Binky
05-16-2005, 09:02 PM
Series: Part 1 Of 3
U.S. TAKES TO HIGH SEAS TO BATTLE COCAINE KINGS
Pins Hopes On New Lightning-Fast Vessel
Midnight Express Chase Boat Of Choice
PLAYA SIETE OLAS, Colombia - The beach known as Siete Olas, or Seven Waves, arches away to the west -- a long and deserted belly of off-white sand girdled by lacy pleats of Caribbean surf and an aquamarine sea.
A broad, green promontory shelters the bay, and the late-morning sun beats down from a powder-blue sky.
This ought to be paradise, and in some ways it is, but it is also Colombia - -- and that means drugs.
It also means war.
"We're about two minutes out from destiny," declares a U.S. soldier, speaking with a nasal southern twang.
Protected by a nine-member guard of Colombian National Police in battle dress, the American and about 20 others -- some military, some civilian -- are huddled amid scrub growth and cacti, high on a ridge overlooking Seven Waves Beach.
Everyone's eyes are fixed on the scene below, where two men aboard a Zodiac inflatable dinghy are plowing through the breaking waves, intent on making rendezvous with a pair of high-powered, glass-fibre speedboats that are planing into sight across open waters, racing into this splendid and isolated bay on the north coast of South America's most benighted land.
You don't need to be a genius, much less a narcotics agent, to figure out what is about to go down on these sun-glazed waters off Seven Waves Beach.
Despite Washington's best efforts, Colombia remains today what it has been for decades -- the drug-producing capital of the western world -- and right now the men in the Zodiac dinghy intend to do what Colombian drug smugglers seem capable of doing almost at will.
They intend to transfer their cargo -- you could call it cocaine -- on to those two fast-approaching speedboats, a pair of Colombian-built Eduardonos.
The Eduardonos will then race out to sea on a circuitous northbound course, a course that typically leads to the United States of America.
On most occasions, the cocaine gets there, too -- high, dry and worth a fortune.
Today, however, there's a difference.
Today, the fix is in.
"I think we're doing the Lord's work," says Capt. Peter Husta, the top U.S. Navy officer in Colombia, as he watches the drama unfolding off Seven Waves Beach. "And the Colombians are, too. They want the drug business to be gone."
Unfortunately, the drug business does not seem to be co-operating.
This is the final year of Plan Colombia -- an ambitious, five-year, Washington-led assault on Colombia's booming narcotics trade -- but the United States is still a long distance from achieving its goal of putting the drug barons out of business.
Nevertheless, American authorities here insist they are making real progress in their war on drug production and trafficking in South America. They concede, however, that it's difficult to quantify that progress or even to prove its existence.
"We are winning," insists a top anti-narcotics official at the sprawling, fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Bogota, the Colombian capital. She pauses. "But we cannot see the goalposts yet."
Besides, the South American drug industry has suffered setbacks before, only to emerge stronger than ever.
More than a decade ago, U.S. and Colombian authorities thought they had knocked the narco-traffickers down for the count when they broke up the so-called Medellin cartel that once ruled the business.
The Colombian Army even succeeded in killing the infamous Pablo Escobar, once the high-rolling emperor of this country's drug lords.
That was in 1993.
But the ashes of the Medellin cartel had not yet grown cold before five drug rings known collectively as the Cali cartel were rising in southern Colombia, quickly filling the vacuum left by Escobar and his ilk.
The Cali drug barons were bested in turn -- and yet the Colombian narcotics industry has not only survived these reversals. It has adapted, and it has flourished.
Today, the business is bigger than it was a decade ago, and the new kingpins of Colombian cocaine are savvier, more secretive and no less ruthless than their predecessors.
Currently, this beautiful but stricken land of 44 million people produces three-quarters of the world's cocaine, supplying fully 90 per cent of the U.S. market. Nor is that all. Nowadays, Colombia is also the source for about half of the heroin consumed each year in the United States, as well as substantial quantities of marijuana and synthetic drugs.
With this kind of market penetration -- and the massive profits it generates -- the drug lords seem to possess both the resources and the ingenuity to match their opponents in Washington and in Bogota, gun for gun, dollar for dollar and corpse for corpse.
