Traffickers

WASHINGTON -- Congress is close to forcing a major expansion of economic sanctions against international drug traffickers and businesses that work with them.Legislation to impose such sanctions on narcotics criminals throughout the world passed the Senate easily last month.After initially opposing the measures on both practical and foreign policy grounds, administration officials have begun to work with legislators to fashion a bill both the House and President Clinton could support.But while such measures have some support among businesses and government officials in Colombia -- the only country where the United States has used them -- they are being strongly opposed by the government of Mexico and a few of that country's biggest companies.

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti -- Drug traffickers taking advantage of Haiti's location, weak institutions and inexperienced police force have turned the country into a major transshipment center for cocaine en route from Colombia to the United States.In 1996, an estimated 5 percent to 6 percent of the cocaine destined for the United States was moved through Haiti. By the end of 1997, the figure had increased to 19 percent and climbing. By some estimates, that means up to 50 tons annually pour through Haiti.

SANTA ANA, Calif. -- The firing squad-like execution of 18 men, women and children Thursday in Ensenada set a benchmark for Mexican drug violence, pushing the cartels closer to their ruthless Colombian counterparts, say drug enforcement experts."

Undercover narcotics officers posing as drug dealers arrested 11 suspected drug traffickers and users and one prostitute yesterday in crackdowns at three South Baltimore locations, police said."

MEXICO CITY -- The landmark North American Free Trade Agreement has made it easier than ever for Mexican traffickers to smuggle drugs, and U.S. authorities are not doing enough to counter the fast-growing threat, a U.S. task force has concluded.Sophisticated drug gangs are investing in everything from trucking companies and rail lines to warehouses and shipping firms to shield their trafficking activities, according to a confidential report by Operation Alliance, a task force led by the U.S. Customs Service.

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- In a highly unusual critique published in his own newspaper, the editor of the San Jose Mercury News acknowledged Sunday that articles last year on the rise of crack cocaine in urban America were marred by serious shortcomings, including their strong implication that the CIA had countenanced the drug's spread in league with Nicaraguan dealers.The publication of the series, "Dark Alliance," provoked a furor among black elected and community officials and prompted multiple federal investigations.

WASHINGTON -- Searching for a new weapon in the United States' drug battles abroad, the Clinton administration has been debating proposals to impose stringent economic sanctions against Mexico's biggest traffickers.The measures under consideration include freezing the U.S. assets of suspected drug smugglers and their associates, barring the traffickers' legitimate commercial ventures from doing business with companies in the United States, and blocking the traffickers' access to U.S. banks.

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico -- Bloodshed is no stranger to Ciudad Juarez, the border city across the swirling Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. For years, it has had a murder rate twice New York's, but authorities mostly shrugged off the carnage so long as it did not spill out of the shanty towns and victims could be dismissed as drug dealers.Recently, however, something seems to have snapped. After a series of daytime attacks by gangsters firing automatic rifles claimed 20 lives in a month, business people, clerics and other civic leaders are speaking out.A nationwide wave of homicide has followed the death in July of Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the Mexican drug trafficker who made Juarez his main smuggling gateway to the United States.

Virgilio Barco, 75, who led Colombia through one of its most difficult periods of drug violence as president from 1986 to 1990, extraditing top traffickers to the United States, died Tuesday. He suffered from Alzheimer's disease. During his presidency, he authorized the extradition of leading drug traffickers, unleashing a war of terror by drug lord Pablo Escobar.Dorothy Olding, 87, a literary agent for J. D. Salinger and a guardian of his privacy, died May 14 in New York. She also represented Pearl S. Buck, Paul Gallico, Ngaio Marsh during a 52-year career with the Harold Ober Associates literary agency in New York.

THE ANNUAL international drug testing contest is under way in Washington: On Feb. 27, President Clinton will judge how committed our Third World allies are to fighting our drug war and report to Congress.Countries that fail the test will be "decertified" - and will not only lose U.S. economic assistance but may also face trade sanctions. Democrats and Republicans alike gain a chance to prove their get-tough bona fides by castigating countries for being "soft on drugs" in a process that is as hypocritical as it is diversionary.

Here's some new news about drugs in Baltimore: * A kilo of cocaine now costs $32,000, up a full $10,000 from 2006. Bulk quantities of the drug are more expensive here than in Washington, where a kilo costs $30,000, and in Richmond, Va., where it goes for $26,000. * Local drug dealers outsource even the final stages of turning powder cocaine into crack. * Dealers are increasingly steering away from highways to smuggle drugs, preferring package delivery services so they can track their shipments on the Internet.

