Source: Houston Chronicle Contact: Pubdate: Fri, 26 Dec 1997 Page: 19A Website: http://www.chron.com/ COLOMBIAN DRUG TRAFFICKERS SHIFT BACK TO FLORIDA SMUGGLING ROUTES MIAMI (AP) Colombia's cocaine traffickers are switching back to their old smuggling routes into Florida, easing out of the Mexican pipeline because of tougher enforcement and greedy partners. Federal agents in Florida seized nearly seven tons of Colombian cocaine in the past two months, a lot of it hidden aboard cargo ships from Venezuela. Just don't look for a return to the Cocaine Cowboy days of the 1980s, when Florida was flooded with millions in excess cash and headlines were filled with the speedboats, lowflying planes and public gun battles that inspired TV's Miami Vice. "We're not worried about that street violence that once made Miami notorious," Customs spokesman Michael Sheehan said. "Nowadays, drug smuggling is conducted like any other international business," he said. "Men in business suits, carrying briefcases, rather than that old Miami Vice look." Increased enforcement around Florida led the Colombian drug cartels to align their business with Mexican drug families in the early 1990s, shipping cocaine by land and air into the U.S. Southwest. The noticeable shift back to Florida came after President Clinton ordered a tough new antidrug strategy aimed at eliminating drug smuggling from Mexico. "It's almost as if this were a balloon, so that if you squeeze this one place along the Southwest border you have a bubble somewhere else here in Florida," said Raphael Lopez, special agentincharge for the Customs Service in Miami. Another reason more drugs are coming through Florida is that "the Colombians have grown tired of dealing with the Mexicans," said William Mitchell, special agentincharge of the Drug Enforcement Administration's Miami Field Division. Mexican drug lords have upped the price for transporting cocaine for the Colombians, Mitchell said. "It's costing the Colombians more to ship through Mexico than to put it on a ship in Colombia and just bring it in, or to take it to Venezuela, and mask it as if it were a Venezuelan product," said Lopez. Customs agents weren't surprised at the Colombian turnabout. "It's just that if you consider the economics of the situation at the time, it was more convenient to do it through the Southwest (U.S.) border," Lopez said. "Then, as those costs increased, then the Colombians are going to come back to their historic market, where they have stable costs."