Bogota Crackdown Cuts Drug Flow to U.S.

WASHINGTON —  The Colombian government’s crackdown on the nation’s drug cartels has disrupted the supply of cocaine into the United States, nearly halting traffic on major smuggling routes and driving up wholesale prices, drug policy director William J. Bennett said Wednesday.

However, checks of prices and availability of cocaine on the streets of Los Angeles and other cities indicated that any such change in wholesale trafficking activity has not yet manifested itself at the retail level.

But Bennett’s statements, based on reports that he said were received in the last few days, represented the strongest claim to date that Colombia’s war against its drug traffickers had begun to cut the flow of cocaine into this country.

“There’s very little cocaine moving in the Caribbean, and there’s very little cocaine coming into America,” Bennett declared in testimony before a House subcommittee. “Project this for months or years, and you’ve got a major breakthrough.”

Acknowledging that the disruption might be short-lived, Bennett noted that the Colombian government had been “paying the price” for its anti-drug efforts. “Although there’s less cocaine, there’s more blood,” he said.

But Bennett nevertheless contended that the offensive in Colombia--where thousands of raids on cartel strongholds have been conducted since Aug. 18--clearly have demonstrated that the powerful cocaine enterprises can be disrupted.

That conclusion was endorsed by several federal officials with access to intelligence information. They credited the slowdown in trafficking to the Colombian government’s success in keeping major operatives on the run and in seizing thousands of planes and hundreds of boats commonly used in smuggling operations.

Even so, nearly a dozen federal and local officials in various cities nationwide said they had seen no indication yet that the apparent disruption at the wholesale level had affected the street price of cocaine or its smokable derivative, crack.

‘The Drug Is Still Out There’

Indeed, an informal four-city survey conducted by the Los Angles Police Department’s Narcotics Division concluded that “the drug is still out there and the price has not risen,” Officer Tom Cunningham said.

And some law enforcement officials said they were skeptical that the disruption is as severe--or potentially long-lasting--as Bennett appeared to suggest.

In testimony at the same hearing, Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh agreed that the Colombian crackdown had achieved a “negative impact on the drug traffickers’ operations.” But he said that his assessment of the prospects for long-term success tended “to be on the very conservative side.”

“These are highly sophisticated operations,” he said.

And the chief spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration, Frank R. Shults, said it is “too early to tell on a national scale” whether the cocaine supply had in fact been disrupted.

“The indicators we assess wouldn’t reflect” any firm conclusion about the Colombian crackdown so far, he said.

However, other officials in Washington and across the country called attention to what they characterized as an unusual coincidence of observations.

Cocaine seizures by the Coast Guard and the Customs Service have entered an unusual lull. Both agencies have reported a dramatic decline in suspicious activity along major smuggling routes. And in Miami--a major cocaine import center--the wholesale price has increased sharply.

While officials acknowledged that such evidence is not conclusive, they said that the parallels are too striking to be purely coincidental and that the apparent disruption is supported by reports from U.S. intelligence agencies.

“Right now we just don’t see any sign of anything moving,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jim Simpson, a Coast Guard officer who oversees interdiction efforts.

In the weeks since the Colombian government declared its war on drug traffickers, Simpson said, the Coast Guard has seized only one cocaine shipment--and that was found to have been loaded before the crackdown began.

At the same time, he said, evidence of “suspect planes, vessels and air drops” in the Caribbean has “dropped out of sight.” Near Miami, where federal surveillance commonly has recorded three to five air drops of cocaine each week, only one unconfirmed drop has been detected since mid-August, a Customs Service spokesman said.

Along the Mexican border south of California and Arizona--another major smuggling route for cocaine--a similar lull has been detected, according to federal authorities in Washington. One official with access to intelligence reports said that landings of drug-ferrying aircraft at storage sites in northern Mexico had dropped off precipitously in the last two weeks.

“It was really startling,” he said.

In Miami, the average price of bulk quantities of cocaine sold in 30-kilogram blocks has jumped to $19,000 to $20,000 per kilo--up from an average range of $11,000 to $16,000 per kilo earlier this year, the DEA said.

But in both Los Angeles and San Diego, federal officials said an expected increase in wholesale prices had not yet materialized.

Times staff writers Ronald J. Ostrow and Stanley Meisler in Washington, Andrea Ford in Los Angeles and Richard Serrano in San Diego contributed to this report.