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Three bombs, two of them carried by suicide attackers, exploded in southern Afghanistan yesterday, killing four people and wounding at least 10, officials said. The attacks took place during a visit by a U.S. assistant secretary of state, Richard A. Boucher, to Kabul, where he met with members of the Cabinet. Boucher said the purpose was to discuss the strategic partnership between the United States and Afghanistan, which will include an increase in U.S. funding in the next year for the Afghan army and police forces.

MEXICO CITY -- Breaking with long-standing practice, Mexico extradited four major drug traffickers to the United States late Friday and sent a signal that the country's newly elected president, Felipe Calderon, is serious about cooperating with his northern neighbor to dismantle cartels. U.S. law enforcement officials have long complained about Mexican reluctance to hand over drug traffickers indicted in crimes north of the Rio Grande, and many drug kingpins have continued to operate their deadly networks from inside Mexican prisons, where they have been able to corrupt officials.

The recent discovery of a 2,400-foot-long underground tunnel linking Tijuana and San Diego, and packed with more than two tons of marijuana, is just another example of the sorry state of affairs at the U.S.-Mexico border. The tunnel was the 21st discovered since security measures were heightened on the U.S. side of the border after the 9/11 attacks. Increased border security and joint anti-smuggling efforts by U.S. and Mexican law enforcement authorities have undoubtedly forced Mexican traffickers to go literally underground to sneak contraband and migrants into the United States.

CARACAS, Venezuela -- Venezuela is becoming a refuge for Colombian drug traffickers seeking to avoid capture in their neighboring homeland, according to several Venezuelan and foreign counter-drug officials. The traffickers, who include at least three top leaders of Colombia's notorious North Valley Cartel, may be taking advantage of Venezuela's limited drug cooperation with Washington amid the heated political clash between President Hugo Chavez and the Bush administration, analysts say. They may also be trying to stay on top of their exports to Europe, the destination of the bulk of the Colombian cocaine passing through Venezuela, the analysts and officials added.

Arecent decision by Mexico's Supreme Court to allow the extradition of criminal suspects who face life sentences abroad is a welcome move that will help the U.S. prosecute alleged Mexican drug traffickers and murderers who are accused of committing crimes in this country. Legislation approved last month by U.S. lawmakers that denies financial aid to countries that block extraditions most likely helped persuade the Mexican justices. The decision reflects more willingness by Mexico to work with the U.S. to fight drug smuggling along their shared border.

An Indian hero has died. Brother Jose Vetticattil of the Montfort Brothers of St. Gabriel, of Hyderabad in Central India, was not nearly as famous as Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Gandhi. But their spirit of peace, grace and charity was alive in him. Word reached me recently of the death of Brother Jose, as he was known to some of the most vulnerable and abused of Hyderabad's citizens, whom he helped. He died last month at age 49 after a massive heart attack. The date of his death was exactly one year after I met him in Hyderabad, where I had gone to visit a project he had founded 10 years earlier to rescue and restore children who were the victims of horrific abuses of sex traffickers.

WASHINGTON - Barring unforeseen U.S. congressional action to re-evaluate the war on drugs in Colombia, what little is left of the South American country's democratic institutions could die prematurely despite U.S. efforts. The lethal injection that put the bloodstained narco-state on that dire course was the so-called Justice and Peace Law, signed July 22 by President Alvaro Uribe. The importance of U.S.-Colombian ties was reflected in Mr. Uribe's visit to President Bush's Crawford, Texas, ranch Aug. 4 to promote the law as a key aspect of legitimizing paramilitaries in Colombia by allowing them to participate in the government.

THE RECENT closure of the American consulate in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, was the wrong response to the carnage playing out along the U.S.-Mexico border. Last Friday, on the same day that Ambassador Tony Garza announced the consulate's reopening, rival drug gangs vying for control of limited transit routes into the United States claimed their latest victims: the head of the City Council's Public Security Commission and his bodyguard. Both men were gunned down in what has become a routine occurrence on Nuevo Laredo's blood-soaked streets.

MEXICO CITY - Printing shop owner Alejandro Dominguez Coello was the only man brave enough to accept the police chief's job in the violence-wracked border town of Nuevo Laredo. Six police officials have been killed there since February, and city officials had searched for weeks before hiring Dominguez. Within hours of taking office Wednesday, the new chief was killed in a hail of gunfire, presumably by drug traffickers. The ambush of Dominguez , was one of the more audacious crimes in a string of drug-related killings that have terrorized Nuevo Laredo in recent months.