Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 27, 1990 TAG: 9005270319
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By WILLIAM R. LONG LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: CHIMORE, BOLIVIA LENGTH: Long
But their leader, "the Colonel," bridles at the Rambo comparison. These Americans didn't come to kill, he tells us. "These people are all investigators. These people aren't military." They're here to help the Bolivian police look for drug laboratories, cocaine and traffickers in the Chapare jungle.
The Chapare, an area the size of New Jersey, is subtropical forest scarred here and there by rough dirt roads and patched with settlements and farms. Almost all the farms grow coca, a twiggy bush with small, pointed leaves from which cocaine is processed.
Traffickers come and go in planes and boats, bringing in dollars to buy coca paste, which is extracted from the leaves by gasoline and acid in plastic-lined pits. Many traffickers are armed, and these jungle hunting grounds pose other dangers different from what most of the U.S. agents are used to on American city streets. That's why the DEA provides them with military assault rifles and special Army training.
The mission is part of Operation Snowcap, a program begun by the DEA in 1987 in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. It's the first U.S. anti-drug program that has assigned teams of DEA agents to live and work on a daily basis in the remote, rural beginnings of the long cocaine-trafficking trail.
All of the agents except the Colonel sleep on cots in a big barracks across a muddy street from the team's day room in a small, wood-frame house. The Colonel sleeps in a small room in the back of another small house next door that serves as the DEA mission's office. The DEA teams are rotated, each staying 90 days. This team has been in the Chapare 24 days and has helped plan and carry out a total of 51 anti-drug operations with Bolivian police. Much of it is night work. "They're going all the time," the Colonel says.
Jungle operations often require long marches. "It's up and down and it's through streams, water," the Colonel says. "The biggest hazard is water. Like stepping off in a hole in the river with 40 pounds of gear."
The Americans work closely with a 60-member unit of Bolivia's militarized anti-drug police, the Mobile Patrol Unit, UMOPAR. The Bolivians wear the same camouflage uniforms as the DEA agents but carry ancient M-1 carbines instead of M-16s.
An UMOPAR patrol was ambushed by armed traffickers in March, and a lieutenant was killed. Although DEA agents were in the area on the same operation, none was with the patrol. The Colonel acknowledges the danger to DEA agents operating in the Chapare, but he tells us that traffickers seem wary of the well-trained and -equipped Americans. "I think they show reluctance to hit us when we are there because they know they are going to get waxed."
In the past, there have been 30 major paste buyers operating in the Chapare. But the disruption of trafficking networks by police action in Bolivia and Colombia has reduced the number in recent months. "We only know of seven buyers in the valley now," the Colonel says.
The Bolivian policemen at Chimore, trained by U.S. Army Special Forces, all have ranks. The DEA agents have found that the Bolivians expect them also to have ranks. So they do. And because they are all college graduates, the Americans assume the privileges of officers.
"There are no lieutenants here, nothing but captains and above," the Colonel says.
Many operations are based on information that the DEA buys from Bolivian informants cultivated by the agents. Sometimes the agents meet the informants in village bars or jungle rendezvous points. Sometimes the informants come around late at night. They tell the DEA when traffickers are planning to set up buy markets, where paste is stashed, where laboratories have been installed to convert it into semi-refined cocaine base.
Some of the informants are associated with the trafficking underworld. As with informants in the United States, the Colonel says, "Some of them want to be cops. They're cop buffs." He says the DEA treats its informants here with special deference. "They want to be your friend, and they want you to treat them with respect. Hispanic informants are different. You wouldn't treat them like you'd treat a Chicago mobster."
At 3:15 a.m. the following day, two pickups leave the base loaded with UMOPAR and DEA. They are heading for a spot on the Chapare River where an informant has told the DEA that a shipment of cocaine paste will be delivered later in the morning. The informant is to meet the trucks before dawn at a village on the river and lead the officers to a place nearby where he says coca paste will be collected for shipping downriver.
6:30 a.m.: More police and DEA board two Huey helicopters at the base airfield. The Hueys, provided by the United States and piloted by U.S.-trained Bolivian air force pilots, are to airlift officers into the place where the encounter is planned and give backup support from the air. An M-60 machine gun is mounted at the door of each aircraft.
It has been raining most of the night, and low clouds hover over the forest around the base's airstrip. But the ceiling rises after daylight, and the Colonel prepares to leave for the operation area aboard a Cessna 182 that he uses as a spotter plane. UMOPAR seized the single-engine craft from drug traffickers, he says.
7:20 a.m.: We are circling over Puerto Aurora on the Chapare River. From the Cessna, the village is a tiny collection of thatch and metal roofs. The pickups are parked by the river's brown water at the end of a dirt road. People looking tiny as ants are gathered near some of the roofs, probably watching the helicopters maneuver up and down the river.
7:40 a.m.: We lose sight of one of the helicopters. The Colonel hears on the Cessna's radio that the copter has put down officers somewhere on the other side of the river from the village. "If they've put people on the ground, that's a good sign," he tells us. "They wouldn't be heading for the jungle unless they had someone with them to show them where to go." A few minutes later, both Hueys land in the village soccer field and wait.
8 a.m.: The Colonel, apparently satisfied with what he has seen, returns to the Chimore base. The sun is breaking through the clouds, throwing swatches of light on the scarred forest below.
At mid-morning, one of the pickup trucks arrives from the river. The returning DEA agents are elated. A Cuban-born agent comes in the day room and salutes the Colonel. "Forty pounds of paste and two people captured, sir," he says with a grin before stowing his M-16 on a table by the door. Others come in.
They chatter and laugh, digging into eggs and sausage and pancakes prepared by the cook. The operation came off without mishap. No shots fired. The two people captured, a man and a woman, were hirelings carrying the drug shipment. The trafficker in charge slipped away into the jungle, but the operation brought a special bonus. "We found out there's a special load that's going to be taken out tonight," the Colonel tells us later. "One of the villagers approached one of the agents. "Just by being there, we gave the guy the opportunity. There are people that want to do this for moral reasons."
Later the Colonel takes us over to UMOPAR headquarters for a look at the paste, moist and crumbly, grayish white, packed in clear plastic bags. An UMOPAR police clerk is taking a statement from a detained woman. In a nearby building, a dozen other prisoners peer nervously from behind the bars of a holding cell. The Colonel says most of those detained had minor trafficking jobs and will be released within a few weeks.
by CNB