US DRUGGED POLICY

Colombia's Narco-Candidate

In 1997 and '98, alert US Customs agents in California seized three
Colombia-bound ships laden with 50,000 kilos of potassium permanganate, a
chemical necessary for the manufacture of cocaine. According to an August
3, 2001, document signed by then-DEA chief Donnie R. Marshall, the ships
had originated in Hong Kong and were each destined for Medellin, Colombia,
to deliver the chemical - whose legal uses include the manufacture of
printed circuit boards - to a company called GMP Productos Quimicos, S.A.
(GMP Chemical Products). Over the past decade, GMP has imported huge
quantities of potassium permanganate, according to Marshall, and is
suspected by Colombian law enforcement of leaking the chemical to coke
producers.

The amount of permanganate seized before reaching GMP was enough to make a
half-million kilos of cocaine, with a street value of $15 billion.

What makes this little episode of more than passing interest is that GMP
Chemical Products is owned by Pedro Juan Moreno Villa, long-time right-hand
man to Colombian presidential candidate Alvaro Uribe Velez, who is expected
to win the May 26 national election.

Colombia's Conservative Party threw its support to Uribe after a poor
showing in the recent congressional elections.

The party's electoral disappointment stemmed from public disaffection with
current Conservative Party president Andres Pastrana's support for the US
military adventure known as Plan Colombia - an American initiative,
designed to win the "War on Drugs" abroad, which has only further
entrenched drug production and organized crime.

Ironically, Colombian voters will likely elect Uribe, who, like his father,
has been deeply immersed in the drug economy from the earliest days of his
career - as evidenced, in part, by his long, intimate political association
with Moreno, who is currently managing Uribe's presidential campaign.

Alvaro Uribe's path to Colombia's highest office began in the city of
Medellin, the capital of the province of Antioquia, in 1982. At that time,
unofficial mayor Pablo Escobar, head of the notorious Medellin drug cartel,
was the undisputed king of the city: nothing happened in Medellin without
his permission. When Uribe became the official mayor, Medellin was a boomtown.

Escobar was taking the city by storm, constructing public housing for the
poor, paying taxes, and stoking Mayor Uribe's construction of a world-class
subway system.

The Liberal Party, through which Uribe and Escobar rose in the same
electoral wave to mayoral and legislative power, is to Antioquia what the
Democratic Party is to Boston: the entire political show.

From 1995 to 1997, Uribe was governor of Antioquia, and Moreno served as
his chief of staff. (During roughly the same period, from 1994 to 1998,
Moreno's GMP was also Colombia's largest importer of permanganate.)
Together, the two men oversaw the rise of paramilitary organizations in
Antioquia in the mid 1990s.

This brings us back to those California permanganate seizures in 1997-'98.
The shipments were seized without the usual media fanfare. Such seizures
usually involve US companies, which have been heavily fined for failing to
notify the DEA about potassium permanganate shipments that exceed the legal
limit of 500 kilograms per month.

The January 14, 2000, Hartford Courant reported, for example, that the
Connecticut-based chemical firm MacDermid Inc. paid the feds $50,000 "to
settle a claim involving the export of a chemical that can be used to
synthesize cocaine" for just that reason.

And, the Courant reported, MacDermid was selling the chemical to
"legitimate buyers." In contrast, GMP was not fined a single devalued
Colombian peso by the US government.

The Customs Service, the DEA, and other US law-enforcement agencies were
caught in a public-relations disaster.

Their agents did their job. And the bureaucrats in Washington spent more
than three years trying to cover it up. The permanganate traffickers - not
content to be on the road to the Colombian presidency, they also wanted to
collect their tips - fought from early 1998 until mid 2001, in a case
before DEA administrative-law judge Gail Randall, to avoid legal penalties
and to get their 50,000 kilos back. If the Justice Department had fined
GMP, it would have unleashed a chain of events embarrassing to Moreno and,
consequently, to presidential candidate Uribe Velez. It would have
interfered with Washington's electoral plans for Colombia: to weaken all
other potential candidates (those who are still alive and not in captivity)
and install Uribe as the next Colombian president.

Perhaps because he was at the end of his term, or perhaps because his own
DEA troops were already furious with the bureaucratic cover-ups of the
California seizures, then-DEA chief Marshall rejected the non- binding
recommendation of the administrative-law judge and ordered the 50,000 kilos
permanently seized.

It is only because Marshall went public with his findings that we now know
the intricacies of Moreno's operation.

The bottom line is this: coca grows on trees in Colombia, and the military,
paramilitaries, police, rebels, and poor farmers will be battling in vain
for control of the coca-leaf market for decades to come. But the person who
controls the potassium permanganate market in Colombia - a product that
must be imported from continents far away - truly controls the global
traffic of processed cocaine.

The same standards set by Moreno's GMP company will no doubt be applied
when Moreno and Uribe - and their customers from the ranks of the narcos
and paramilitary groups - get their mitts on the entire Colombian military
and law-enforcement complex, as well as on Plan Colombia's $2 billion.

Perhaps that is Washington's intent.

It would not be the first time that United States officials backed a
presidential candidate in Latin America who, once elected, could be easily
blackmailed and controlled because of his documented narco history: the
likes of Pinochet, Noriega, Salinas, Zedillo, Menem, Banzer, and Fujimori
all come to mind.