Colombia hits top cartels but cocaine keeps moving

BUENAVENTURA, Colombia, July 21 (Reuters) Colombia's most infamous cocaine lords have been killed or jailed, violence has fallen sharply and drug seizures are at an all-time high.

But the string of successes in the world's No 1 producer has not been enough to slash the amount of cocaine for sale on the streets of the United States or Europe.

Even as the US-backed war on drugs has tamed top cartels, smaller groups have emerged, shifting coca leaf to areas that are harder to fumigate and opening new smuggling routes.

Colombia's Pacific coast is now a key battleground.

''This is one of the heaviest trafficking zones,'' said Lt Juan Correa, patrolling in a US-made Piranha gunboat in search of speedboats carrying drugs and guns near the large port of Buenaventura.

''They use all the rivers in speedboats, and use the mangroves for improvised factories. Then they take the drugs out into the open sea to larger ships,'' he said.

Days earlier, Colombian Marines waded chest deep through a jungle river an hour's helicopter ride away and found 6.5 tonnes of cocaine buried in the earth and waiting for shipment out into the Pacific Ocean.

It was the latest major seizure in a security crackdown that has won President Alvaro Uribe strong approval ratings at home and the full support of US President George W Bush.

Marines make daily captures of cocaine, drug-making chemicals and weapons in the rivers and impoverished wooden slums around the harbor here, where traffickers, rebel groups and paramilitaries all battle for control of smuggling routes.

Since 2000, the United States has pumped more than 4 billion dollars in mostly narcotics and security aid into its Plan Colombia program to slash cocaine shipments and curb Latin America's oldest guerrilla insurgency.

It says the money helped rescue Colombia and clearly much has changed from the late 1980s, when drug lord Pablo Escobar unleashed a wave of bombing and shooting attacks that killed hundreds of police, government officials and civilians.

A ruthless man who portrayed himself as a friend of the poor and opened a zoo on his ranch featuring giraffes, rhinos and hippos, Escobar was shot dead in a police chase across the rooftops of Medellin in December 1993.

Since then, both the Medellin and the rival Cali cartels have been devastated by arrests and extraditions.

Uribe's government has sent hundreds of drug traffickers to face U.S. justice since he took office in 2002, and the military has retaken large areas once held by Marxist guerrillas also involved in the cocaine trade.

''The country is much stronger institutionally to contain drug trafficking, and in that Plan Colombia has achieved a purpose,'' top police chief Gen. Oscar Naranjo told Reuters.

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