The war on drugs: Ambushed in Jamundí

Why the massacre of an elite US-trained Colombian police team prompted Congress to freeze drug-war funding.

On May 22, right after the Monday afternoon bingo game, three cars skidded to a halt on the road that dead ends at Mi Casita. Ten men in blue jeans and police vests and one man in a ski mask piled out.

War on drugs A three-part series Part 1 - 09/27/06 Ambushed in Jamundí Part 2 - 09/28/06 Plan Columbia: Big gains, but cocaine still flows Part 3 - 09/29/06 How to fix Plan Colombia

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"Judicial police! Open up!" they shouted.

Mr. Morales, as the one responsible for the keys, hurried down the path to comply.

As he reached the green iron gate, however, Sergio Berrio, the administrator of the home, leaned out from the balcony above and screeched: "Stay back! Don't open!"

Morales froze. That's when the shooting started: a torrent of bullets and grenades rained down on the police from the nearby forest. "The war came here," Morales recalls incredulously, "...all the way here."

What followed in the next 45 minutes was the calculated massacre of one of Colombia's best counternarcotics police teams - all hand-picked and trained by the US. None survived.

This is a story of those policemen - of the members of Colombia's military that killed them - and of the narcotraffickers that, according to Colombia's attorney general, ordered the hit.

The investigation of the Jamundí massacre to date suggests the reach that Colombia's drug lords maintain today, and has shaken officials in Washington and Bogotá. The US Congress has temporarily frozen funding for Plan Colombia, the $4.7 billion effort to stop the illicit drug trade - and a chorus of disappointed and angry voices in both capitals is demanding an honest evaluation of the US' most expensive foreign aid program outside of the Middle East, six years after it set out to win the war on drugs.

* * *

"Three thousand Americans a year die from Colombian drugs," says US Ambassador to Colombia William Wood. "That's like suffering a World Trade Towers attack every year."

Talking about drugs in terms of an attack on the US is not new. President Richard Nixon coined the term "war on drugs" in 1971, and President Ronald Regan popularized it in the 1980s, as crack cocaine was devastating America's inner cities. Then, with the cold war drawing to a close, illicit substances and those who trafficked them became the new international enemy - and the countries that produced them became battlefields. Colombia has emerged as the biggest battlefield of all.

An estimated 5.5 million Americans have used cocaine at least once in the past 12 months, roughly the same number as were doing so in 2002, according to the annual US Department of Health and Human Services survey. More than 2.3 million Americans are "current" users, defined as consuming the drug within the last month - a slightly higher number than the regular users counted in 2002.

Cocaine consumption is rising faster in Europe, but the US still has the highest rate of cocaine use anywhere in the world.

And while Ambassador Wood's 3,000 US deaths related to cocaine use is debated, the source of the narcotic is not. Colombia supplies an estimated 80 percent of cocaine worldwide, and more than 90 percent of the cocaine (and half the heroin) in the US, according to the State Department.

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