ARGENTINE COCAINE TRADE GROWING

Traffickers are setting up cocaine labs in Argentina, long merely a
transit point for cocaine, and creating new addicts with 'paco,' a
cheap, toxic byproduct with a short, intense high.

'Paco' boosts Argentine drug trade

Matias Salas tried marijuana when he was 11. By age 17, he smoked pot
every day, sniffed cocaine when he could get it and was a regular
user of pills.

Then, a new drug hit Argentina.

"I have never tried anything so addictive in my life. I am no rookie,
but this just hit me like a log. I couldn't stop," says Salas, now 20
and one of thousands of working-class youths in that country hooked
on smoking paco.

Experts say the sudden availability of paco, also known as basuco, is
a sign that cocaine is being produced in Argentina. The white
crystals, left over from refining coca paste into cocaine, are too
cheap and low in quality to make them worth transporting. So wherever
cocaine is refined, paco is sold.

This is a turning point for the drug business in Argentina, which
until recently was only a transit point for Colombian, Peruvian and
Bolivian cocaine largely on its way to Europe.

Argentina's counter-drug officials attribute the surge of cocaine
laboratories to their efforts to control the export of chemicals used
to refine coca paste into cocaine.

"Traffickers have changed their strategy. Instead of taking the
chemicals to countries where the coca paste is produced, they bring
the coca paste here and they install laboratories, primarily in the
outskirts of Buenos Aires," says Jose Ramon Granero, director of
Argentina's counter-drug agency, known as SEDRONAR.

Cocaine seizures in the country doubled in 2004 compared to 1999, and
authorities discovered 10 clandestine cocaine laboratories in 2003,
20 in 2004 and 14 last year. Granero says seizures so far "are in
line with last year's."

The State Department's 2006 international drug report said there was
evidence that more drug trafficking organizations are entering
Argentina, lured by the advanced chemical industry there and the low
risk in shipping the coca paste into the country.

Paco is at the lowest rung of the drug business ladder.

In Argentina, paco-laced cigarettes are sold almost out in the open
in poor neighborhoods -- even in kiosks that sell regular cigarettes
and candy -- addicts say. A paco cigarette goes for 30 U.S. cents,
compared to $1.50 for a marijuana joint.

"In my barrio, it's everywhere. It's very easy to get," Salas told
The Miami Herald in a telephone interview from Fundacion Manantiales,
a nonprofit Buenos Aires organization that treats addicts with
government money.

Salas checked in voluntarily and has been living in the rehab center
for four months. He says he tried to quit paco once on his own, but
he relapsed. Now he doesn't want to return to the working-class
neighborhood where he grew up until he is certain he can stay clean.

Paco is highly addictive because its effect is so short -- a couple
of minutes -- and so intense that many users resort to smoking 20 to
50 cigarettes a day to try to make its effects linger.

Used regularly, it can devastate a person physically, emotionally and
mentally within six months, says Cristian Laclau, a spokesman for
Fundacion Manantiales.

Paco is even more toxic than crack cocaine because it is made mostly
of solvents and chemicals, with just a dab of cocaine, said Jim Hall,
executive director of Up Front Drug Information Center, a Miami
nonprofit that has been tracking cocaine abuse for more than two decades.

Argentine media reports have blamed the surge of paco consumption --
up 200 percent to an estimated 50,000 users to 70,000 users in the
last four years, according to local authorities -- on the 2001
economic meltdown that pushed thousands of Argentines into poverty and despair.

But authorities and experts look north for the answer.

The multimillion-dollar U.S.-backed Plan Colombia is disrupting the
operations of traffickers there and forcing them to look for new
bases for their business, said Eduardo Gamarra, of Florida
International University's Latin American and Caribbean Center.

Farther south, the recent election of President Evo Morales in
Bolivia, which capped three years of political instability in that
country, raised concerns that his policy to clamp down on cocaine but
decriminalize coca farming for traditional, legal uses may result in
more paste shipped to its neighbors.

There are no statistics available, but the Argentine and U.S.
governments, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, agree that most
of the coca paste entering Argentina comes from Bolivia, the world's
third-largest cultivator of coca leaves after Colombia and Peru.

Argentina and Bolivia share a long, porous border through which coca
paste is smuggled, Granero says. It enters the country in small
planes that land on clandestine airstrips, by truck in cargo
containers, or in boats.

"The border is very extended, in some places inhospitable and almost
deserted, in others made of small rivers. It's difficult to patrol,"
Granero says.

The State Department's 2006 drug report said Argentine authorities
had expressed concern that Bolivia's new policy, dubbed "Yes to coca,
no to cocaine," could greatly increase the production of illegal drugs there.

But Granero was far more diplomatic.

'We think Evo Morales has good intentions. But his policies will be
measured by the results. If 'Yes to coca, no to cocaine' results in
an excess of coca leaves, we'll have to see where that excess goes."