EXPERTS FEAR MORE DRUGS FROM LATIN AMERICA

The Sept. 11 terrorist strikes against the United States may have claimed
an unexpected victim: the war on drugs. Officials and experts fear
narcotics are pouring through holes in U.S. security created when
surveillance planes and drug agents were diverted to the war on terrorism.

Although Bush administration officials say they will not have hard numbers
until January, they say the early signs of trouble already exist.

"We are going to see an avalanche of drugs in 2002," says Bruce Bagley, a
drug trafficking expert with the University of Miami. "There will be less
U.S. attention paid to drug trafficking, and at the same time Latin
American economies will be moving into deeper recession."

He and others point to a number of worrisome trends:

Illegal drug smuggling to Florida through Caribbean routes rose by 25
percent in the month that followed the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, largely
because Drug Enforcement Administration agents and intelligence analysts
were diverted to homeland defense activities, the DEA says.

While increased security at U.S. airports is making it harder to smuggle
drugs via commercial planes, U.S. anti-drug agencies have reduced drug
interdiction activities in Caribbean transit routes. This is allowing drug
smugglers to drop their cargoes at sea and pick them up with speed boats.

Peasants in Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, hurt by a collapse of world coffee
prices, are stepping up coca and opium poppy cultivation.

Region's Role

Much of the likely rise in drug shipments will take place through South
Florida, because of heightened security along the U.S.-Mexican border and a
new shift of Colombian drug smugglers toward Caribbean routes, Bagley said.

"South Florida will be back in a big way as a transit point," he predicted.

U.S. officials are reluctant to make projections about a potential rise in
the drug trade, in part because they don't want to encourage more drug
smuggling by suggesting that U.S. defenses are weak, and because they don't
want to undermine President Bush's war on terrorism. But few dispute that
they have reasons to be worried.

"Of course I'm concerned," said Rand Beers, assistant secretary of state
for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. "I'm particularly
concerned because of a noted decrease in the availability of interdiction
and monitoring assets in the [Caribbean] transit zone."

Since Bush launched the U.S. war on terrorism, more than 100 DEA and 1,000
Customs agents have been diverted from anti-drug to anti- terrorism duties,
U.S. officials say. Many of them have been redeployed as air marshals on
U.S. domestic flights, or diverted to airport or seaport security tasks.

Coast Guard

The U.S. Coast Guard, which until recently devoted 18 percent of its
activities to counterdrug missions, has had to reduce these operations to 7
percent, officials say. Much of the service is now geared to port security
operations.

In addition, several U.S. Customs P-3 surveillance planes, which were used
to monitor Caribbean and Mexican border drug transit routes, are now
devoted full time to counter-terrorism surveillance activities within U.S.
territory.

As a result of this redeployment of resources, "the traffickers see a
window of opportunity in the Caribbean," DEA administrator Asa Hutchinson
said in a recent House of Representatives hearing.

Meantime, in South America, U.S. efforts to curtail drug production are
suffering serious setbacks.

In Bolivia, the government announced Nov. 11 "a pause" in its highly
successful coca eradication program after violent protests by coca growers
left five peasants dead over the past three weeks.

Bolivia was about to become the first success story in the U.S. war on
drugs: It has slashed illegal coca production by 95 percent over the past
four years, and was about to destroy the last 4,500 acres of coca crops
before the growers' protests forced the government to halt the
U.S.-financed coca eradication program.

In neighboring Peru, the drop in coffee prices has driven thousands of
farmers in the valleys of the Ene, Apurimac and Huallaga rivers to return
to coca growing this year, U.S. and Peruvian officials say.

To make things worse, smugglers have benefited from the suspension of U.S.
anti-drug surveillance flights over Peru since an April 20 incident in
which a Peruvian jet fighter, supported by a CIA radar aircraft, mistakenly
downed a small U.S. plane carrying an American missionary and her
7-month-old daughter.

Coca Upsurge

Colombia, the world's biggest coca producer, is seeing a major upsurge in
coca and opium poppy cultivation because of the collapse in world prices
for coffee, oil and coal, some of the country's biggest exports. Thousands
of farmers are going back to growing coca.

Colombia's drug production and smuggling are also going up because the
central government doesn't control much of the country's territory. By some
U.S. law enforcement estimates, there are now 163,000 acres of coca
cultivation, up by 50 percent from a year ago.

Proposals in Congress could inadvertently complicate the problem.

One initiative under consideration would reduce the Andean Regional
Initiative funds to help Colombia and four other drug-producing nations in
the region fight drug production and rebuild their economies. Congress is
considering a $564 million package for the program, down from the $832
million requested by the Bush administration.

"That program needs to be funded as close as possible to the
administration's request," said Beers, the U.S. State Department's top
anti-drug official.

Efforts to reduce production in source countries "need to be shored up if
we are going to withdraw detection and monitoring assets in the transit zone."

Avalanche

Some U.S. officials believe it is not too late to stop the avalanche of
drugs into U.S. territory that others foresee.

First, they say, many of the reassigned anti-drug agents are returning to
their normal duties.

In some agencies, nearly half of the anti-drug agents who were reassigned
after Sept. 11 have returned to their old jobs.

Second, while there are less U.S. surveillance and interdiction activities
in drug transit zones, there is much more scrutiny at U.S. border
crossings, airports and seaports.

"We have put up a net," said Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the U.S. Customs
Service. "We are looking for both terrorists and drug traffickers. We are
not looking for one at the exclusion of the other."

Third, the U.S. recession is having an impact on drug consumption.

U.S. officials say that, much like with any other product, drug use goes
down when people have less money.