Word: cocas
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...Costa Rica and the Bahamas look the other way as some of the hemisphere's most wanted men have walked from their private planes to waiting limousines. Police and military officials in Honduras and Panama have tipped off traffickers to impending raids. Efforts to slow the trade, from destroying coca crops to extraditing traffickers, are bumping against the drug barons' bloody blueprint for expansion...
...cartel, operating through a wide network of associates, controls a tightly organized enterprise. Coca leaves are grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, where they are turned into a thick paste. The paste is shipped to processing laboratories, most of them in Colombia, where it is converted into the powder that drug users, especially in the U.S., consume. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and the Bahamas are among the favored transshipment points. Profits are usually laundered in Panama and invested...
...Bolivia and Peru, where the cocaine trail begins, governments have made considerable progress toward cleansing themselves of corruption. While some high-level bribery persists, both governments must convince poor farmers that they should get out of the coca business and give up the $1,000 the cartel pays for each 2.5 acres planted in the leaf. The local poseros, or processors, who grind the leaves into paste, are paid even better, which enables them to . acquire four-wheel-drive vehicles and color television sets. "It is an unbalanced and unfair fight," says Juan Carlos Duran, Bolivia's Interior and Justice...
...such finger pointing, satisfying as it might be, is increasingly hollow. While the U.S. is without question the world's biggest market for narcotics, some of the drug-exporting countries are developing a taste for the goods. In Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, consumption of basuco, a low-quality coca derivative, has reached levels that frighten health experts...
...measure that offers slightly more promise is eradication. In Bolivia, a U.S.-sponsored program has resulted in the destruction of some 3,000 of 88,000 acres of coca plants. A Peruvian police raid last November took 57,200 lbs. of coca paste and 880,000 lbs. of coca leaves out of circulation. But while it makes sense to tackle the drug problem at its source, the narcotics trade is proving to be hydra-headed: as soon as one area is cleared, another opens up. "Eradicating crops has the same effect as an atomic bomb," says a Mexican official...