Cuba has denied the U.S. Coast Guard permission to enter its waters in hot pursuit of drug smugglers but is considering other proposals to improve counter-narcotics coordination, State Department officials said Thursday. The announcement came as a top congressional leader requested that Cuba be put on a U.S. list of drug transit nations that would require President Clinton to annually certify the island's good conduct in the war on drugs. U.S.-Cuba cooperation in narcotics interdiction has become a sensitive issue for Washington because of the implied shift in the policy of isolating Cuba and charges of Cuban government involvement in the drug traffic. [continues 818 words]
BOGOTA, Colombia -- Twenty years after locally grown opium began appearing in Colombia, drug experts are seeing indications of a jump in heroin use, overdoses and cases of HIV spread through needles. Detected mostly among the young and poor, the surge is worrying experts in a country with an estimated 250,000 people with "serious problems" involving narcotics and drugs such as marijuana and cocaine, but almost no history of heroin use. Government officials blame the increase on traffickers trying to create a local market for heroin they cannot smuggle into the United States, and perhaps a 1994 court ruling legalizing the personal use of all narcotics. [continues 652 words]
Saying it wants to improve U.S.-Cuban cooperation on drug interdiction, the U.S. government is sending four Coast Guard and State Department officials to Havana to meet their Cuban counterparts next week. U.S. officials took pains to play down the visit, portraying it as a low-level session on issues such as the radio frequencies used by Cuban and U.S. patrols in an area with an increasingly worrisome ``interdiction gap. But Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., called it another Clinton administration attempt at ``appeasement and collaboration'' with a Cuban regime that he said is deeply involved in drug trafficking. [continues 409 words]
Man is also a suspect in Castro death plot One of the seven Cuban exiles charged in Puerto Rico with plotting to kill Fidel Castro has been arrested in Miami in a major cocaine-smuggling case, Drug Enforcement Administration officials said Monday. The two cases are not linked, although DEA wiretaps that led to the drug charges against Juan Bautista Marquez also intercepted his talks with Castro-plot defendants, other officials said. Marquez, 61, and six other exiles were charged with plotting to kill the Cuban president after the U.S. Coast Guard in Puerto Rico found two sniper rifles hidden in a Miami-registered yacht in October 1997. [continues 594 words]
When Russian nightclub owner Oleg Kirillov decided to fly to Miami last December and spend his New Year's vacation in the sun and surf, the FBI got ready to celebrate, too. Pegged as the head of a powerful Russian crime gang, the 31-year-old Kirillov was arrested by FBI agents soon after he arrived and was charged with conspiracy to export cocaine from Miami to Moscow. Yet the bust got little publicity, perhaps because Kirillov was only one of scores of Russian mobsters who visit South Florida, perhaps because his is only one of the dozen or so Russian gangs known to operate here. [continues 1516 words]
