BE OUR GEST: HOW COLOMBIA'S DRUG LORDS TOUCH OUR LIVES

Morley Swingle is the prosecuting attorney of Cape Girardeau County.

What does the country of Colombia, South America, have to do with cocaine on the streets of Cape Girardeau? Or with you personally? Answer: More than you know.

As a local prosecutor since 1982, I have been involved in the investigation and prosecution of hundreds of drug cases, mostly small-time dealers, with an occasional big fish on the hook.

Meanwhile, I would occasionally notice articles in the national press about the major "Drug Lords" in Colombia, and would think with some satisfaction that what went on in South America had little to do with us here in Southeast Missouri.

Last year, I decided to become more educated about world-wide cocaine distribution. Do the Colombians have anything to do with the cocaine on the streets of Cape Girardeau?

The answer is scary.

The use of cocaine in the United States increased dramatically in the 1980s because at the same time the invention of "crack" cocaine increased demand, the improved organization and ruthlessness of the South American drug dealers increased the available supply.

The eastern slopes of the Andes mountains in South America, in areas of Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, are the only places in the world where cocaine grows. It comes from coca leaves, harvested four times per year, from shrubs that can get up to 12 feet tall. Thus, the cocaine being sold today in Cape Girardeau undoubtedly came from South America.

Eighty percent of the cocaine exported into the United States comes through the country of Colombia. It may have been grown in Colombia or Peru or Bolivia, but most of it goes through Colombia on its way to other places in the world.

Colombia has historically been a haven for all types of smugglers. It borders both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. It is closer to Miami than Miami is to Chicago.

In the 1970s, cocaine smuggling was still a comparatively disorganized collection of separate small-time operators. It came into the United States only a few kilos at a time, hidden in the luggage or on the bodies of people hired to carry it, known as "mules."

In the late 1970s, several of the Colombian drug dealers, who had started out as petty thieves and small-time smugglers, got together and pooled their money to buy their own airplane. With each flight they became richer. In 1974, a kilo of cocaine (about the size of a loaf of bread) could be bought in Colombia for $2,000 and resold in the United States for $55,000.

The first airplane became airplanes, and eventually one of them, Carlos Lehder, bought an entire island in the Bahamas, known as Norman's Cay, and the group used it as a refueling station for all of their airplanes. By the middle of the 1980s, four Colombian drug dealers (Pablo Escobar, who just escaped from prison last July; Jorge Ochoa; Lehder; and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha) controlled more than 50 percent of the cocaine coming into the United States more than 50 metric tons per year. They had thousands of employees: peasants who grew the coca and processed it into cocaine; airplane pilots who carried it; distributors who marketed it in the United States; lawyers who handled the legal problems; thugs who offered bribes or issued threats; and hired killers who eliminated enemies. By the mid-1980s they were known as the Medellin cartel and their income was at least $2 billion per year, tax free.

Lehder was eventually caught and extradited to the United States where he stood trial. He was convicted and is currently in prison in Marion, Ill., just 50 miles from Cape Girardeau.

One thing the major drug dealers are deathly afraid of is extradition to the United States for trial. The reason is that although they have thoroughly succeeded in corrupting the judicial system in Colombia, they cannot control our legal system. Police officers, prosecutors and judges in Colombia are poorly paid and poorly protected. Those who have integrity and backbone are routinely assassinated. Between 1979 and 1989, more than 220 Colombian judges and officers of the court were murdered. More than 500 others resigned. In 1985, the going rate for a bribe to a judge was $50,000, and it was well known that, as one prosecutor put it, "You could take the bribe or you could die."

The death was usually at the hands of a hired killer riding a motorcycle who would fire an automatic weapon into the judge's car. The weapon of choice was most often an Ingram MAC-10 handgun, a "box-shaped little black killing machine that could send big .45 caliber slugs through a car body at the rate of a thousand per minute."

On Nov. 26, 1985, the drug dealers' henchmen took over the Supreme Court Building in Bogata, Colombia. The Supreme Court was considering the issue of whether Colombian drug dealers could be extradited to the United States. They had allowed Lehder to be extracted and seemed likely to rule that others could be sent to the United States, too. On that bloody day, 11 of the 24 Supreme Court judges were shot dead in their offices. Two of the survivors resigned as a result of continuing death threats. Eight months later, the new Chief Justice, the last surviving "hard-liner" on the extradition issue, was ambushed by the motorcycle killers. Not surprisingly, the new judges who replaced the dead jurists voted on Dec. 12, 1986, to use a legal technicality to prohibit extradition.

Thus, the law of the land of Colombia was changed by assassination. As one former Supreme Court Justice said at the time: "A year ago, to be a justice was every lawyer's aspiration; now everybody hides, so they won't be asked to serve."

A 1990 Department of Justice report estimated that four Colombian drug cartels controlled 70 percent of the cocaine processed in Colombia and 80 percent of the cocaine exported to the United States. The Medellin cartel is still the most powerful, but is now rivaled in influence by another one in Cali.

Our community is feeling the effects of the Colombian cocaine. A large percentage of people prosecuted for burglary, robbery, shoplifting or other types of stealing were either on drugs at the time they committed the crimes, or did them to get more money to buy more cocaine. A large percentage of the domestic violence cases, assault cases, and sexual assault cases involve people who were on drugs.

There is some good news:

The use of drugs may have reached its peak in the 1980s. We now seem to be on a downward curve in drug use. A 1991 study indicated that for the previous three years in a row, fewer young people were using drugs than the year before. Thus, drug education programs like Project Charlie seem to be having a positive effect.

Lehder is in prison, Escobar is on the run, and Gacha is dead (shot down by Colombian police); still, it is naive to think that others have not taken their places.

Prosecutors and judges in the United States are better paid than their Colombian counterparts and are protected by the best law enforcement officers in the world. The large scale corruption that took place in Colombia could not take place on the same scale here.

In October of 1990, the Colombian government fixed the technicality in a treaty that had allowed its Supreme Court to bar extradition of drug dealers to the United States.

The United States government recently began using the military to help fight the importation of cocaine at our borders, using sophisticated military equipment to intercept many of these cocaine flights.

The best book about the "Drug Lords" is arguably "Kings of Cocaine" by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, award-winning reporters of the Miami Herald. It is available at the Cape Girardeau Public Library. Although it is non-fiction, it reads like a suspense novel.

Once you read it, you will never again think Colombian drug lords have nothing to do with you.