TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022089/02208900.037

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 5.6 KB | 105 lines

                ß                                                              WORLD, Page 44

DRUGS

The Chemical Connection


    Shortly after dawn, five helicopter gunships took off from
the Palanquero military air base southeast of Medellin. Thirty
minutes later, skimming over the treetops of the Colombian
jungle, the clattering swarm descended on a ranch outside the
Magdalena River town of Puerto Triunfo. Thirty members of
Colombia's elite National Police antinarcotics unit jumped from
the copters and began searching the grounds. Their eventual
payoff: discovery of three complexes containing eight cocaine
laboratories. After the raiders methodically burned chemical
dumps and bunkhouses, a five-man explosives team blew up brick
buildings, generators and 15,000-gal. chemical holding tanks.

    So began Operation Primavera, the latest effort by Colombian
authorities to destroy the massive cocaine-processing industry
that thrives under the green canopy of the country's jungles.
By the time the ten-day campaign ended last week, Operation
Primavera had become the most successful bust of coke labs in
Colombian history, netting a total of 26 plants capable of
producing 6.6 tons of the addictive white powder a week. Though
the plants never achieved that level of production, the
potential output is about three times the demand of the U.S.
market. Boasted a senior police official: "This is a bullet to
the heart of the cocaine mafia."

    Police confiscated about 1.3 tons of cocaine in base and
finished form. But what left law-enforcement officials gloating
was the seizure of unprecedented quantities of chemicals used in
the manufacture of cocaine. The cache included 417,095 gal. of
ether acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and 95 tons of potassium
permanganate -- enough chemicals to make 104 tons of cocaine,
a third of the estimated annual cocaine output of Colombia,
Bolivia and Peru combined.

    Those seizures underscore a little noted but crucial fact of
life in the $130 billion cocaine business: the drug trade is a
two-way street. The cocaine flows from mostly Third World
producers to the U.S. and other industrialized nations, but the
chemicals and other materials needed to turn coca leaves into
cocaine flow from the industrialized nations to the Third
World. By participating in this Faustian technology transfer,
the drug-consumer nations are, in effect, providing vital raw
ingredients for the scourge that bedevils them and that they
often blame exclusively on coke-producing countries. "Look at
all this equipment," said a Colombian police commander last
week, surveying the ruins of a coke lab. "It's almost all from
the U.S. And these chemicals come from all over the world. All
Latin America supplies are the coca leaves and the labor."

    The site of Operation Primavera's first strike was Finca la
Brasilia (Brazil Ranch), reportedly owned by Alberto Toro,
brother-in-law of the notorious coke lord Pablo Escobar Gaviria.
Early last week the raiders descended on Hacienda Napoles, the
grandest -- and gaudiest -- of Escobar's several country
estates. The helicopters landed to the trumpeting of three caged
elephants, part of a private zoo maintained by the drug kingpin.
Not found was Escobar, one of the world's most wanted criminals,
who has eluded Colombian authorities dozens of times.

    The chemicals seized during Operation Primavera were stored
in standing tanks or 55-gal. drums. In some cases the drums were
stacked 15 ft. high, creating Andean peaks of testimony to the
proportions of the smuggling operation. Ethyl ether, for
example, is essential to the final processing of cocaine base
into a white hydrochloride powder. The manufacture of ethyl
ether has been outlawed in Colombia, and importation is closely
regulated. A 55-gal. drum of ethyl ether that sells for $500 in
the U.S. fetches more than $12,000 in Colombia. Says Alfonso
Barragan, president of the Colombian Society of Chemical
Engineers: "The Colombian black market in chemicals probably
has a higher profit margin than that of cocaine itself."

    The contraband chemicals are not all from the U.S., or even
from other industrialized nations. Much of the ethyl ether was
manufactured in Brazil. The potassium permanganate, normally
used as a water purifier, came from China, which is the world's
leading producer.

    Since Brazil and China are among the majority of countries
that have few regulations governing the foreign sales of
chemicals, tracing the path of the seized materials will not be
easy. But chemicals manufactured in the U.S. may be another
matter, at least in the future. Last year the U.S. passed a new
law, which will take effect in the next few months, requiring
closer supervision of the overseas sales of chemicals used in
the production of cocaine, including ethyl ether and acetone.

    Authorities may be able to trace at least some of the
U.S.-produced chemicals seized in Colombia over the past two
weeks. The contraband included containers marked with the logos
of Dow Chemical Co. and Union Chemical Corp. Both companies are
among major U.S. chemical producers who have agreed to
cooperate with the DEA in seeking to ascertain the final
destination of the chemicals before allowing them to leave the
country. In the case of the chemicals seized in Colombia,
however, most of the batch numbers on labels had been scratched
off by knife blades. Given how successful drug lords have been
in using a dizzying tangle of middlemen and front companies to
hide their activities, law enforcement officials may never be
able to halt fully the chemical side of the drug trade.