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Several hours later, a merchant in the area was slaughtered in his home. The murderers reportedly left handwritten signs reading "This is how servants of the government die." Last week authorities recovered the mutilated bodies of four U.S.-employed surveyors. Felipe Paucar, president of an agricultural cooperative in Lima, speculated that the men had been murdered by members of the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist terrorist group. "I think it was Sendero," said he, "because of the way they were cruelly tortured: their fingers were cut off, their tongues were cut." The U.S. has suspended the coca-eradication program pending investigation of the killings.
It was the Mexican marijuana enterprise that truly stunned U.S. officials. The plantations, located in high, arid country, included huge barns for storing bales of the drug, drying and packaging facilities, a 30-truck parking lot and, allegedly, some 7,000 campesinos who were being used as slaves. The peasants had been lured to Chihuahua with the promise of earning 3,000 pesos ($14.70) a day for harvesting fruit. At the cannabis plantations, they were forced to work at gunpoint. They were herded into the fields at 4 a.m. and worked incessantly until 10 at night. They ate once or perhaps twice a day. The strongest were given scissors to cut the marijuana branches and separate the seeds, while the children and the old men packaged the pot in bundles of no more than 10 kilos each and loaded the packets onto trucks. The campesinos were threatened with execution if they tried to escape. Some of them claimed that five had died while working on the plantations, but the authorities found no trace of human remains.
The amount of marijuana seized was staggering. U.S. officials had estimated that in 1983 only 1,300 tons, or some 9% of the marijuana consumed in the U.S. that year, was produced in Mexico. The amount found in Chihuahua alone was seven times as great as that estimate. "It represents what we thought was 75% to 80% of our annual consumption," said Thomas.
The latest estimates said that Colombia provided 59% of the pot smoked in the U.S., with 6,000 to 9,000 tons smuggled into the country last year. Jamaica was be lieved to have provided 13%, while 11% was grown domestically and 8% originated in Belize, Thailand and other countries. It was believed that 20 million Americans smoked marijuana regularly. All these estimates may be quite inaccurate, given the implications of the huge bust in Mexico. Said a DEA spokesman of the numbers: "We may have goofed."
— By Jacob V. LamarJr. Reported by Bernard Diederich/ Miami and Larry Wippman/Lima