PLAYA DEL CARMEN, Mexico (Reuters) - In the main square of Mexico's resort
of Playa del Carmen, cocaine and marijuana dealers hiss at foreigners and
offer them a cheap high.

Almost every other week, a stash of drugs is found on small boats or
pleasure yachts moored in the glitzy Caribbean harbors of Cancun or
Cozumel. And even from a helicopter fishing boats skimming across the
turquoise waters off Mexico's southeastern state of Quintana Roo with their
twin 200-horsepower outboards look far too fast to be interested only in
lobsters.

Experts say Mexico may have a real fight on its hands to keep the Yucatan
Peninsula from becoming the next big route for transshipping Colombian
cocaine to the United States.

In recent testimony to the Mexican Senate, Attorney General Jorge Madrazo
said a plan launched in June to seal off the peninsula from drug
traffickers was a huge operation and that 15,000 troops would be sent there
and to the southern border with Guatemala to plug the flow of narcotics.

"The sealing-off plan isn't just based on the biggest deployment of
personnel ever," Madrazo told senators. He said the "ambitious" operation
also involved improved intelligence gathering, information sharing with
Guatemala and Belize and air and sea patrols off the peninsula's long,
cove-studded coastline, as well as military roadblocks inland.

DRUG-TRAFFICKING PARADISE

Recently, Mexico's Reforma daily reported that Cancun, a purpose-built
resort visited by hundreds of thousands of North American and European
tourists each year, had taken on the role played by Miami in the 1980s as a
drug-trafficking paradise.

The paper said a third of the illegal drugs passing through the Caribbean
from South America to the United States touched land on the pristine
beaches near Cancun. It said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA)
registered 64 boats in July believed to be ferrying cocaine from Colombia
to Quintana Roo.

A DEA official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said he could not
confirm the Reforma report. But the official said any flank left exposed to
traffickers would be exploited.

"The Caribbean is a big sea. Everywhere is a target (for drug smugglers).
How much drugs are passing through Yucatan? Don't know. But some is. We
mustn't let down our guard."

U.S. officials say trafficking through the Caribbean has increased sharply
since narcotics agents cracked down on smuggling across Mexico's 2,000-mile
land border with the United States, the world's top cocaine consumer.

In congressional testimony last April, DEA chief Thomas Constantine said
the Caribbean's reemergence as a significant trafficking area may be partly
due to the disintegration of Colombia's once-powerful Cali cartel, which
previously routed up to 70 percent of its shipments through Mexico by land.

"The new groups in Colombia have reactivated the old Caribbean smuggling
routes," Constantine said.

Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, further to the east, are the main
stopover points, but the Yucatan may be beginning to serve as a conduit on
a smaller scale. According to local journalists and residents, Colombian
cocaine is delivered by ship, sometimes dropped off in waterproof bales in
the ocean and then transferred to smaller, faster boats.

A lot of the drugs are taken ashore and sent by road to the northern border
hidden in fake truck bottoms, allegedly often under the protection of local
police.

MEXICO FIGHTS SILENT WAR

Mexico's drug war in the Yucatan is largely a silent one.

Quintana Roo Governor Mario Villanueva Madrid last December took out
full-page newspaper advertisements denying links with drug traffickers.
Recently, his spokesman Roberto Andrade told Reuters narcotics was a matter
for federal authorities.

The Attorney General's delegate in Cancun, Jorge Pena Sandoval, declined to
talk, saying he had been in office only a short while since his predecessor
unexpectedly quit.

In Mexico City, repeated requests for comment from the U.S. Embassy, the
navy and army ministries and the Attorney General's Office (PGR) went
unanswered.

"The tourist trade is very important," noted one official, adding that no
one wanted to imperil hard currency receipts by painting the Yucatan as an
up-and-coming drug center.

Certainly, judging from the low levels of violence compared with the main
drug cartel cities of Ciudad Juarez and Tijuana, across the border from El
Paso and San Diego, narcotics trafficking in the Yucatan is still in its
infancy.

Yet evidence mounts that drugs are making inroads into Quintana Roo's
social fabric and perhaps its political life. Cocaine is easily available
in the discos and bars of Playa del Carmen and Cancun, where the bustling
tourism industry provides a natural and eager market for recreational drugs.

Over the past year, Quintana Roo's deputy prosecutor Humberto Guevara and
former judicial police chief Ramon Baez Marquez have reportedly come under
investigation, the latter allegedly in connection with the kidnapping of a
military officer who went to the Yucatan to probe narcotics smuggling.

Police arrested 35-year-old German citizen Alexander Nesnidal in Playa del
Carmen in August and are now preparing to extradite him to Germany, where
prosecutors say "the capo" is charged with buying drugs in Mexico for sale
back in Europe.

The month before, authorities arrested two alleged mob members in Cancun.
Oreste Pagano, alias Cesare Petruzzielo, and Alberto Minelli, both accused
of smuggling drugs for the Italian Mafia and sought in three countries,
were immediately deported to Italy for visa violations.

The clampdowns on foreign narcos mingling like chameleons in the crowds of
sunburned tourists won praise. But as regional newspaper Por Esto noted:
"How strange it is to us in Quintana Roo that only foreign drug barons have
been detained, despite the fact that it is common knowledge drug cartels
headed by Mexicans operate in this area."

Checked-by: Pat Dolan