The decision to carry the drug war into cyberspace was announced in a joint
statement issued at the end of a threeday meeting in Bogota of police
intelligence officials from Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, Venezuela
and Colombia.

Col. Oscar Naranjo, intelligence chief of Colombia's National Police, said an
encrypted Website would be set up to allow the seven countries to share
information on drug gangs and the whereabouts of drug kingpins.

The site would also be used to pinpoint the location of suspected clandestine
drug laboratories and illicit coca and opium poppy crops and to alert
authorities to crossborder drug flows, he said.

Naranjo told Bogota's El Tiempo newspaper that Colombia came up with the idea
of using the Internet after discovering that drug lords themselves were using
it to coordinate their worldwide criminal activities.

``Curiously enough, what we've detected through our monitoring of criminal
organisations is that various clans dedicated to drug trafficking and
organised crime are using topnotch tools and one of those is the internet,''
he said.