Operation Aimed at Drugs for U.S. Is Cited as Model

MIAMI — Drug enforcement officials Wednesday unveiled the results of what they called the biggest international effort ever to stem the tidal wave of Colombian drugs flowing through the Caribbean to U.S. shores.

Dubbed “Operation Conquistador,” the 17-day crackdown that ended Sunday involved 26 Caribbean and Central and South American countries, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said. Agents throughout the region seized more than 5 tons of cocaine, 120 pounds of heroin, 2,331 suspects, 13 boats, 172 vehicles, 83 weapons, 17,340 rounds of ammunition and more than $2 million in property, the DEA said.

But DEA Special Agent Michael Vigil, who heads the agency’s Caribbean operations, said its greatest success was cooperation among law enforcement agencies from more than two dozen nations through which an estimated one-third of the cocaine sold in the United States passes.

“Obviously, it’s not going to stop the trade, but what we want to do is run these operations continually to keep the drug dealers off balance,” Vigil said in a telephone interview from his base in Puerto Rico, where he announced the undercover operation.

“But the whole reason for these operations is to get these countries to work together and share intelligence information,” he said. “And they really went out with hurricane force this time.”

Even anarchic and impoverished Haiti, which has become the region’s biggest transit point for Colombian cocaine headed north, contributed “enthusiastically” to the operation, Vigil said.

The fledgling U.S.-trained Haitian National Police, which was sharply criticized in a recent State Department report for corruption and lax drug enforcement, staged searches throughout the capital, Port-au-Prince, making three arrests and seizing 40 pounds of cocaine--most of it from couriers at the country’s international airport.

U.S. drug enforcement agents acknowledge that this month’s seizures in Haiti were a tiny fraction of the more than 70 tons of the drug they estimate now passes through there for the United States each year.

But they added that the operation showed that National Police Chief Pierre Denize is committed to the drug fight in Haiti and that the operation had at least a temporary chilling effect on the trade there and throughout the region.

Other nations with checkered reputations in the drug war also participated with surprising zeal, Vigil said.

In the South American coastal nation of Suriname--whose former dictator, Desi Bouterse, was convicted on cocaine charges in July and sentenced in absentia to 16 years in jail by a Netherlands court, police arrested more than 100 drug suspects and staged nearly 3,000 searches of boats, aircraft and vehicles during Conquistador. Bouterse is running for president in Suriname’s May 25 elections.

But the most compelling evidence of the operation’s immediate impact appeared to be in the marketplace.

In Puerto Rico, a key cocaine gateway to the U.S. mainland, DEA intelligence agents say the price of the drug has soared since Operation Conquistador began March 10. A kilogram of cocaine that sold for between $8,000 and $14,000 a month ago is now fetching as much as $24,000.