DEA-BAHAMAS DRUG EFFORTS SEEN AS SUCCESS

GREAT EXUMA ISLAND, Bahamas - "We've got dope in the water!"

Kevin Stanfill, the top U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent in
the Bahamas, snapped shut his cell phone. An Army Blackhawk
helicopter pilot had just reported a possible air drop of five large
drug bundles in the water 30 miles south of Nassau - about an hour
from "Hawk's Nest," a U.S. antidrug installation on this island in
the central Bahamas.

The DEA quickly got its own chopper into the air while the Royal
Bahamas police launched a speedboat to check out a suspicious vessel
near the possible drop zone. U.S. Coast Guard and Army helicopters
circled the target area, waiting for the police boat to arrive.

Within minutes, the 43-foot Bahamian police boat roared up at 50 mph.
Two officers boarded the boat and a diver plunged into the shark-infested sea.

The possible drugs, it turned out, were actually large squares of
sheet metal used by some fishermen to lure lobsters. The suspect boat
was innocent after all.

But the recent episode witnessed by an Associated Press reporter and
photographers who accompanied DEA agents on patrol demonstrated the
challenges faced by U.S. and Bahamian officials, who are battling
drug traffickers in a 700-chain of islands as large as the state of California.

The two governments, along with officials from the Turks and Caicos
islands to the south, have collaborated since 1982 in a joint
operation credited with driving many cocaine and marijuana smugglers
toward Mexico's border with the United States.

The Caribbean has long been a paradise for smugglers who take
advantage of the many islands, crowded waters and weak law
enforcement in countries such as Haiti. The DEA has estimated that as
much as 20 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States
moves through the Caribbean, although that figure has varied over time.

"We've been successful here," said Stanfill. "We always want to
maintain that presence."

It is often difficult to quantify whether the United States is
gaining ground in the long, costly war on illicit drugs.

Despite hundreds of arrests and billions of U.S. dollars spent,
cocaine continues to be "widely available throughout the nation," the
DEA said in a 2006 drug threat assessment. Yet there are some success
stories and the DEA points to the Bahamas as one of them.

Since 2000, Operation Bahamas and Turks and Caicos has resulted in
seizure of more than 25 tons of cocaine, nearly 82 tons of marijuana
and the arrests of 786 people, according to the DEA. The operation
costs the U.S. government about $30 million a year.

With its hundreds of tiny islands and cays, a vast expanse of water
and prime location as close as 45 miles east of Florida's coast, the
Bahamas has long been a haven for pirates and smugglers of every stripe.

During the drug traffickers' 1980s heyday, airplanes laden with
cocaine regularly took off for the United States from clandestine
airstrips in the Bahamas. Boats carried drug loads every day - some
of them blending into the legitimate maritime traffic, others
speeding toward the coast under cover of night.

Although the United States hasn't proposed pulling out of the joint
operation, Bahamian officials fear that if Washington were to turn
attention elsewhere it would jeopardize hard-won progress. The amount
of cocaine that is smuggled through the Bahamas has dropped from
about 80 percent of the drugs that reached the United States 20 years
ago to about 10 percent today.

"We have to be cognizant of the open corridors we have here in the
Bahamas," said Bahamas Drug Enforcement Unit Inspector Samuel Butler.
"We have actually been able to hold the tide. If we do not have these
assets in place, certainly the drug enterprises will be back in the Bahamas."

Mark Trouville, special agent in charge of DEA's Miami office, said
U.S. officials fear that increased law enforcement efforts along the
Mexico-U.S. border could raise the costs of smuggling drugs in the
Southwest. That in turn could make the Caribbean and the Bahamas
attractive again to the drug cartels.

"One of the reasons we stay vigilant is that these folks are nothing
if not innovative, and they respond to pressure," Trouville said. "As
more of our resources are going to the Mexican border, these folks
will look at the original route and start to come back this way."

The smugglers use a network of caves in a part of the Bahamas known
as the Raggeds to store drugs, sometimes marking their loads with
brightly colored children's toys. Traffickers' planes regularly ditch
in the ocean or crash on an island - finding wreckage is common - and
speedboats are often run aground deliberately while being chased so
smugglers can escape on foot.

These losses are all figured into the drug traffickers' costs of
doing business, said DEA's Stanfill. It's an acceptable cost as long
as cocaine that runs $2,000 a kilogram in Colombia retails for $20,000 in Miami.