But maybe not boat for boat.
That's what the Americans are counting on anyway, and they are hitching their hopes to a muscular wedge of water-borne lightning called Midnight Express.
Just a few short years ago, most of Colombia's drug exports departed the country by air, but many of those routes have been blocked by increased police surveillance and enforcement.
Result: The drug smugglers have adapted, because that is what they do.
"Demand is not going away," says a long-time foreign resident of Colombia who watches the narcotics trade closely. "So whenever you put up an obstacle, other channels are opened."
Now, roughly 70 per cent of the cocaine and heroin that travel from Colombia to the United States begin their clandestine journey to market by sea, in a way that closely resembles the scene now unfolding off Seven Waves Beach, except for three important differences.
First, cocaine normally departs these shores by night, not by day.
Second, the Colombian Coast Guard has a new and not-so-secret weapon in the naval campaign against drug smugglers, a fast boat purchased off the shelf from its manufacturer in Pompano Beach, Fla. It will be pressed into service today.
Finally, this particular cargo of cocaine is fake.
In fact, the entire drama now unfolding in this lovely Caribbean bay is certifiably phoney, a staged exercise in a real and deadly war.
The men aboard the Zodiac -- like their counterparts operating the two drug-running speed boats -- are not smugglers at all but U.S. Special Forces officers, who are testing Colombia's ability to police its long and rugged seashore against drug traffickers.
It's a battle that Colombian authorities have been losing badly -- at least until now.
Put simply, the bad guys -- or los chicos malos, as they are referred to here -- have possessed the speedier boats.
The craft currently favoured by this country's drug smugglers is the Eduardono, a sleek, glass-fibre "go-fast" boat, built in Colombia and worth about $50,000.
In its drug-bearing configuration, an Eduardono typically carries two or as many as four stainless-steel Yamaha salt-water outboard motors -- or up to $75,000 worth of propulsion.
Loaded with hundreds of gallons of spare fuel in 200-litre drums, and laden with up to 2.5 tonnes of uncut cocaine in burlap sacks, these fleet little craft can travel full-out on open seas for 14 hours without a pit stop.
They regularly peel away from these shores at speeds of up to 65 km/h, on northward journeys to Central America or to any of several different Caribbean territories, including San Andres, Haiti, the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico.
Once they hit land, the smugglers simply abandon their boats, along with the motors, the excess fuel, cellphones, and everything else they've been carrying -- everything, that is, except for their precious store of powdered cocaine.
"It's all just chump change in comparison to the end value of the cocaine," says Husta.
The drugs continue their journey to market, either secreted in containers aboard merchant vessels or via an overland route that takes them through Central America and Mexico to their final destination in the United States of America.
There, the profits are stupendous.
Year in, year out, the drug users of Miami, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, and countless other American towns spoon over roughly $65 billion in exchange for illegal intoxicants.
That's right -- $65 billion.
Much, and perhaps most, of that money ends up in the hands of Colombia's drug mafia or its sundry partner agencies -- two left-wing guerrilla armies, for example, not to mention an evil cabal of right-wing paramilitary death squads -- almost all of which carry firearms, don't mind using them and have made life a daily hell for many ordinary Colombians.
At least until recently, the Colombian Coast Guard has had little hope of catching the sea-borne smugglers, not with the kind of speed boats they have been burdened with, a Colombian craft called the Delfin.
"The Delfines were doing tail chases in heavy seas," says Husta.
Enter the Midnight Express.
Built in Florida, the Midnight Express is actually a tournament fishing boat -- a 39-foot bullet with a super-clean hull, typically powered by four 250-horsepower, fuel-injected engines. It was designed by a Floridian named Tom Mason, based on the specifications of a speedy, 36-foot cigarette boat.
For some time, the Midnight Express has been the U.S. customs department's chase boat of choice.
This past December, the Colombian Coast Guard took delivery of four of these sleek, U.S. speed launches, with four more now on order.
It can outrun anything the drug smugglers can currently put in the water, capable of speeds close to 95 km/h-- or more.
"In optimum conditions, they'll go even faster," boasts Husta, "but we don't want to tell the bad guys how fast."
Just now, he doesn't need to.
