Pubdate: Sun, 31 May 1998
Source: New York Times (NY) 
Contact:  
Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ 
Author: Mireya Navarro

DRUG TRAFFICKERS RETURNING TO BAHAMAS-FLORIDA ROUTE 

MIAMI -- Last week, federal officials in South Florida scored what they
believed was their biggest cocaine seizure from a pleasure boat: 4,000
pounds, with a street value of $34 million, found in hidden compartments
aboard a 62-foot-long luxury yacht.

The significance of the news, however, was not so much the amount of the
stash -- more cocaine gets into Florida in cargo containers and freighters,
for example -- but that it was found on a boat making a run from the
Bahamian island of Bimini to a private dock in Fort Lauderdale. To U.S.
Customs Service and Drug Enforcement Administration officials here, the
seizure was another indication that after concentrating on other routes in
the 1980s and 1990s, Colombian traffickers are returning with renewed
intensity to the familiar routes between the Bahamas and Florida. DEA
officials say they seized more cocaine in the first three months of 1998 in
the Bahamas than in the previous three years combined. "They're coming back
to the roots that they know," said Raphael Lopez, the U.S. Customs Service's
special agent in charge in Miami. "The infrastructure is here. They've got
the people, the smuggling and transportation routes, the businesses to hide
their smuggling and money laundering. And the commanding control is here."

Although smuggling through the Bahamas and Florida has never stopped,
officials say, aggressive law enforcement on that corridor moved much of the
drug trafficking to Puerto Rico and the border with Mexico. Drug enforcement
officials believe most cocaine coming into the United States passes through
the southwest border, but a resurgence of heavy smuggling in the Atlantic
Ocean indicates the trade is being chased back by interdiction efforts and
tensions between the Colombian traffickers and their Mexican distributors,
who have turned into competitors by setting up their own cocaine business.
The same dynamics have made Caribbean countries like the Dominican Republic
and Haiti major transfer points for cocaine destined for the American
market. This ebb and flow of drug trafficking patterns underscores what
officials call the balloon effect: squeezing on one place only to have the
drug activity bulge in another. But the resurgence of the drug trade in the
Bahamas is in a different setting than in the route's heyday in the late
1970s and 1980s.

The big cartels have been virtually dismantled, and law-enforcement agencies
say they are more experienced and better coordinated for this second round.
In Florida, for instance, federal and local officials routinely work
together to target violent drug organizations, the officials say. The
Bahamas, where there was widespread evidence of drug-related corruption in
the prime minister's Cabinet and among the police in the 1980s, now stands
firmly behind the war against drugs, with new weapons like a 100-member
police drug-enforcement unit and laws against money laundering. "We've come
a long way," said Marvin Dames, drug-enforcement commander for the Royal
Bahamas Police and liaison to an American anti-drug mission in the Bahamas
and Turks and Caicos consisting of 120 DEA, Coast Guard and Army personnel.
But the decimation of the Medellin and Cali cartels has fragmented the drug
trade, giving way to dozens of smaller trafficking groups that, while not as
big or efficient as the cartels, require more manpower and better
intelligence gathering to combat, some experts on international drug
trafficking said.

The traffickers have also grown more sophisticated and use new technology to
complement their home advantage in the 700-island archipelago strewn over an
area the size of California.

They use cellular telephones and 800 numbers. Airplanes and speedboats
rendezvous on schedule for airdrops of cocaine, thanks to state-of-the-art
navigation systems that pinpoint a meeting place.

The boats themselves are faster than ever, outfitted with three and four
outboard engines for extra horsepower and customized to carry up to 2,200
pounds of cocaine for delivery to Bahamian Islands like Bimini and
ultimately ports and marinas along Florida's east coast, from Palm Beach
County down to the Florida Keys.

Their operators wear night vision goggles. "Before it was much more
half-haphazard," said Louis Weiss Jr., a DEA special agent who has worked in
South Florida and the Bahamas for 13 years. "They're much more organized."
The traffickers have also altered their lifestyle. In Florida, where drug
planes once landed on expressways and shoot-outs were so common traffickers
earned the moniker "cocaine cowboys," flamboyance is out. Increasingly,
federal officials said, the drug trade operators aim to blend in. When
Yolene and Savil Dessaint, a couple in their 40s, were arrested in December
on cocaine trafficking charges, they lived in an affluent Fort Lauderdale
suburb and their two children attended local schools. No flashy cars, no
appearance of great wealth. They say they ran an import-export business, but
prosecutors contend that their business really consisted of smuggling
cocaine from Colombia through Haiti and into the Miami River and
distributing about 440 pounds a month in three South Florida counties.
"They're not buying Rolex watches, but they invest in land and stocks and
bonds," William Mitchell, the DEA's special agent in charge in Miami, said
of the new breed of trafficker.

But some things about the Bahamas-Florida route have never changed. Federal
officials say the operations headquarters for Colombian traffickers remains
well-entrenched in South Florida; when large loads of cocaine are received
in Los Angeles, they said, directions on distribution come from Miami. And
the balloon effect notwithstanding, drug smuggling through the Bahamas and
Florida has been a constant, with an increase in trafficking in Colombian
heroin in the last five years adding to cocaine smuggling. It is an
indication of how little the flow of drugs has been disrupted over time that
cocaine prices have remained stable and even dropped in the last 15 years.
In the Miami area, a kilo of cocaine, or 2.2 pounds, that sold for up to
$38,000 in 1984 sold for as little as $12,000 to $15,000 in 1988 and for
$12,500 to $18,000 this year, DEA figures show.

DEA officials say the recent increase in cocaine seizures -- about 15,000
pounds of the drug were seized in the Bahamas in the first three months of
1998, compared with about 11,500 pounds in the previous three years combined
- -- is not attributable to better law enforcement. They also point to the
higher frequency of trafficking standbys like airplane-to-boat drops of
cocaine and the use of "stash houses," storing 440 pounds, as evidence that
the Bahamas-Florida route is hot again. A year ago, Mitchell said, the drug
agency estimated that 70 percent of the cocaine entering the United States
came through the southwestern border and 30 percent through other routes;
six months later, the trafficking along the Mexican border was estimated to
have dropped to 53 percent. Such figures are only rough estimates involving
guesswork on factors like the amount of cocaine being produced and
processed. And as traffickers shift routes to elude law enforcement, "what
may be true this week might not be true next week," Mitchell said.

Weiss, the DEA special agent, puts it another way. "They figure out a way to
do it, we figure out a way to stop them," he said. "They figure out a way to
do it again. It's like a big chess game." As traffickers look for the path
of least resistance, the resources to fight them follow. In Congress, the
House has passed a bill earmarking more than $1 billion next year for 1,700
additional Customs Service inspectors and new drug interdiction technology
for the nation's borders. The DEA's Miami field division is already adding
40 more agents, for a total of 400. The Senate is considering a similar bill.

But some note that as long as drug demand drives the supply, the best that
can be hoped for is to prevent the re-emergence of huge trafficking
organizations and to reduce shipments over a long enough period to make
cocaine more expensive and price out some users, particularly the young.
There is uncertainty only about where drug smuggling will go next. "The
displacement can't be avoided," said Bruce Bagley, a University of Miami
expert on drug trafficking. "The balloon effect is inevitable as long as
there are incentives for people to produce and ship cocaine."

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Checked-by: Melodi Cornett