COCAINE TRADE GOES LOW-KEY

Narco-kings eschew flashy Hollywood-style of predecessors, but are just as
dangerous

MEDELLIN, Colombia - They're not your typical Hollywood-style drug lords.
Not these days. No big gold chains. No flashy diamond pinky rings. No
fleets of bodyguards loaded into armoured four-wheel drives with customized
gun ports and personalized plates.

Today's narco-kings aren't like Colombia's Pablo Escobar or Mexico's Amado
``Lord of the Flies'' Carrillo, both dead, who jammed their product up
their noses as fast as Al Pacino's Miami capo in Scarface.

This is 1998, a new era.

Colombia's new drug lords (and they're still men) are younger - in their
30s and 40s - smarter, more subtle and more likely to stay alive and out of
prison than their predecessors.

They're managers, computer-savvy businessmen who take ordinary taxicabs,
meet over lunch counters and go home to their families at night. No lavish
club parties with piles of coke on every table.

And their influence extends to the remotest corners of Canada.

``It's a whole new style,'' says Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, chief of
Colombia's National Police.

Colombia's war on drugs is his force's responsibility. The general is
interviewed in a huge, rosewood-panelled office in the heavily-guarded
Bogota bunker where the police are headquartered.

``The style is low-key now,'' says Serrano. ``But it's just as dangerous.
Our problems are as great.''

Colombian narco-traffickers still control the world's cocaine trade.

As well, according to secret Colombian government reports obtained by The
Star, some of these button-down business types, based in Medellin and other
centres, are linked to leaders of the most brutal death squads in the
country.

'Smaller amounts, more discreet, more careful - but they're shipping just
as much'

That takes the drug business to a whole new level, say sources. Instead of
killing each other and battling police, as they've done traditionally,
paramilitaries tied to the drug trade are waging war against peasants,
throwing them off their land and redistributing millions of hectares under
the guise of fighting a civil war.

Colombian drug lords process and ship more than 75 per cent of the world's
cocaine, including the coke that's turning up with greater frequency - and
purity - on the streets of Canadian cities.

``Even in remote areas such as the Yukon or Northwest Territories, it is
easily available,'' says Leo Vaillant, from the drug analysis section of
the RCMP's Criminal Investigation Division in Ottawa.

`Smaller amounts, more discreet, more careful - but they're shipping just
as much' Colombians ship 600 to 700 tonnes of processed coke cocaine
hydrochloride - annually, as well as smaller, but increasing amounts of
heroin and marijuana.

The country's cocaine mafia run a business that nets $7 billion a year in
clear profits. That's before the coke is prepared for sale outside the
country and put on the market at, roughly, $35,000 to $50,000 a kilo.

``These aren't the old cartels in the sense of Pablo Escobar (from
Medellin) or the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers (from Cali),'' says Serrano.
``In 1990, for example, 500 police officers were killed in Medellin. Those
were wild times. Thankfully, we will never see those days again.

``These guys don't fill 727s with seven tonnes of coke anymore and fly them
north,'' says Serrano. ``Instead, they load and ship smaller quantities.
Maybe 100 kilos, maybe 200, but many times over. Smaller amounts, more
discreet, more careful - but they're shipping just as much.

``Where once there may have been two, three, four heads (of cartels), now
there are 20 or more. It's a new way of doing business.''

Once again, Medellin, in northwestern Colombia, has re-emerged as the new
drug hub of Colombia. Construction is booming here, although city officials
insist it's not drug-related.

``Please sound the alert about Medellin, without trying to stigmatize the
city,'' Col. Oscar Naranjo, Colombia's national police intelligence chief,
told a recent counter-narcotics conference in Costa Rica.

``The truth is we are really worried that Medellin is again appearing as an
international centre of the drug trade.''

Medellin used to be the cartel big boy.

But the city went into decline after Escobar was gunned down by police in
1993, and his empire shattered.

Colombia's most famous narco-boss made the fatal mistake of calling his son
in Bogota from a cellphone, allowing police to track him to a Medellin
apartment. U.S. narcotics officials in on the bust still laugh about
Escobar's lapse in judgment. One Texas-based agent said in an interview
that Escobar's mind was addled by his own coke.

Mexico's Carrillo, head of the Juarez Cartel, with its ties to Colombia,
was also a user. After he died last year following eight hours of plastic
surgery for a new face, an autopsy revealed a distinct lack of nasal
cartilage. His death may have been a hit.

Allegedly, the murder was ordered by Colombia's Rodriguez Orejuela brothers
from their Cali jail cells. During the recent Colombian election campaign,
independent candidates mocked light sentences and luxurious jail conditions
which have allowed these sibling capos to control a drug empire from
prison.

