Striking At the Source

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Word leaked out almost as soon as the giant U.S. Air Force C-5A transport plane touched down in the Bolivian city of Santa Cruz. As U.S. embassy spokesmen in the capital city of La Paz and Defense Department officials in Washington tried to downplay the matter, headlines in Bolivia and the U.S. were blaring the news: in the first use of a U.S. military operation on foreign soil to fight drugs, Army Black Hawk helicopters, armed with .30-cal. machine guns and escorted by about 160 U.S. soldiers, had been flown into the South American jungle to assist Bolivian authorities in wiping out that country's production of cocaine.

Although the mission had a ferocious code name, "Operation Blast Furnace," it was apparently carried out under unwritten rules similar to those observed when federal revenue agents chased down Appalachian bootleggers: the etiquette dictated that no one on either side would really shoot to kill. U.S. troops, though armed with M-16 rifles, were under orders not to fire unless fired upon. Besides, the splash of unwanted publicity removed the surprise, ensuring that most of the big drug traffickers would be out of the country before the forces arrived. Said Bolivian Ambassador to the U.S. Fernando Illanes: "With all the advance advice, I think everybody is scampering." At the outset, the mission had a comicopera quality to it. The planned arrival from the U.S. Southern Command in Panama of the C-5A transport ferrying the helicopters, to be followed by C-130 troop planes, had to be delayed three days because a wildcat gasoline strike prevented refueling at Santa Cruz airport. While the huge C-5A sat at the airport in full view of TV cameras, reporters and, presumably, drug merchants, U.S. troops needed four days to transport supplies to a base camp north of Trinidad, in Bolivia's lush northeastern Beni region, where most of the coca leaves are processed. "This thing has turned into a bad dream," confessed one Pentagon official.

In La Paz, meanwhile, opposition parties complained that President Victor Paz Estenssoro should have consulted his Congress before calling in the U.S. military. Even some high-placed Bolivians were dismayed by the turn of events. Said Jacobo Libermann, one of Paz Estenssoro's advisers: "We would have liked assistance of another nature, entirely run by Bolivians and carried out discreetly. Instead, we got the invasion of Normandy."

By week's end the operation was at last under way, as U.S. pilots flew Leopards (as the special police of Bolivia's antidrug unit are known) on four raids. In the first one, 30 of the troops jumped out of two choppers near a 15-tent drug complex just as a Cessna aircraft was landing nearby. The pilot fled into the jungle, but his 17-year-old helper was seized. The raiders destroyed a log-frame laboratory where coca leaves were converted into coca paste.

In the second assault, the Leopards found no cocaine lab in their landing area; their intelligence had been faulty. Two more strikes at week's end suffered from similar information failures. The choppers roared into the * sites, the invaders leaped out, but they failed to find either any cocaine handlers or their equipment.