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As more refineries are set up across South America, drug routes cross more and more borders, bringing previously untainted countries into some phase of the business. Sixteen months ago, customs seized 667 kilos of cocaine, at that time the largest haul in history, at an airport near Caracas, Venezuela. In Paraguay last September, officials intercepted 49,000 gal. of ether, acetone and hydrochloric acid, enough to process eight tons of cocaine; DEA officials speculate that influential Paraguayans might be involved in drug trafficking. Cocaine arrests in Trinidad soared to 150 in 1983 from three in 1978. In the Bahamas, three Cabinet ministers in the government of Prime Minister Lynden O. Pindling resigned from their posts and two others were fired just before the release of a Royal Commission report that portrayed a government riddled with cocaine corruption.
The processing business has also started to take root in the U.S., which up to now has been mostly a customer. Forced to quit Colombia and aware that the ; U.S. is the world's largest producer of ether, traffickers have decided to import coca paste to Miami and process it locally. Over the past 18 months, authorities in Miami have closed down cocaine refineries at the rate of one a month. In January, an elderly woman strolling along the seashore in Palm Beach County almost stumbled over a dozen Army duffle bags. Suspicious, she called the sheriff's office; when the authorities opened the bags, they found almost half a ton of unprocessed coca.
As the nerve center for much of the U.S.'s drug activity, Miami has become a dumping ground not only for narcotics but also for narcodollars. In early December, a hooded witness appeared before the President's Commission on Organized Crime and confessed that he had laundered $250 million in drug money through Miami banks. In an effort to stop such large-scale manipulations, a task force of U.S. Customs and Internal Revenue Service agents has, since 1980, been auditing all financial transactions larger than $10,000. But still the traffickers outfox them. One way to defeat the audit: part-timers, from college students to grandmothers, are hired to drive around the country changing the cocaine producers' cash into cashiers' checks worth slightly less than $10,000.