Documentary : Cocaine Patrol: Prowling Bolivia’s Jungle With the DEA : They aren’t military, but they wear camouflage, carry guns and look for trouble. Come along on an operation with the Americans who man the front line of the drug war.

CHIMORE, Bolivia —  The 14-man DEA team assigned to this outpost in the green heart of South America looks like so many Rambos. Camouflage fatigues, combat boots, black M-16 automatic rifles. Hard muscles, macho manners.

But their leader, “the Colonel,” bridles at the Rambo comparison. These Americans didn’t come to kill, he tells us. “These people are all investigators. These people aren’t military.” They’re here to help the Bolivian police look for drug laboratories, cocaine and traffickers in the Chapare jungle.

The Chapare, an area the size of New Jersey, is dense, subtropical forest drained by meandering rivers and creeks, scarred here and there by rough dirt roads and patched with settlements and farms. Almost all the farms grow coca, a twiggy bush with small, pointed leaves from which cocaine is processed.

Traffickers come and go in planes and boats, bringing in dollars to buy coca paste, which is extracted from the leaves by gasoline and acid in plastic-lined pits. Many traffickers are armed, and these jungle hunting grounds pose other dangers different from what most of the U.S. agents are used to on American city streets. That’s why the Drug Enforcement Administration provides them with military assault rifles and special Army training.

The mission is part of Operation Snowcap, a program begun by the DEA in 1987 in Bolivia, Peru and Ecuador. It’s the first U.S. anti-drug program that has assigned teams of DEA agents to live and work on a daily basis in the remote, rural beginnings of the long cocaine-trafficking trail. All the agents have had several weeks of training in the Army Ranger school at Ft. Benning, Ga. The Colonel broke a leg in a practice parachute jump there. All have had Spanish-language classes, although only the Colonel and four others speak Spanish fluently.

All except the Colonel sleep on cots in a big barracks across a muddy street from the team’s day room in a small, wood-frame house. The Colonel sleeps in a small room in the back of another small house next door that serves as the DEA mission’s office. The DEA teams are rotated, each staying 90 days. This team has been in the Chapare 24 days and has helped plan and carry out a total of 51 anti-drug operations with Bolivian police. Much of it is night work. “They’re going all the time,” the Colonel says.

Jungle operations often require long marches. “It’s up and down and it’s through streams, water,” the Colonel says. “The biggest hazard is water. Like stepping off in a hole in the river with 40 pounds of gear.” Yes, 40 pounds. “On all-nighters or two-day operations, they would have at least that. It’s the same stuff light infantry wears. That’s where we get it.”

The Americans work closely with a 60-member unit of Bolivia’s militarized anti-drug police, the Mobile Patrol Unit, UMOPAR. The Bolivians wear the same camouflage uniforms as the DEA agents but carry ancient M-1 carbines instead of M-16s.

An UMOPAR patrol was ambushed by armed traffickers in March, and a lieutenant was killed. Although DEA agents were in the area on the same operation, none were with the patrol. The Colonel acknowledges the danger to DEA agents operating in the Chapare, but he tells us that traffickers seem wary of the well-trained and -equipped Americans. “I think they show reluctance to hit us when we are there because they know they are going to get waxed.”

In the past, there have been 30 major paste buyers operating in the Chapare. But the disruption of trafficking networks by police action in Bolivia and Colombia has reduced the number in recent months. “We only know of seven buyers in the valley now,” the Colonel says.

It’s a Wednesday afternoon, and a handful of agents are lounging around the DEA day room, which is part of the UMOPAR base. We ask for the Colonel. “He’s indisposed right now,” one of the agents says. We wait, looking around the room. A big American flag hangs from one wall behind a table covered with a plastic tablecloth and flanked by rough wooden benches. A Texas flag hangs overhead. Three overstuffed armchairs and a couch, wearing wrinkled cotton slipcovers with delicate flower patterns, are all occupied. The men are in T-shirts, some wearing camouflage pants, others in running shorts. They talk, doze, smoke Marlboros. From outside comes the steady rumble of the generating plant that provides electricity for the base.