Loads of cocaine out of Colombia are smaller, but Canada is still a major
transshipment centre for these new narco-bosses, according to Colombian and
Canadian sources.

The coke goes by ship to Vancouver, Montreal or Halifax, or by plane to a
number of cities, including Toronto, before being redistributed across
Canada, or sent to Europe or the United States.

``Drug traffickers think it's easier shipping into Canada than the United
States,'' says one police source. ``So they prefer that method.

``They know that law enforcement doesn't have the same money in Canada as
in the U.S. We don't have the same resources, so they assume they'll get
away with more. Maybe they do.''

>From Ottawa, RCMP civilian staffer Vaillant says it's impossible to
>accurately judge how much cocaine is coming into Canada.

But he estimates 2,000 kilos a year are being seized by all police sources,
including the Mounties, the Ontario Provincial Police and metropolitan
police sources.

Users in Vancouver, Montreal and Maritime cities are ``ingesting the drug
which means there must be a lot available and it must be pure,'' says
Vaillant.

At the recent Summit of the Americas in Santiago, Chile, Prime Minister
Jean Chreate;tien was a key player in setting up a multi-level group to
study the growing hemispheric drug problem.

Canada will chair the drug-study group.

Canada is also involved in direct drug-fighting projects with Colombia,
notably RCMP courses taught in both countries to aid Colombian authorities.

``The Mounties are one of the best police forces in the world,'' says
Serrano. ``We have the greatest respect for them and the level of
co-operation has been extremely high. We welcome their courses and we learn
a lot.''

Several experts interviewed by The Star - who must remain anonymous for
their own safety - stress that Colombia's new drug thugs shouldn't be seen
as benevolent entrepreneurs, sort of narco yuppies on the verge of
legitimate business.

Increasingly, say these insiders, they are linked to some of the country's
most violent death squads, particularly in the north.

In fact, that trend of narco-ties to paramilitaries is the second important
evolution of drug-trafficking in Colombia, along with the transition to a
more low-key style.

For example, confidential documents obtained by The Star from DAS,
Colombia's national security agency, reveal a list of police-described
narco-traffickers in Medellin and the Northern Valley area which stretches
to Panama and the Pacific and Caribbean coasts.

The reports says these key players - some operating businesses in Medellin
- - are linked to Carlos and Fidel Castanos, paramilitary leaders in the
north.

The Castano brothers, along with capos from the Cali and northern cartels,
formed a Persecuted by Pablo Escobar (PEPE) group that sought to get rid of
the high-living Escobar in the early 1990s. It's thought they aided
Colombian police in finally bringing him down.

The new generation wanted Escobar out of the way, They didn't like his
flamboyance, nor the unnecessary risks he took. He once shot down a
passenger jetliner, killing 100 people, to kill two enemies.

The Castano brothers are at the head of a paramilitary group calling itself
Self-Defence of Uraba and Cordoba (ACCU). Under the guise of fighting
rebels in Colombia's civil war, they have driven hundreds of thousands of
peasants off their land, and redistributed the land to wealthy landowners,
including themselves.

``The Castano brothers - and don't believe reports saying Fidel is dead -
are narco-paramilitaries, nothing more. They're drug lords,'' says one
human rights worker, who recently finished an exhaustive report on the drug
trade in northern Colombia and asks not to be identified.

`The business is just as vicious as it ever was. Just as bloody'

He says the difference between the paramilitaries and Colombia's left-wing
guerrilla groups is that the rebels have always collected a war tax on
cocaine, and taken advantage of Colombia's narco-trafficking. But they
haven't gotten involved in processing or shipping.

In contrast, he says, the Castano brothers and other paramilitary leaders,
in conjunction with drug lords in Medellin and other centres, are moving
into processing and shipping.

They're taking over as new cartel leaders, says the expert.

A recent report in the Colombian magazine Semana says the Castanos ordered
last year's killings of environmentalists and human rights workers Mario
Calderon, 50, and his wife, Elsa Alvarado, 36, in Bogota.

According to Semana, the killers belong to a group, The Terror, and took
orders from Carlos Castano. Reportedly, the killings were revenge over
Calderone's role in a land dispute in northern Cordoba state going back 10
years. The human rights worker, once a priest, had defended peasants
fighting paramilitary incursions.

``It's true there is a quieter way of doing things, especially here in
Medellin,'' says a local newspaper reporter who also must remain anonymous.
He can print little of what he knows. It's too dangerous.

``The way they live, the way they act in public, it's all very nice. But
the business is just as vicious as it ever was. Just as bloody.''


Checked-by: (Joel W. Johnson)