Drug info - Argentine Cocaine Trade Growing

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Traffickers are setting up cocaine labs in Argentina, long merely a transit point for cocaine, and creating new addicts with 'paco,' a cheap, toxic byproduct with a short, intense high.

'Paco' boosts Argentine drug trade

Matias Salas tried marijuana when he was 11. By age 17, he smoked pot every day, sniffed cocaine when he could get it and was a regular user of pills.

Then, a new drug hit Argentina.

"I have never tried anything so addictive in my life. I am no rookie, but this just hit me like a log. I couldn't stop," says Salas, now 20 and one of thousands of working-class youths in that country hooked on smoking paco.

Experts say the sudden availability of paco, also known as basuco, is a sign that cocaine is being produced in Argentina. The white crystals, left over from refining coca paste into cocaine, are too cheap and low in quality to make them worth transporting. So wherever cocaine is refined, paco is sold.

This is a turning point for the drug business in Argentina, which until recently was only a transit point for Colombian, Peruvian and Bolivian cocaine largely on its way to Europe.

Argentina's counter-drug officials attribute the surge of cocaine laboratories to their efforts to control the export of chemicals used to refine coca paste into cocaine.

"Traffickers have changed their strategy. Instead of taking the chemicals to countries where the coca paste is produced, they bring the coca paste here and they install laboratories, primarily in the outskirts of Buenos Aires," says Jose Ramon Granero, director of Argentina's counter-drug agency, known as SEDRONAR.

Cocaine seizures in the country doubled in 2004 compared to 1999, and authorities discovered 10 clandestine cocaine laboratories in 2003, 20 in 2004 and 14 last year. Granero says seizures so far "are in line with last year's."

The State Department's 2006 international drug report said there was evidence that more drug trafficking organizations are entering Argentina, lured by the advanced chemical industry there and the low risk in shipping the coca paste into the country.

Paco is at the lowest rung of the drug business ladder.

In Argentina, paco-laced cigarettes are sold almost out in the open in poor neighborhoods -- even in kiosks that sell regular cigarettes and candy -- addicts say. A paco cigarette goes for 30 U.S. cents, compared to $1.50 for a marijuana joint.

"In my barrio, it's everywhere. It's very easy to get," Salas told The Miami Herald in a telephone interview from Fundacion Manantiales, a nonprofit Buenos Aires organization that treats addicts with government money.

Salas checked in voluntarily and has been living in the rehab center for four months. He says he tried to quit paco once on his own, but he relapsed. Now he doesn't want to return to the working-class neighborhood where he grew up until he is certain he can stay clean.

Paco is highly addictive because its effect is so short -- a couple of minutes -- and so intense that many users resort to smoking 20 to 50 cigarettes a day to try to make its effects linger.

Used regularly, it can devastate a person physically, emotionally and mentally within six months, says Cristian Laclau, a spokesman for Fundacion Manantiales.

Paco is even more toxic than crack cocaine because it is made mostly of solvents and chemicals, with just a dab of cocaine, said Jim Hall, executive director of Up Front Drug Information Center, a Miami nonprofit that has been tracking cocaine abuse for more than two decades.

Argentine media reports have blamed the surge of paco consumption -- up 200 percent to an estimated 50,000 users to 70,000 users in the last four years, according to local authorities -- on the 2001 economic meltdown that pushed thousands of Argentines into poverty and despair.

But authorities and experts look north for the answer.

The multimillion-dollar U.S.-backed Plan Colombia is disrupting the operations of traffickers there and forcing them to look for new bases for their business, said Eduardo Gamarra, of Florida International University's Latin American and Caribbean Center.

Farther south, the recent election of President Evo Morales in Bolivia, which capped three years of political instability in that country, raised concerns that his policy to clamp down on cocaine but decriminalize coca farming for traditional, legal uses may result in more paste shipped to its neighbors.

There are no statistics available, but the Argentine and U.S. governments, and the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, agree that most of the coca paste entering Argentina comes from Bolivia, the world's third-largest cultivator of coca leaves after Colombia and Peru.

Argentina and Bolivia share a long, porous border through which coca paste is smuggled, Granero says. It enters the country in small planes that land on clandestine airstrips, by truck in cargo containers, or in boats.

"The border is very extended, in some places inhospitable and almost deserted, in others made of small rivers. It's difficult to patrol," Granero says.

The State Department's 2006 drug report said Argentine authorities had expressed concern that Bolivia's new policy, dubbed "Yes to coca, no to cocaine," could greatly increase the production of illegal drugs there.

But Granero was far more diplomatic.

'We think Evo Morales has good intentions. But his policies will be measured by the results. If 'Yes to coca, no to cocaine' results in an excess of coca leaves, we'll have to see where that excess goes."


http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald...s/15256722.htm