DRUG TRAFFICKING THRIVES WITH FOCUS ON TERRORISM

CHACAHUA, Mexico - They found the 21-foot speedboat abandoned on a remote
beach in this faraway stretch of Mexico's Pacific coast. Beneath it,
smugglers had hastily buried one ton of plastic-wrapped cocaine in the
white sand.

Nobody knows exactly why they walked away from a $20 million cache of
drugs. But authorities say its discovery offers a glimpse at how a busy
Pacific drug smuggling route has exploded into a cocaine superhighway.

The reason is that law enforcement has shifted focus since the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks. Large amounts of U.S. resources are now being devoted to
the fight against terrorism, and much less to the war on drugs, according
to experts and officials on both sides of the border.

"We have had to move our vessels back to defend the goal line," said Cmdr.
Jim McPherson, chief spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, explaining that as
much as 75 percent of the ships and other assets once dedicated to the U.S.
counter-drug effort have been moved to focus on homeland defense and
counterterrorism patrols. As a result, he said, "We are not seizing
anywhere near what we were. ... Our counter-drug intelligence support has
dropped to zero."

"Fighting narcotics is mostly about information and intelligence. We can
have all the boats in the sea and they can be in the wrong place," said
Mexican navy spokesman Salvador Gomez Meillon, noting that before Sept. 11,
the U.S. Coast Guard and Mexican navy had unprecedented levels of
cooperation and intelligence-sharing. But now, he said, "the cooperation
has decreased; there hasn't been one combined operation since Sept. 11."

As a result, Coast Guard drug seizures, which had been running at all-time
highs earlier this year, are down dramatically. From Sept. 11 to Nov. 30,
the Coast Guard seized about 10,000 pounds of cocaine, down 66 percent from
the 30,000 pounds it seized during the same period last year. Seizures of
marijuana during that period dropped far more, from 7,000 pounds during
those weeks last year to only 480 this year.

Mexican navy drug seizures also have nosedived since September.

Although tighter security on the U.S.-Mexico border immediately after Sept.
11 appeared to be squeezing the drug trade, three months later the opposite
appears to be true; drug traffickers haven't had it this easy in years.

Law enforcement officials say the Pacific waters of Mexico and Central
America are now dotted with large numbers of smugglers' speedboats, often
called "go fast," or cigarette boats.

These boats spend days on the ocean, idle under sea-blue tarps that make
them harder to spot from the air. By night, planes from Colombia swoop in
low and drop a ton or two of plastic-encased cocaine into the sea. The
speedboat crews, usually two or three men in wet suits who can earn as much
as $250,000 for a successful voyage, fish the drugs out of the water and
rush them to shore in the darkness.