Suddenly, four Bell-212 helicopters, with side-mounted M-60 machine guns, swarm over the promontory from the west and churn out across the bay.
Realizing they've been discovered, the men aboard the two Eduardonos gun their engines and make a run for it.
A pair of these vaunted Midnight Express speedboats has been lurking just out of sight, in anticipation of this very moment.
Off they go, in hot pursuit of the fleeing Eduardonos.
Meanwhile, a Casa-235 surveillance aircraft drones overhead. Before long, a Colombian Coast Guard frigate -- the Antioquia -- heaves into view offshore.
Within minutes, the exercise is over, and it ends with the successful capture of the ersatz drug traffickers, thanks mainly to the superior speed of the Midnight Express boats.
"Eduardonos do not outrun Midnight Expresses -- ever," says Husta. "Period."
No doubt he is right.
Unfortunately, in the real world, the race between an Eduardono and a Midnight Express would take place in darkness, not in broad daylight, and the Colombian Coast Guard would not have been given advance warning about when or where the drugs were going to be loaded prior to heading offshore.
The truth is that very few of the contests in the campaign against illegal drugs in South America are quite as successful as this controlled daytime exercise off Seven Waves Beach.
If they were, Colombia could get back to the business of being a respectable emerging democracy at the crest of South America, famous for its emeralds and its coffee.
Instead, this is a complicated, ambiguous, frustrating war, and Colombia -- the fourth largest and second most populous country in South America -- remains best known as the world's principal supplier of cocaine, just as it has been since the 1980s.
"The historical record makes one very cautious about predicting success ( against the drug lords )," says Albert Berry, an economist at the University of Toronto and an expert on Colombia. "The Americans now on the scene probably don't have much feel for the historical record, which is one of defeat."
Besides, it is probably not beyond the means of the bad guys to disguise their identities and get their hands on a few Midnight Express boats of their own. They can probably afford it.
TOMORROW: Once it was emeralds. Now it's cocaine. Why Colombia became the epicentre of the narcotics trade in the Americas -- and how it stays that way.
Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact: lettertoed@thestar.com
Website: http://www.thestar.com/
U.S. TAKES TO HIGH SEAS TO BATTLE COCAINE KINGS
Pins Hopes On New Lightning-Fast Vessel
Midnight Express Chase Boat Of Choice
PLAYA SIETE OLAS, Colombia - The beach known as Siete Olas, or Seven Waves, arches away to the west -- a long and deserted belly of off-white sand girdled by lacy pleats of Caribbean surf and an aquamarine sea.
A broad, green promontory shelters the bay, and the late-morning sun beats down from a powder-blue sky.
This ought to be paradise, and in some ways it is, but it is also Colombia - -- and that means drugs.
It also means war.
"We're about two minutes out from destiny," declares a U.S. soldier, speaking with a nasal southern twang.
Protected by a nine-member guard of Colombian National Police in battle dress, the American and about 20 others -- some military, some civilian -- are huddled amid scrub growth and cacti, high on a ridge overlooking Seven Waves Beach.
Everyone's eyes are fixed on the scene below, where two men aboard a Zodiac inflatable dinghy are plowing through the breaking waves, intent on making rendezvous with a pair of high-powered, glass-fibre speedboats that are planing into sight across open waters, racing into this splendid and isolated bay on the north coast of South America's most benighted land.
You don't need to be a genius, much less a narcotics agent, to figure out what is about to go down on these sun-glazed waters off Seven Waves Beach.
Despite Washington's best efforts, Colombia remains today what it has been for decades -- the drug-producing capital of the western world -- and right now the men in the Zodiac dinghy intend to do what Colombian drug smugglers seem capable of doing almost at will.
They intend to transfer their cargo -- you could call it cocaine -- on to those two fast-approaching speedboats, a pair of Colombian-built Eduardonos.
The Eduardonos will then race out to sea on a circuitous northbound course, a course that typically leads to the United States of America.
On most occasions, the cocaine gets there, too -- high, dry and worth a fortune.
Today, however, there's a difference.
Today, the fix is in.
"I think we're doing the Lord's work," says Capt. Peter Husta, the top U.S. Navy officer in Colombia, as he watches the drama unfolding off Seven Waves Beach. "And the Colombians are, too. They want the drug business to be gone."