Most of the agents have mustaches. The Colonel doesn’t allow beards. Two or three are watching a videotaped movie being shown simultaneously on two television screens sitting on shelves at different angles. It’s “Heartbreak Ridge,” with Clint Eastwood; he’s wearing almost exactly the same gear that these agents wear.

The shelves around the television sets are crammed with all kinds of American supermarket goods: tea, tuna, cereal, raisins, cocoa, ketchup, mustard. There are also a couple of rows of paperback books and video movies.

When Clint finishes conquering Grenada, someone puts on “Full Metal Jacket.” More camouflage fatigues. Through a doorway, we see a plump Bolivian woman in the kitchen preparing dinner, fried chicken and potato salad. Next to the kitchen, in the other back corner of the house, shortwave static crackles and whines. The radio room.

Then the Colonel comes in through the front door. He is 43, lean, curly-haired, with a sandy mustache. He has been catching up on his sleep after an all-night operation in the jungle. His DEA superiors have authorized us to talk to him but have specified that, for security reasons, his name not be used.

The Bolivian policemen at Chimore, trained by U.S. Army Special Forces, all have ranks. The DEA agents have found that the Bolivians expect them also to have ranks. So they do. And because they are all college graduates, the Americans assume the privileges of officers.

“There are no lieutenants here, nothing but captains and above,” says the Colonel.

Since the UMOPAR was established in the Chapare in the mid-1980s, one of its main problems has been corruption of officers by bribes from drug traffickers. And one of the DEA’s functions has been to try to keep the officers from falling to temptation. The Colonel says he has not been aware of any corruption since he has been here. “I give everybody the benefit of the doubt,” he says. And he rates the UMOPAR officers high in professional performance. “They’re really sharp, and they’re getting sharper.”

He confers with them at all hours, in their headquarters, in the day room, in the street outside, sometimes at his bedroom window. “They’ll come up here late at night and scratch on the screen,” he says. “They bring in informants. They always bring them to me.”

Many operations are based on information that the DEA buys from Bolivian informants cultivated by the Spanish-speaking agents. Sometimes the agents meet the informants in village bars or jungle rendezvous points. Sometimes the informants come around late at night. They tell the DEA when traffickers are planning to set up buy markets, where paste is stashed, where laboratories have been installed to convert it into semi-refined cocaine base.

Some of the informants are associated with the trafficking underworld, and others are not. As with informants in the States, the Colonel says, “Some of them want to be cops. They’re cop buffs.” He says the DEA treats its informants here with special deference. “They want to be your friend, and they want you to treat them with respect. Hispanic informants are different. You wouldn’t treat them like you’d treat a Chicago mobster.”

At 3:15 a.m. the following day, two white Toyota Landcruiser pickups leave the base loaded with UMOPAR and DEA. They are heading for a spot on the Chapare River where an informant has told the DEA that a shipment of cocaine paste will be delivered later in the morning. The informant is to meet the trucks before dawn at a village on the river and lead the officers to a place nearby where he says coca paste will be collected for shipping downriver.

6:30 a.m.: More police and DEA board two IH-1H Huey helicopters at the base airfield. The Hueys, provided by the United States and piloted by U.S.-trained Bolivian air force pilots, are to airlift officers into the place where the encounter is planned and give backup support from the air. An M-60 machine gun is mounted at the door of each aircraft.

Chugging and clattering, the Hueys take off. “They think they have found another informant,” says the Colonel, who has been communicating by radio with the men in the field. It has been raining most of the night, and low clouds hover over the forest around the base’s airstrip. But the ceiling rises after daylight, and the Colonel prepares to leave for the operation area aboard a blue and white Cessna 182 that he uses as a spotter plane. UMOPAR seized the single-engine craft from drug traffickers, he says.

7:20 a.m.: We are circling over Puerto Aurora on the Chapare River. From the Cessna, the village is a tiny collection of thatch and metal roofs. The two white pickups are parked by the river’s brown water at the end of a dirt road. People looking tiny as ants are gathered near some of the roofs, probably watching the helicopters maneuver up and down the river.

