COLOMBIA'S DRUG CARTELS ADOPT LOW-KEY APPROACH

Crime: Today's drug-lords dress simply and keep operations small. But their
output hasn't dropped.

BOGOTA, Colombia - Adapting to stepped-up pressure from law enforcement, a
new breed of Colombian drug trafficker has abandoned the model of the huge
narcotics cartel and is shunning ostentation in favor of a low-key
lifestyle.

Out are bodyguards and armor-plated Toyota Landcruisers. In are taxis and
conservative business suits.

"Today's drug trafficker shelters himself in very small, subtle
organizations," said Colombia's national police chief, Gen. Rosso Jose
Serrano. "He doesn't go around anymore in fancy sneakers, with Rolex watch,
gold chains and a revolver on his belt."

The vast majority of today's traffickers in Colombia are virtual unknowns.
But they are efficient, U.S. and Colombian officials agree. The flow of
cocaine out of the world's leading producer nation, estimated at 550 tons a
year, has not ebbed.

Nor has business declined for Mexican druglords, who have also adopted a
quieter, more businesslike style in recent months. One example is the
Arellano Felix gang in Tijuana. Once known for violence and high
visibility, the Arellano Felix brothers are no longer spotted in the
upscale nightclubs they once frequented.

The shift is more evident in Colombia, however, where the business has
become more diffuse.

Gone are the days of the big drug cartels - conglomerates that controlled
the business each step of the way from crop cultivation to cocaine
production in secret labs to sales on U.S. streets.

"This is more like after the breakup of AT&T. Now you have the Baby Bells,"
said a U.S. Embassy official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
"Notwithstanding, there's still a lot of dope out there."

And it keeps moving into new markets - Russia, South Africa and Japan are
now in vogue.

Colombia's retooled cocaine trade is once again concentrated in Medellin,
the city that the late Pablo Escobar made murderously notorious but was
always a model of commercial efficiency. Authorities have identified 43
trafficking gangs in Colombia, nearly half of them in Medellin.

Each has an average of 10 to 20 associates, compared with the hundreds of
people who were on the payrolls of the old cartels.

"They are mostly people between the ages of 25 and 40 who have no criminal
records and work through legitimate small businesses," said a Colombian
police intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Some of the Medellin traffickers are former Escobar lieutenants, but most
are sophisticated newcomers who employ the latest technologies, are
Internet savvy, have a keen grasp of global finance and are deft money
launderers.

Colombia's first generation of traffickers, the "cocaine cowboys" typified
by Escobar, trained legions of young assassins, kept mounds of cash in
wicker baskets and concentrated operations in specific regions. Flaunting
their wealth and defying authorities, they went down in flames in the early
1990s after waging a war on the state that killed hundreds.

The successor Cali cartel fared well for a while, bribing police officers,
judges, journalists and politicians to look the other way while hiding
behind an intricate web of legitimate businesses like its Drogas la Rebaja
pharmacy chain.

But with the help of U.S. agents and intelligence, political pressure from
Washington and a police anti-corruption purge by Serrano, brothers Miguel
and Gilberto Rodriguez and the rest of the Cali cartel's pinstripe-suited
principals were caught beginning in 1995, convicted and jailed.

The new generation remains discreet and harder to infiltrate.

"We know of very important traffickers in Medellin who don't even have
cellular phones or beepers. They know that makes things difficult for us,"
said a police intelligence official.

Witness to the self-destructiveness of the Medellin-Cali rivalry, today's
Colombian traffickers tend to collaborate rather than compete. They
sometimes pool resources, but are autonomous. And they work equally with
paramilitary groups and rebels, both of whom earn tens of million of
dollars a year from cocaine production.

Medellin's main drug bosses - nine are identified in an April 1
intelligence report by Colombia's equivalent of the FBI - allegedly include
a major shareholder in a local soccer team and Carlos Castano, a fugitive
paramilitary leader who lives in a northern mountain hideout.

"The business is more dispersed. They don't send 7 tons like before, but
100 kilos or 50 kilos at a time because that way it's much more difficult
to identify the organization," Serrano said.

The new traffickers are also less inclined to violence than their
predecessors, although they have killed six judicial investigators in
Medellin over the past year, riddling one with 23 bullets from a submachine
gun, said senior judicial official, requesting anonymity.

"At the moment, they're controlling Medellin's bands of assassins," he
said, referring to the professionals trained by Escobar, who was killed by
police in 1993.

The laboratories used to process cocaine also reflect the new order.

"They are smaller, and although their production can still be high, there
is less accumulation of product than before, and their location is better
concealed," said Col. Leonardo Gallego, chief of Colombia's anti-narcotics
police.

Today's traffickers still use small planes and speedboats to get cocaine,
and increasingly heroin, to transshipment points in the Caribbean and
Central America. But they are relying more and more on couriers known as
"mules," many of them foreigners recruited in Europe and Africa.

They still do a lot of business with Mexican cartels, but some now bypass
those costly middlemen. And cocaine distributors in the United States are
increasingly independent, acquiring drugs from a variety of sources.

Colombian smugglers are constantly inventing new ways of eluding the law.
The latest is black cocaine, a mixture of the drug with iron dust and
charcoal the fools both sniffer dogs and the standard chemical detection
test.

After German police first identified the substance with the seizure of 33
pounds in March, Colombian investigators tracked down the shippers and
found 250 pounds at Bogota's airport. It was in barrels labeled industrial
pigment and was waiting to be shipped by air to the African nation of Togo
via the Netherlands.

Experts said that once it reaches its destination, the cocaine in black
cocaine can be separated out with a simple solvent like acetone. The extra
steps add to the cost of smuggling, but the ploy gives the gangs a new
edge.