WILD COLOMBIA COAST A FOCUS OF DRUG WAR

A Joint Force Including U.S. Officials Is Working to Stem Cocaine
Exports and Related Violence Along the Pacific Shore.

BUENAVENTURA, COLOMBIA -- At the sound of approaching patrol boats, the
drug smugglers hurriedly fled their camp hidden among the mangroves,
leaving behind a wealth of evidence.

The Colombian Coast Guard's raiding party arrived to find a still-warm
makeshift stove, short-wave radios, satellite phones, enough AK-47
assault rifles to arm a platoon, and, buried under freshly turned mud,
8 tons of cocaine.

The June 28 seizure near the village of Venado is viewed as an
encouraging success in a campaign called Operation Riptide mounted
late last year by Colombian and U.S. counter-narcotics forces to stem
the export flood of cocaine and the violence enveloping this wild,
virtually ungovernable coastline.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that at least
three-quarters of the cocaine destined for U.S. markets departs from
camps such as Venado along the hundreds of miles of coastline from the
Panamanian border to Tumaco, near the border with Ecuador.

At the center of the tropical wilderness lies Buenaventura, a
fast-growing impoverished port through which half of all Colombian
trade passes. Many neighborhoods here lack running water and
electricity, and housing is so scarce that the poor have constructed
warrens of shacks on stilts over inlets and the bay -- creating a
maze-like cover for traffickers.

Leftist guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries and drug traffickers vie
here to dominate the illicit trade, leaving behind an average of a
corpse a day, a homicide rate nine times that of Los Angeles. Nine
bombs exploded around the city in June, allegedly placed by the guerrillas.

"It's not like competing supermarkets. These are violent criminal
gangs. If you are moving a shipment of $40 million in illegal
merchandise, you don't feel safe having the other guy around," said
one U.S. counter-narcotics official who discussed the port city's
appeal to drug traffickers.

Much of the violence is the indirect result of the success of previous
drug suppression efforts on the Caribbean coast and in the interior,
under U.S.-funded Plan Colombia.

Operation Firewall, which began in 2003 on Colombia's Caribbean coast,
reaped record narcotics seizures and unprecedented numbers of
extraditions and convictions of Colombian drug traffickers in U.S.
courts.

Aerial spraying of vast cocaine plantations in Colombia's southeastern
jungle since the 2000 inauguration of Plan Colombia also has forced
guerrillas, paramilitary armies and traffickers to seek more
permissive locales to grow and process coca leaves.

Buenaventura and the surrounding estuaries and jungles fit the bill
for laboratories and staging areas because parts of the region often
are inaccessible to the armed forces. In addition to the daunting
latticework of inlets and swamps, the Bay of Buenaventura experiences
rapidly shifting tides with as much as 18 feet of variance a day,
which can confuse or strand all but experienced boatmen.

The nearly constant cloud cover -- Buenaventura averages 320 days of
rain each year -- limits aerial surveillance, leaving traffickers free
to build speedboats capable of carrying 2 tons of cocaine per trip.
They also have fashioned towable "submarines," such as the
30-foot-long craft seized near here in December that was capable of
hauling as much as 3 tons of cocaine.

"The narcos all want the five-star life, but they have no choice now.
They have to be here," said one Colombian coast guard officer,
describing the less-than-luxurious conditions of life in this
sweltering coastal city. He asked not to be named because of security
concerns.

Drug traffickers are helped by this city's history of corruption and
deeply rooted social problems. Buenaventura always has been a magnet
for contraband, with notoriously corrupt port officials.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe called Buenaventura city manager
Adolfo Chipantiza a crook last year during a community council meeting
here and urged that he be arrested. Chipantiza allegedly tried to
return a load of captured cocaine to its narco owners last year, and
spent much of this year under house arrest until he was exonerated by
a magistrate last month. The Uribe government said it would appeal the
judge's action.

Meanwhile, Buenaventura Mayor Saulo Quinones surrendered to police
last week to answer charges filed by a special anti-corruption
prosecutor that he misappropriated city funds.

Aggravating the situation are high unemployment rates among the
largely Afro-Colombian population, and the influx of 40,000 people who
have fled the civil war raging in Colombia's rural areas.

The social instability has made the city fertile ground for the
leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by its Spanish
initials, FARC.

Counter-narcotics officials say the rebels pay youths $200 a month to
be undercover "shorts and sandals" members of the group's urban
militia. They work as lookouts and perform the small logistical tasks
essential to moving cocaine out of the city and bringing in the tons
of chemicals required to process it. Often barely teenagers, the
youths also act as hired assassins.

The spate of bombings June 22 has been described by local police as
FARC's retaliation for the army's sniper killing June 5 of the group's
Buenaventura commander, Milton Sierra, as he made a predawn river
crossing. The charismatic rebel leader, better known by his nom de
guerre, J.J., allegedly was responsible for militias and drug
trafficking in the region.

Uribe has recognized the roots of Buenaventura's problems and recently
announced new jobs, education and housing programs to improve the
standard of living. But the tradition of corruption in Buenaventura
will make the area difficult for police to control in the short term,
despite the 800 additional officers Uribe dispatched this year.

Malfeasance also has tainted the coast guard, which in 2006 was forced
to fire eight of its members in the Buenaventura section on suspicion
of tipping off drug traffickers about patrols and raids.

The guard launched the recent Buenaventura raid only after U.S.
counter-narcotics officials operating in Colombia encouraged them to
act on information the Colombians had obtained about the lab. They
sped to the camp aboard U.S.-supplied "Midnight Express" speedboats
capable of outrunning the narco-traffickers' craft, which apparently
were preparing to ferry the drugs to Central America or Mexico, en
route to the U.S. market.

The patrol boats navigated a labyrinth of mangroves using
U.S.-provided hand-held global satellite positioning monitors. Once at
the targeted site, a special group of trackers used 8-foot-long metal
rods to probe the newly turned earth, and before long found the
cocaine, buried in metal containers. Inside were dozens of 50-pound
watertight bales bound in plastic and bearing the "brands" of various
narco-traffickers.

U.S. officials speak of the Colombian coast guard admiringly.

"The Colombian police and the military are in the eye of the storm
because of the convergence of opposing forces," said one U.S. official
in a tersely worded assessment. "They are holding their ground."

Another U.S. counter-narcotics agent was more effusive in his praise
last month during a visit to Buenaventura, noting that the
Buenaventura coast guard detachment had seized 26 tons of cocaine this
year, as well as more than 20 speedboats.

"The courage and commitment that these guys display amid difficult
conditions is admirable," the agent said.