7:40 a.m.: We lose sight of one of the helicopters. The Colonel hears on the Cessna’s radio that the copter has put down officers somewhere on the other side of the river from the village. “If they’ve put people on the ground, that’s a good sign,” he tells us. “They wouldn’t be heading for the jungle unless they had someone with them to show them where to go.” A few minutes later, both Hueys land in the village soccer field and wait.

8 a.m.: The Colonel, apparently satisfied with what he has seen, returns to the Chimore base. The sun is breaking through the clouds, throwing swatches of light on the scarred forest below.

At mid-morning, one of the pickup trucks arrives from the river. The returning DEA agents are elated. A Cuban-born agent comes in the day room and salutes the Colonel. “Forty pounds of paste and two people captured, sir,” he says with a grin before stowing his M-16 on a table by the door. Others come in. One is wet from jumping out of a canoe the DEA hired to cross the river.

They chatter and laugh, digging into eggs and sausage and pancakes prepared by the cook. The operation came off without mishap. No shots fired. The two people captured, a man and a woman, were hirelings carrying the drug shipment. The trafficker in charge slipped away into the jungle, but the operation brought a special bonus. “We found out there’s a special load that’s going to be taken out tonight,” the Colonel tells us later. “One of the villagers approached one of the agents. “Just by being there, we gave the guy the opportunity. There are people that want to do this for moral reasons.”

The Cuban-American agent jokes with the Colonel about his observation flight (“Did you find us? We were lost.”) and complains about the discomforts of pre-dawn operations in the jungle (“I fell asleep on that truck waiting for daylight. The bugs were eating me alive.”).

Later the Colonel takes us over to UMOPAR headquarters for a look at the paste, moist and crumbly, grayish white, packed in clear plastic bags. An UMOPAR police clerk is taking a statement from a detained woman. In a nearby building, a dozen other prisoners peer nervously from behind the bars of a holding cell. The Colonel says most of those detained had minor trafficking jobs and will be released within a few weeks.

The Colonel is a Marine Corps veteran who spent 18 years as a DEA field agent on the Mexican border in California and Texas. Currently he has a DEA desk job in Washington. Like all the agents with him in the Chapare, he volunteered for the assignment. They came in as a group for a three-month stay. Most probably will come back on future three-month assignments. Some have been here before. “We have a couple of people who know the place like the back of their hand. In the jungle, that’s important.”

Six of the men are Border Patrol agents on loan to the DEA. The regular DEA agents come from long-term assignments in such cities as Los Angeles, San Diego, Chicago, New York and Miami.

The Colonel was an agent in Texas last year when he received a new assignment at DEA headquarters in Washington. That was when he volunteered for Operation Snowcap. He expects to have two three-month assignments in Bolivia this year, alternating with Washington desk duty. “If I’m going to have to go to headquarters, I wanted to spend six months in South America.” Why? “You’ll find there’s a little bit of the adventurer in everybody down here.”

And the Colonel says the Chapare is a key place for breaking the long chain of smuggling operations that eventually puts cocaine on U.S. streets at a cost of thousands of dollars a pound. When the DEA and UMOPAR capture a pound of drugs here, “We’re preventing everybody in that chain from making a dollar,” he says.

The DEA also puts information together that helps identify and analyze trafficking organizations. The information is sent to DEA analysts in Cochabamba, Santa Cruz and La Paz. “We’re starting to put the whole thing together,” the Colonel tells us.

Two UMOPAR officers come into the day room to talk to the Colonel. They have been told that the DEA has information on a new drug transfer to be made tonight on the Chapare River. “What we want to do is make a plan for a surveillance operation on the river,” the Colonel tells them in Spanish. “Put a motorboat at an observation point where we can see boats going by. Put another group farther downriver with another motorboat.”

DEA agents with the surveillance team will use night-vision goggles. When they see a suspicious boat pass by, they will radio the intercept and search team, which will stop the suspected boat. Helicopters will insert the two teams in the area.

There is still a lot of planning to do. The Colonel excuses himself.

Cocaine Country

American drug agents roam Bolivia’s Chapare region while, in Peru and Colombia, authorities face a new menace from allied drug traffickers and terrorists.