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Indeed, as the drug busters step up their campaign, they find themselves targeted more and more often for reprisals by multimillionaire cocaine czars. Last November alone, Washington's efforts were menaced on three separate fronts. In Colombia, a bomb exploded under a car parked outside the U.S. embassy in Bogota, killing a woman and, when backed up by telephoned death threats, causing 17 U.S. officials and their families to leave the country. In Peru, 19 members of a U.S.-sponsored program to eradicate coca bushes in the wilds of the Amazon jungle were killed, four of them, the State Department was told, after being tortured. In Bolivia, intelligence agents discovered that Colombian and Bolivian cocaine traffickers had paid a gunman $500,000 to murder U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr (the ambassador continues to drive around La Paz, varying his routes and his routine each day).
The violence seems likely to mount: Colombia's drug kings have sworn to kill five Americans for every compatriot extradited to the U.S. They have even placed a $300,000 bounty on the heads of U.S. narcotics agents, dead or alive. "These are very tough and mean men," says a Panama City banker familiar with the drug trade. "If you attack their livelihood, they'll fight you until the death."
The Reagan Administration is giving the drug war high priority, having involved 37 federal agencies and eleven Cabinet departments. The U.S. is fighting on a number of fronts: from eradicating coca crops in the foothills of the Andes to using trained dogs to sniff out the presence of cocaine residue in suspect bundles of cash. Political measures are also being taken. An amendment passed by Congress in October 1983 stipulates that the President should cut off aid to any country that has failed to meet projected reductions in narcotics production. The first victim of that law, some Washington officials believe, could be Bolivia, which is to receive $48 million in U.S. assistance during the current fiscal year. "Bolivia's not going to get another dollar, so far as I'm concerned," Republican Senator Paula Hawkins of Florida, the amendment's sponsor, told TIME Correspondent David Beckwith after the State Department report was released.
The Administration's various efforts to curtail the drug trade have by no means been fruitless. The amount of cocaine seized in the U.S. has increased thirtyfold since 1977, and the wholesale price of a kilo of coke in Miami has jumped from $23,000 to $35,000 in the past six months. In one two-week period a month ago, Florida authorities confiscated over two tons of the drug, more than was seized by all federal agents in 1981. But the record amounts of cocaine intercepted may only serve to prove that there are record amounts of cocaine pouring into the country--through Miami or, increasingly, Arizona, Texas and California.