A Letter From the Publisher: Feb. 25, 1985

This week’s cover story, on the massive influx of South American drugs into the U.S., reports the ominous conclusion of a new Government study: the size of coca crops is increasing in countries that account for much of the illegal drug flow. TIME’s own wide-ranging look at the insidious traffic began last October, when Los Angeles-based Correspondent Jonathan Beaty undertook to find out how the trade had changed in recent years. Beaty visited Central and South America, where he had, as he puts it, “whispered interviews with cocaine traffickers in Rio nightclubs, a clandestine meeting with one of Panama’s most influential smugglers, and spirited political discussions with coca plantation owners in Bolivia.” But given the sheer size, profitability and economic importance of the dope trade, Beaty says, “it wasn’t surprising that some of my most secret meetings were held not with cocaine barons but with hard-pressed Latin American prosecutors or opposition politicians, who described the involvement of their country’s military and political establishment.”

The cover story, written by Staff Writer Pico Iyer, drew on materials provided by Reporter-Researcher Edward Gomez and on reports on the drug trade from twelve Latin American and Caribbean countries. Coordinating much of this coverage was Rio de Janeiro Bureau Chief Gavin Scott, who is responsible for TIME’s reporting in most of South America. His own travels took him to, among other places, Bolivia’s two-mile-high capital of La Paz. There he interviewed Deputy Minister of the Interior Gustavo Sanchez, the country’s top law- enforcement official, who has earned the enmity of cocaine racketeers and therefore keeps a machine gun handy by his desk. Mexico City Correspondent Ricardo Chavira investigated Panama’s role as a transshipment point for drug traders.

Another key contributor to this week’s story was Caribbean Correspondent Bernard Diederich, who has reported on Latin American drug trafficking for the past 20 years, first from Mexico City and now from Miami, one of the main U.S. entry points for cocaine. Says he: “From Mexico’s Sierra Madre, where I covered opium-eradication programs in the 1970s, to Colombia’s La Guajira Peninsula, which I visited late last year, the mark of the drug trade is the littered wreckage everywhere of smugglers’ planes that didn’t make it.” The drug trade has apparently also wrecked the image of Colombians. Says Diederich: “A Colombian told me that because of the way U.S. Customs officials deal with his countrymen, he feels like a fourth-class citizen whenever he has to present his passport. Dope has marked every Colombian, even the law-abiding ones.”