Word: beni
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...Trinidad Mayor Pedro Alvarez was summoned to the local Bolivian air force base for some unsettling news. The gringos are coming, he was informed; the base would need another well. Since that day, the tranquil cattle-farming community of Trinidad (pop. 40,000), capital of Bolivia's northeastern Beni region, has not been the same. "Our humble town," complains Alvarez, "is becoming internationally known as a cocaine center." Trinidad has, willy- nilly, become home to the U.S. 193rd Infantry Brigade. Transported from Panama two weeks ago, the G.I.s are embarked on an earnest mission: to help the Bolivian drug-enforcement...
...wildcat gasoline strike prevented refueling at Santa Cruz airport. While the huge C-5A sat at the airport in full view of TV cameras, reporters and, presumably, drug merchants, U.S. troops needed four days to transport supplies to a base camp north of Trinidad, in Bolivia's lush northeastern Beni region, where most of the coca leaves are processed. "This thing has turned into a bad dream," confessed one Pentagon official...
Indeed, Suarez is said to be a great benefactor. A wealthy cattleman with vast lands in Bolivia's Beni region, he reportedly has underwritten most of the education costs for an entire district and regularly provides technical or college education abroad for young people in the area. Little wonder, then, that when Suarez had appendicitis two years ago, he was able to slip into the hospital in Santa Cruz (pop. 376,000), his hometown in Bolivia's Oriente region, for treatment. "The authorities were searching for him," explains one of Suarez's friends, "but the whole town conspired to protect...
...continues to grow in Bolivia, even if many of the stories told about him are probably wildly exaggerated. He has been seen carrying a gold-plated handgun and keeps a pet leopard, said to wear a gold collar studded with diamonds, near his side at his ranch in the Beni. In interviews with journalists, Suarez has boasted that he has hired Libyan "experts" to train his security force and that his ranchland retreats are defended by missile-carrying aircraft. He also likes to buy newspaper space to lecture his countrymen on the corruption in their government...
...After two months of special training, complained one U.S. official, "they spent months and months doing nothing. The government's choice was to avoid confrontation, so they stayed in their barracks." Finally, last October, 93 members of the heavily armed paramilitary unit were sent on a sweep of the Beni, a roadless wilderness east of the Andes in which some 200 cocaine barons process and ship coca out of huge estates, some as large as 100,000 acres and many equipped with processing plants and airstrips. The biggest target of all was Suarez, who maintains a feudal rule over...