the
installation of three radar centers near Colombia or on drug routes and has
"captured more drugs in five months than were seized all of last year." He
also argued that Venezuela has the drug interdiction situation well under
control and thus does not need outside interference. "We have complied with
our responsibilities without any need for bases in Curacao and Aruba or
overflights that we do not consider to be convenient," he said. But
McCaffrey said that since the closing of Howard, "there have been seven
criminal penetrations of Venezuelan airspace that have had unsuccessful
endgames because there is no endgame in Venezuela."

Some key members of the U.S. Congress are growing impatient with the
Venezuelan stance. They warn that if Chavez's position does not change soon,
the United States could retaliate by refusing to certify that Venezuela is
collaborating fully in the anti-drug war, a step that would deprive it of
trade and other benefits.

"If Venezuela isn't cooperative, and the amount of trafficking increases as
a result of that, then it would certainly affect the certification process,"
said Rep. Benjamin Gilman, R-N.Y., chairman of the House International
Relations Committee.

"Right now we are hard-pressed in our efforts, and until we are able to
establish some alternative facilities, which is going to take quite a while,
we will continue to have a major strategic gap," Gilman said. But the
Clinton administration is eager to avoid such a confrontation. Venezuela has
the largest oil reserves outside the Middle East and in recent years has
become the United States' principal source of imported oil. Despite the
public rebuffs they have received, U.S. officials remain hopeful that Chavez
can be persuaded to change his mind. Even before McCaffrey's visit, State
Department and other delegations sought to lay out the U.S. case to him,
pointing out that drug traffickers are regularly violating the sovereignty
he says he holds dear.

"President Chavez has been so focused on politics and the economic situation
that he frankly hasn't spent a lot of time up to now on drug stuff," said a
U.S. official who monitors the issue. "Our goal is to help him and his
administration get oriented as to how we see the drug threat regionally and
how it affects Venezuela specifically, and use that as a basis to move
forward on cooperation."