Unfortunately, the drug business does not seem to be co-operating.
This is the final year of Plan Colombia -- an ambitious, five-year, Washington-led assault on Colombia's booming narcotics trade -- but the United States is still a long distance from achieving its goal of putting the drug barons out of business.
Nevertheless, American authorities here insist they are making real progress in their war on drug production and trafficking in South America. They concede, however, that it's difficult to quantify that progress or even to prove its existence.
"We are winning," insists a top anti-narcotics official at the sprawling, fortress-like U.S. Embassy in Bogota, the Colombian capital. She pauses. "But we cannot see the goalposts yet."
Besides, the South American drug industry has suffered setbacks before, only to emerge stronger than ever.
More than a decade ago, U.S. and Colombian authorities thought they had knocked the narco-traffickers down for the count when they broke up the so-called Medellin cartel that once ruled the business.
The Colombian Army even succeeded in killing the infamous Pablo Escobar, once the high-rolling emperor of this country's drug lords.
That was in 1993.
But the ashes of the Medellin cartel had not yet grown cold before five drug rings known collectively as the Cali cartel were rising in southern Colombia, quickly filling the vacuum left by Escobar and his ilk.
The Cali drug barons were bested in turn -- and yet the Colombian narcotics industry has not only survived these reversals. It has adapted, and it has flourished.
Today, the business is bigger than it was a decade ago, and the new kingpins of Colombian cocaine are savvier, more secretive and no less ruthless than their predecessors.
Currently, this beautiful but stricken land of 44 million people produces three-quarters of the world's cocaine, supplying fully 90 per cent of the U.S. market. Nor is that all. Nowadays, Colombia is also the source for about half of the heroin consumed each year in the United States, as well as substantial quantities of marijuana and synthetic drugs.
With this kind of market penetration -- and the massive profits it generates -- the drug lords seem to possess both the resources and the ingenuity to match their opponents in Washington and in Bogota, gun for gun, dollar for dollar and corpse for corpse.
But maybe not boat for boat.
That's what the Americans are counting on anyway, and they are hitching their hopes to a muscular wedge of water-borne lightning called Midnight Express.
Just a few short years ago, most of Colombia's drug exports departed the country by air, but many of those routes have been blocked by increased police surveillance and enforcement.
Result: The drug smugglers have adapted, because that is what they do.
"Demand is not going away," says a long-time foreign resident of Colombia who watches the narcotics trade closely. "So whenever you put up an obstacle, other channels are opened."
Now, roughly 70 per cent of the cocaine and heroin that travel from Colombia to the United States begin their clandestine journey to market by sea, in a way that closely resembles the scene now unfolding off Seven Waves Beach, except for three important differences.
First, cocaine normally departs these shores by night, not by day.
Second, the Colombian Coast Guard has a new and not-so-secret weapon in the naval campaign against drug smugglers, a fast boat purchased off the shelf from its manufacturer in Pompano Beach, Fla. It will be pressed into service today.
Finally, this particular cargo of cocaine is fake.
In fact, the entire drama now unfolding in this lovely Caribbean bay is certifiably phoney, a staged exercise in a real and deadly war.
The men aboard the Zodiac -- like their counterparts operating the two drug-running speed boats -- are not smugglers at all but U.S. Special Forces officers, who are testing Colombia's ability to police its long and rugged seashore against drug traffickers.
It's a battle that Colombian authorities have been losing badly -- at least until now.
Put simply, the bad guys -- or los chicos malos, as they are referred to here -- have possessed the speedier boats.
The craft currently favoured by this country's drug smugglers is the Eduardono, a sleek, glass-fibre "go-fast" boat, built in Colombia and worth about $50,000.
In its drug-bearing configuration, an Eduardono typically carries two or as many as four stainless-steel Yamaha salt-water outboard motors -- or up to $75,000 worth of propulsion.
Loaded with hundreds of gallons of spare fuel in 200-litre drums, and laden with up to 2.5 tonnes of uncut cocaine in burlap sacks, these fleet little craft can travel full-out on open seas for 14 hours without a pit stop.
