PUERTO RICO BEACH DISTRICT MAJOR GATEWAY FOR COCAINE SMUGGLING

FAJARDO, Puerto Rico - At first glance, little about this beach district
suggests its role as the biggest gateway for one of the main routes for
smuggling cocaine into the United States.

But U.S. drug enforcement officials say the low-slung fishing boats
manufactured here are ideal for ducking under radar and outrunni ng bigger
Coast Guard and Customs vessels through miles of coastal waters only four to
five feet deep.

And the predominance in Fajardo of migrants from the Dominican Republic,
officials add, reflects the fact that Dominican-dominated g angs control
almost 90 percent of the cocaine smuggled from Puerto Rico to the U.S.
mainland.

``Puerto Rico is now a transshipment point for a significant part of the
Colombian cocaine reaching U.S. markets,'' said Michael S. Vigil, head of
the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Puerto Rico, a U.S.
commonwealth. ``And Dominican gangs control much of the traffic.''

Authorities intercepted four shipments of 2,500 pounds or more each in the
past eight months. A single-seizure record for the Caribb ean was set in
September 1997, when 6,700 pounds were found in a trailer-truck.

Cocaine seizures in and around Puerto Rico totaled 14 metric tons in the
most recent 12 months measured, compared with nine metric t ons in the same
period one year earlier, said James McDonough, director of strategy in U.S.
drug czar Barry McCaffrey's Washington o ffice.

And it's not just cocaine. Increasingly, traffickers are smuggling
high-grade Colombian heroin through Puerto Rico to the U.S. easte rn
seaboard, mostly to the New York-New Jersey area but also to Florida.

Heroin smuggling aboard direct commercial flights from Puerto Rico recently
helped give Orlando the second-highest number of heroin overdose deaths in
Florida, behind Miami, DEA officials say.

Closer to home, drug trafficking has fueled Puerto Rico's high crime rate _
its murder rate has ranked at or near the top of the U.S . charts for
several years _ and growing police corruption.

Eight police officers were arrested last month on charges of using their
police launch to shuttle cocaine from the small island of V ieques, seven
miles off the coast, to the Fajardo area on Puerto Rico's northeastern
corner.

Puerto Rico has long been an attractive spot for Colombian traffickers: It
is the U.S. territory closest to Colombia, and its people speak Spanish. It
has 300 miles of coastline and no U.S. Customs checks on shipments to the
mainland.

Trafficking here soared as U.S. officials squeezed routes across the
U.S.-Mexico border, which accounted for 75 percent of the cocai ne reaching
U.S. markets in 1994 and now account for about 50 percent.

Colombian wholesalers now are shipping much of their product through the
Caribbean, DEA officials say, island-hopping their way nort h aboard
everything from coastal freighters to speedboats and planes.

Speedboats can make the dash from Colombia to Puerto Rico in less than a
day, while freighters and planes rendezvous in the northwes tern Caribbean
with smaller boats that shuttle the loads to ``cooling off'' hideouts in
places like Haiti and the Dominican Republic .

A few of those shipments are later smuggled directly to the United States.
But most are smuggled into Puerto Rico, put aboard cargo containers and
shipped by sea to the mainland, DEA officials say.

In most cases, the final smuggling run into Puerto Rico involves small,
locally made, shallow-draft boats that dash into Fajardo acr oss the huge
expanses of sandy shoals off this coast.

``Approximately 75 percent of all drugs entering Puerto Rico arrive by way
of Fajardo,'' said a classified report by the Justice Dep artment's National
Drug Intelligence Center, issued in 1997 and obtained by The Herald. Fajardo
was one of the areas of Puerto Rico hit hardest by Hurricane Georges last
month, but the damage was not expected to affect the drug traffic.

With gunwales barely one or two feet above the water, the local smacks are
almost impossible to spot on radar when waves are two or more feet high,
said U.S. Customs Agent Tom Svarc.

``They can come in at night at top speed, and even if we spot them, it's
tough to chase because the water is just four to five feet deep in most
places,'''' said Svarc, who patrols the area aboard an unmarked 42-foot
speedboat.

It's in this final smuggling run that Dominican gangs join in the cocaine
traffic, handling the bulk of the arrivals, the shipments to the mainland
and later distribution in U.S. cities.

Dominican drug gangs ``transport approximately 12 to 33 percent of the
Colombian cocaine entering the United States each year,'' sai d the National
Drug Intelligence Center report, and use Puerto Rico ``as their primary
staging area.''

The report noted that the vast majority of Dominicans are law-abiding but
said the Dominican gangs were perfectly positioned to go t o work for the
Colombians when smuggling routes shifted from Mexico to the Caribbean.

Dominican smugglers have long been involved in sneaking illegal migrants
across the 77 miles that separate their country from Puerto Rico, mostly
aboard the same kind of small fishing boats that drug smugglers now use.

And they work more cheaply: While Mexican smugglers usually charge 50 to 60
percent of a load's value for their work, the National D rug Intelligence
Center report said, the Dominican smugglers charge only 20 to 30 percent.

An estimated 50,000 Dominicans live in Puerto Rico and dominate a handful of
coastal areas like Fajardo's Maternillo neighborhood, o ne of the main
centers for building the small fishing boats, known as yolas.

About 30 to 50 Dominican smuggling ``coordinators'' operate in Puerto Rico,
DEA officials said, hiring out to Colombian producers to receive and
transship drug loads on a single-shipment basis.

They hire 10 to 30 workers to handle each load, DEA officials said, but
these are no small-time operations.

Ships and planes use sophisticated GPS equipment to pinpoint their
locations, and smugglers use satellite phones and fraudulently ob tained
cellular phones to chat with little fear of wiretaps, the report said.

U.S. officials believe they have begun putting serious dents in the
Caribbean drug routes since federal authorities declared the reg ion a High
Intensity Drug Trafficking Area in 1996 and assigned it bigger enforcement
budgets.

The DEA's Puerto Rican office, in charge of all the Caribbean, went from 32
drug-fighting agents in 1994 to more than 100 today, with plans to hit 156
by October 1999. U.S. Customs went from about 50 agents to 154 today.

The U.S. Coast Guard and the Dominican navy launched a coordinated effort
this spring, Operation Frontier Lance, to step up patrols and coordination
in area waters.

``I've seen a significant increase in seizures since September as we began
to coordinate federal and local assets,'''' said Frank Fi gueroa, U.S.
Customs chief for Puerto Rico.

Dominican President Leonel Fernandez has expressed his determination to
crack down on Dominican smugglers and has named tough young police and
military officers to key drug-fighting posts.

U.S. officials admit, however, that squeezing the Puerto Rico routes is only
likely to force the Colombians to switch their routes e lsewhere _ and say
they have already seen hints of this.

``Our latest evidence shows a shift to Haiti,'' said a U.S. drug expert in
Washington, ``no longer as a transshipment point for Puer to Rico but as a
jumping-off point for direct shipments to South Florida.''

((The Miami Herald, Florida -- 10-10-98))

Checked-by: Don Beck