AT SMALL LAB, IT PAYS TO KEEP A LOW PROFILE

In the violent, high-stakes world of the global narcotics trade, Jose
Ceron's cocaine lab is strictly a mom-and-pop operation. In a good year,
one with four coca harvests, Ceron can clear about $3,600 for making the
paste that eventually yields the white powder fetching hundreds of
thousands more on U.S. streets.

That's about half the average income in Colombia but nearly twice what a
farmer can make in Putumayo. He clears that profit after paying rent for
the lab, the chemical supplies used in processing, and the barefoot
"chemists" who -- for $18 a week -- stomp, pour and sift the gooey mix into
paste.

Each harvest produces about 2.5 kilograms of paste that Ceron sells to drug
traffickers for about $780 per kilogram -- which after being further
refined will fetch about $225,000 in the United States.

"I was a coca picker here, a raspachin just like everyone else," said
Ceron, who still grows a small amount of coca but now focuses on running
his lab. "I just saw an opportunity to make some money, so I took it. I
have two children. I'd like to send them to school so they can do better
than me."

For three years, Ceron has run a "laboratory" in a wooden shack hidden by
thick foliage. It is about an hour's walk from the nearest road in this
southern Colombian state.

It's a clandestine operation, but because just about everybody in Putumayo
grows coca, it's not good business to be too hidden. Farmers need to know
where they can take their crop for sale and processing.

On a typical day, local pickers deliver the leaves to Ceron's lab in
25-pound sacks called arrobas. Ceron records each picker's arroba count in
a child's Mickey Mouse notebook and pays them at the end of the week.

While several battalions of Colombian anti-narcotics police regularly
destroy labs like Ceron's, the relatively small scale of his business may
keep him safe. Until recently, the guerrillas of the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia were linked to huge labs that were essentially
multimillion-dollar assembly lines combining harvesting, processing and
shipping to the United States and Europe.

The local powers, be they guerrillas or paramilitaries, tax the coca
trade's use of land, crops and precursor chemicals. But the tax is built
into the price for small labs like Ceron's, and he is generally left alone.

By comparison to the guerillas' labs, a full day's work in Ceron's
20-by-30-foot open-air shed may yield enough coca paste to fill a small
bowl. That mix is then taken to a "kitchen," another lab run by someone
else that refines it into the snortable, injectable mix that will be
further cut with other chemicals before it ends up in somebody's bloodstream.

The lab sits on land Ceron rents near a coca field of about 5 acres. There
are no guns within view, and the farmers and chemists frequently smile and
crack jokes. During a recent visit by two American reporters, most workers
were in their teens and early 20s, including a 12-year-old boy and a
15-year-old girl.

"Now you can say you've met some real traficantes," joked Pepe Mora, 25.
"Really, though. I've been doing this since I was a kid. I grew up with this."

To make cocaine, workers chop up the leaves with common weed whackers. They
mix the chopped leaves with kerosene, lime and uric acid in plastic-lined
pits or the wooden floors of shacks. Barefoot workers stomp the leaves in
much the same way that grapes are crushed into wine.

The stench can be nauseating.

"Right now we're fine, but tonight I'll have headaches, and probably years
from now, I'll have lung problems," said Ceron, who like many in Putumayo
immigrated here from other Colombian states in search of work raising coca.
"You do it for the money. This is the only work that we have to survive on."

Ceron squeezes the chopped, stomped leaves into 25-gallon drums filled with
more kerosene. The barrels sit for about an hour as kerosene sucks the
"essence" from the leaves. A worker then siphons the kerosene into another
container and mixes it with water. The kerosene separates, leaving the coca
extract in the water. Known as suero, or serum, the extract is mixed with
sulfuric acid and potassium permanganate.

The paste is mixed again with acetone or other solvents to further dissolve
the cocaine base, which is strained through a cloth to finally yield white
cocaine hydrochloride crystals -- called "the merchandise."

"This is very hard, dirty work," Ceron said. "It's not as easy as people
seem to think."