With U.S. Resources Elsewhere, Mexican Cartels Step Up Cocaine Shipments

By Mary Jordan
Washington Post Foreign Service

CHACAHUA, Mexico -- They found the 21-foot speedboat abandoned on a remote beach in this faraway stretch of Mexico's Pacific coast. Beneath it, smugglers
had hastily buried one ton of plastic-wrapped cocaine in the white sand.

Nobody knows exactly why they walked away from a $20 million cache of drugs. But authorities say its discovery offers a small glimpse at how a busy Pacific drug
smuggling route has exploded into a cocaine superhighway.

The reason is that law enforcement has shifted focus since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Large amounts of U.S. resources are now being devoted to the fight against
terrorism, and much less to the war on drugs, according to experts and officials on both sides of the border.

"We have had to move our vessels back to defend the goal line," said Cmdr. Jim McPherson, chief spokesman for the U.S. Coast Guard, explaining that as much as
75 percent of the ships and other assets once dedicated to the U.S. counter-drug effort have been moved to focus on homeland defense and counterterrorism
patrols. As a result, he said, "We are not seizing anywhere near what we were. . . . Our counter-drug intelligence support has dropped to zero."

"Fighting narcotics is mostly about information and intelligence. We can have all the boats in the sea and they can be in the wrong place," said Mexican navy
spokesman Salvador Gomez Meillon, noting that before Sept. 11, the U.S. Coast Guard and Mexican navy had unprecedented levels of cooperation and
intelligence-sharing. But now, he said, "the cooperation has decreased; there hasn't been one combined operation since September 11."

With the FBI and other agencies focusing almost singularly on guarding against terrorism, some drug trafficking experts estimate that as little as 10 percent of the
manpower once devoted to interdicting drugs remains in place. Special agents formerly working on the drug war are now serving as sky marshals aboard domestic
U.S. flights. And many money-laundering investigators formerly tracking billion-dollar drug trafficking enterprises are now on the money trail of Osama bin Laden.

As a result, Coast Guard drug seizures, which had been running at all-time highs earlier this year, are down dramatically. From Sept. 11 to Nov. 30, the Coast Guard
seized about 10,000 pounds of cocaine, down 66 percent from the 30,000 pounds it seized during the same period last year. Seizures of marijuana during that period
dropped far more, from 7,000 pounds during those weeks last year to only 480 this year.

Mexican navy drug seizures have also nosedived since September.

Although tighter security on the U.S-Mexico border immediately after Sept. 11 appeared to be squeezing the drug trade, three months later the opposite appears to
be true; drug traffickers haven't had it this easy in years.

Drug trafficking specialists also see signs of a resurgence of coca production in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, in part because of the global crash in coffee prices. So as
more drugs are available to ship, there is a new ease in moving them to U.S. consumers through these Pacific waters, known as the cocaine corridor.

"Fifty thousand people die every year in the U.S. because of drug abuse," said one U.S. law enforcement official, questioning the singular focus on terrorism.

In recent weeks there has been a flurry of large and small drug seizures at the U.S.-Mexico border, and three bold drug flights over the border on a recent weekend,
another indication the traffickers have resumed their trade with gusto. "Activity has picked up big-time," said one U.S. border agent.

Smugglers have spotted the new holes in U.S. defenses and are taking advantage, officials at several U.S. and Mexican law enforcement agencies, who declined to
be named, said in interviews.

Law enforcement officials say the Pacific waters of Mexico and Central America are now dotted with large numbers of smugglers' speedboats, often called "go fast"
or cigarette boats.

These boats spend days on the ocean, idle under sea-blue tarps that make them harder to spot from the air. By night, planes from Colombia swoop in low and drop
a ton or two of plastic-encased cocaine into the sea. The speedboat crews, usually two or three men in wet suits who can earn as much as $250,000 for a successful
voyage, fish the drugs out of the water and rush them to shore in the darkness.

Once ashore, the cocaine is split up and eventually handed over to dozens of people who carry relatively small amounts of cocaine over the border into the United
States. A few members of this "ant patrol" are invariably caught, but the vast majority make it through successfully.

Until recently, such operations were more difficult because of U.S. surveillance and intelligence concentrating on major busts at sea before the cocaine loads reached
land. The Coast Guard, often firing on the smuggling boats from armed helicopters, had seized a record 138,000 pounds of cocaine last year -- more than 90 percent
of it in these Pacific waters.

But with U.S. ships now drawn back to ports from San Diego to Charleston, S.C., the smugglers have only to contend with the overworked and under-funded
Mexican navy, which has an annual budget of about $800 million -- the cost of a single U.S. Navy Aegis destroyer.

Mexican officials say they are so short of cash that they cannot follow up on many tips about drug movements at sea because they cannot afford the fuel.

The shift in U.S. priorities occurred at a time when the U.S. and Mexican cooperation had never been closer. Last year's election of President Vicente Fox has
resulted in increased trust and intelligence-sharing after long years of distrust.

But the once frequent radio contact between the U.S. Coast Guard drug patrols and the Mexican navy has been replaced by silence, and the Mexican navy is largely
trying to fight the battle alone.

It is an unfair fight. Seven of the world's 11 biggest drug trafficking organizations are Mexican. Since smuggling arrests often lead to new information on drug cartel
operations, a slowdown in seizures is expected to curb the ability to dismantle the cartels. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has been particularly eager to
arrest the leaders of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix cartel, which last year killed three Mexican anti-drug agents who had been working with the DEA.

One of them, special prosecutor Jose Patino, was kidnapped as he crossed into Mexico after a meeting with U.S. officials in San Diego. Patino's captors put his head
in a vice and cracked it open. They then ran over his body with a car.

People in this remote part of southern Oaxaca state, 30 miles west of Puerto Escondido, worry that such violence might follow the increased drug trade here. In
recent weeks, soldiers with machine guns have been patrolling this wilderness beach, where fishermen are usually accompanied only by the snapper and bass they
catch.

Soldiers camping under tall coconut trees near the sandy spot where $20 million of cocaine was found Nov. 13 said they could not talk about their mission. But
everyone is talking about them. "The traffickers unload here," said Luis Narvaez, who runs a ferry across the lagoon. "but they are being closely watched now."

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