They regularly peel away from these shores at speeds of up to 65 km/h, on northward journeys to Central America or to any of several different Caribbean territories, including San Andres, Haiti, the Dominican Republic or Puerto Rico.
Once they hit land, the smugglers simply abandon their boats, along with the motors, the excess fuel, cellphones, and everything else they've been carrying -- everything, that is, except for their precious store of powdered cocaine.
"It's all just chump change in comparison to the end value of the cocaine," says Husta.
The drugs continue their journey to market, either secreted in containers aboard merchant vessels or via an overland route that takes them through Central America and Mexico to their final destination in the United States of America.
There, the profits are stupendous.
Year in, year out, the drug users of Miami, New York, Chicago, Detroit, Dallas, and countless other American towns spoon over roughly $65 billion in exchange for illegal intoxicants.
That's right -- $65 billion.
Much, and perhaps most, of that money ends up in the hands of Colombia's drug mafia or its sundry partner agencies -- two left-wing guerrilla armies, for example, not to mention an evil cabal of right-wing paramilitary death squads -- almost all of which carry firearms, don't mind using them and have made life a daily hell for many ordinary Colombians.
At least until recently, the Colombian Coast Guard has had little hope of catching the sea-borne smugglers, not with the kind of speed boats they have been burdened with, a Colombian craft called the Delfin.
"The Delfines were doing tail chases in heavy seas," says Husta.
Enter the Midnight Express.
Built in Florida, the Midnight Express is actually a tournament fishing boat -- a 39-foot bullet with a super-clean hull, typically powered by four 250-horsepower, fuel-injected engines. It was designed by a Floridian named Tom Mason, based on the specifications of a speedy, 36-foot cigarette boat.
For some time, the Midnight Express has been the U.S. customs department's chase boat of choice.
This past December, the Colombian Coast Guard took delivery of four of these sleek, U.S. speed launches, with four more now on order.
It can outrun anything the drug smugglers can currently put in the water, capable of speeds close to 95 km/h-- or more.
"In optimum conditions, they'll go even faster," boasts Husta, "but we don't want to tell the bad guys how fast."
Just now, he doesn't need to.
Suddenly, four Bell-212 helicopters, with side-mounted M-60 machine guns, swarm over the promontory from the west and churn out across the bay.
Realizing they've been discovered, the men aboard the two Eduardonos gun their engines and make a run for it.
A pair of these vaunted Midnight Express speedboats has been lurking just out of sight, in anticipation of this very moment.
Off they go, in hot pursuit of the fleeing Eduardonos.
Meanwhile, a Casa-235 surveillance aircraft drones overhead. Before long, a Colombian Coast Guard frigate -- the Antioquia -- heaves into view offshore.
Within minutes, the exercise is over, and it ends with the successful capture of the ersatz drug traffickers, thanks mainly to the superior speed of the Midnight Express boats.
"Eduardonos do not outrun Midnight Expresses -- ever," says Husta. "Period."
No doubt he is right.
Unfortunately, in the real world, the race between an Eduardono and a Midnight Express would take place in darkness, not in broad daylight, and the Colombian Coast Guard would not have been given advance warning about when or where the drugs were going to be loaded prior to heading offshore.
The truth is that very few of the contests in the campaign against illegal drugs in South America are quite as successful as this controlled daytime exercise off Seven Waves Beach.
If they were, Colombia could get back to the business of being a respectable emerging democracy at the crest of South America, famous for its emeralds and its coffee.
Instead, this is a complicated, ambiguous, frustrating war, and Colombia -- the fourth largest and second most populous country in South America -- remains best known as the world's principal supplier of cocaine, just as it has been since the 1980s.
"The historical record makes one very cautious about predicting success ( against the drug lords )," says Albert Berry, an economist at the University of Toronto and an expert on Colombia. "The Americans now on the scene probably don't have much feel for the historical record, which is one of defeat."
Besides, it is probably not beyond the means of the bad guys to disguise their identities and get their hands on a few Midnight Express boats of their own. They can probably afford it.
TOMORROW: Once it was emeralds. Now it's cocaine. Why Colombia became the epicentre of the narcotics trade in the Americas -- and how it stays that way.
Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact: lettertoed@thestar.com
Website: http://www.thestar.com/