A LOSING BATTLE ON DRUGS IN COLOMBIA?

"The Better We Get At Catching Them," A U.S. Official Said, "The More
Creative They Get."

BOGOTA, Colombia - The six puppies looked fine at first. But when
police gave them a closer look, they found fresh scars on their
bellies that told a different story.

The tiny Labradors and rottweilers had been surgically converted into
drug couriers, cut open, with several packets of heroin stitched into
their abdomens.

Even Colombia's hardened police, who found the puppies at an
abandoned house outside Medellin, had never seen anything like it.
Traffickers were apparently going to ship the dogs to the United
States saying they were pets. It is almost certain that they would
have been discarded as soon as their valuable cargo was removed.

"The better we get at catching them, the more creative they get,"
said Mark Styron, supervisor of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration's Heroin Group in Bogota.

Staying ahead of the smugglers is expensive. Since 2000, the United
States has sent $4.5 billion to Colombia to help battle drug
trafficking. That six-year program, known as Plan Colombia, is set to
expire at the end of this year.

Although the Bush administration and Congress have signaled a
willingness to continue funding at current levels for at least one
more year, some are questioning the money's effectiveness in stemming
the tide of drugs to the United States.

Much of the cocaine and a major part of the heroin that end up for
sale on the street corners of the United States originate in the rich
soil of this conflict-ridden South American country.

The Colombians, defending the antidrug effort, point to the hundreds
of thousands of acres of coca and poppy fields they have destroyed
and the tons of drugs seized at their airports and borders.
Kidnappings and murders are down.

But a report from the United Nations showed that while coca
cultivation in Colombia was down, it had risen in neighboring Peru and Bolivia.

And the efforts in Colombia seem to have had little measurable effect
on the U.S. drug supply. The Justice Department's National Drug
Threat Assessment for 2005 found that heroin and cocaine were still
readily available throughout the United States. Data from the DEA
show that the purity of wholesale cocaine being smuggled in from
South America has increased slightly.

At least with heroin, however, there is some evidence that a
crackdown begun in 2002 is showing results. DEA tests show that
purity has dipped 14.5 percent since 2000. It is generally believed
that if a drug is in short supply, purity decreases and prices increase.

Colombia remains the world's largest producer of cocaine, and the
nation's image remains closely linked to the drug.

Yet in the United States, concern is running high about heroin.
Although the opiate is not used with the frequency of cocaine or
marijuana, it is highly addictive and leads to a disproportionately
high number of overdoses and deaths, according to emergency-room data.

Colombia produces only 2 percent of the world's heroin, but it is
generally believed to be among the best, often so pure that users can
snort it, rather than injecting it. And almost all Colombian heroin
flows into the United States. Ninety percent of the heroin on the
East Coast is Colombian, according to the DEA.

Plan Colombia was launched under the Clinton administration as a way
to fight drugs. After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001,
Congress said the funding could be used for counterterrorism as well.

In Colombia, the two are inseparable, officials say.

"The drugs are the terrorists' juice," said William Wood, U.S.
ambassador to Colombia.

The drug pipeline to the United States often begins in the camps of
the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. Known by its
Spanish-language acronym, FARC controls swaths of rural coca- and
poppy-growing territory. Colombian police and intelligence officials
say FARC supports itself and its insurgency against the government
with millions of dollars from the drug trade.

One FARC defector said in an interview that he abandoned the group
because of its brutality. Leaders in his front ordered his brother to
kill his girlfriend after she violated the rules and killed a civilian.

The man, who declined to give his name out of fear of retaliation,
said that he grew up in FARC and that drugs were a constant presence.

"To end the drug war, you have to end the guerillas," he said. "As
long as there are guerillas, there are drugs. They exist together."

Everywhere in Colombia there is evidence of U.S. money and influence:
Black Hawk and Huey helicopters, twin-engine Otter police planes,
fixed-wing fumigation planes. At a rural training site southwest of
Bogota, American Special Forces help the Colombians train for
dangerous raids to destroy drug labs.

"It would be much worse without the U.S.," said Gen. Jorge Daniel
Castro, chief of the Colombian National Police. "This is a long and
difficult battle, and the United States has been our strongest ally."

Over the last 10 years, Colombia has lost 40 U.S.-supplied aircraft
battling FARC and the right-wing United Self-Defense Forces of
Colombia, or AUC. The additional aid is needed to keep the fleet
operating, the Colombians say.

Wood, the U.S. ambassador, said that more people died every year in
the United States from Colombian drugs than in the Sept. 11 attacks.
U.S. aid will eventually decline as the situation stabilizes, he
said. But the drug problem will never go away entirely, and the
United States - as the primary consumer of South American drugs -
will likely always have a role in Colombia.

"It's like asking when is crime over," Wood said. "It's never going to be over."