Word: colombia
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...Antidrug Chief General Barry McCaffery jetted into a Colombian military base last week, he saw the makings of a nightmare outside his window. "It was astonishing," the former Army general told TIME. "In some southern districts of Colombia, about a third of the land is under coca cultivation." From the air, it seemed that every jungle clearing was inlaid with coca bushes. The view impressed upon McCaffery that despite the loss of five U.S. servicemen--whose reconnaissance aircraft slammed into a jungle mountain hidden by clouds days before his visit--the Clinton Administration's war against Colombian drug cartels...
...Colombian police commandos in antidrug warfare--combat skills that the Colombians use to battle the rebels across the board. Under U.S. law the advisers are forbidden to join the Colombian police on raids, but already their presence has rattled the leftist rebels known as the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). If the U.S. "intervenes further in Colombia," FARC leaders said last week, "its troops will go home dead or wounded...
Already the U.S. is passing intelligence about FARC activities to Colombia's top military officers. And U.S. planes, based in Florida, Colombia, Ecuador and Honduras, have flown more than 2,000 counter-drug missions. Many of those were reconnaissance flights similar to the one that crashed southeast of Bogota on July 21, killing its American crew and two Colombian officers. The efforts are backed by a $289 million annual aid package. (Colombia is the third largest recipient of U.S. largesse, behind Israel and Egypt...
...maddeningly for U.S. officials, Colombia's traffickers seem to be winning. According to McCaffery, 80% of the cocaine that reaches the U.S. and an increasing amount of heroin are produced in Colombia. Partly that is because of the success of U.S. aerial spraying in Bolivia and Peru. The Colombian traffickers, instead of shutting down their operations, began paying off farmers in the southeastern part of the country to begin wide-scale planting of coca and heroin. Data from U.S. satellites indicate "an explosion" of drug growth inside Colombia over the next couple of years, McCaffery says, and that means more...
...case highlights the sophisticated methods adopted by narco-traffickers to bring their wares to market despite the war on drugs. Colombia and Mexico have long complained that while they?re routinely pilloried as the source of the problem, the massive demand for drugs in the U.S. creates an incentive for traffickers to develop sophisticated paramilitary structures that infiltrate law enforcement and other state bodies in order to beat drug-interdiction efforts. Smuggling cocaine off a U.S. military base dedicated precisely to stopping its flow may mark a new level of boldness. But as long as there are fortunes...