MIAMI (Reuters) -- South American drug traffickers are using Haiti as a
                  main smuggling route through the Caribbean but the region lags far behind
                  Pacific-Mexico routes for U.S.-bound drugs, U.S. anti-drugs chief Barry
                  McCaffrey said on Thursday.

                  Although Caribbean smuggling routes are a "huge problem," 50-70 percent
                  of illicit drug traffic to the United States flows up the eastern Pacific or
                  across the 2,000-mile (3,200 km) Mexico border, McCaffrey told
                  academics at the University of Miami's North-South Centre.

                  The island of Hispaniola, shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic, is the
                  key route through the Caribbean and little progress has been made toward
                  stemming the flow, said McCaffrey, director of the Office of National Drug
                  Control Policy.

                  "Clearly Haiti is viewed as enormously vulnerable, almost open, to being
                  used as a drug smuggling conduit into the United States and into the
                  Dominican Republic, and that's what's happening," he said. "I see no
                  credible effort so far to oppose that process."

                  McCaffrey said the United States needed to continue long-term support for
                  the anti-drugs fight in Colombia, where land under coca plant cultivation
                  "exploded" by 26 percent last year, and Mexico, where U.S. officials have
                  defended the government's efforts against traffickers. Coca plants provide
                  the raw material for cocaine.

                  The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Mexico had produced
                  such dismal results against drug trafficking in the last year that Congress
                  would try to add it to a blacklist of countries unworthy of aid.

                  President Bill Clinton has requested a record $17.8 billion budget for the
                  drug war in 2000, an increase of $735 million over 1999.

                  McCaffrey said some South American drug traffic was moving through
                  Cuban airspace and sea lanes, but reiterated past statements that the United
                  States had no evidence the Cuban government was involved in smuggling.

                  However, he said Cuba was potentially a major smuggling threat to the
                  United States.

                  "Cuba will be open within five years and it will be a major, logical drug
                  smuggling route to Europe and the United States," he said.

                     Copyright 1999 Reuters.