Smuggling and the commerce in contraband have been a way of life in Colombia for nearly 500 years. Approximately 1,000 miles (1609 km) of largely unpatrolled Pacific and Caribbean coastline and vast tracts of mostly uninhabitable territory—ranging from tropical jungles in the south, to rugged Andean mountain slopes in the east, to sparsely populated deserts in the north—have made Colombia a haven for smugglers of illegal COCAINE, MARI-JUANA, and, most recently, HEROIN. Violence, corruption, inadequate control by the central government over much of its territory, and an ineffective judicial system have hampered Colombia's drug-control efforts. Consequently, Colombian cocaine is the single largest supply of that illicit drug to be smuggled into the United States.

During the 1980s, despite positive law enforcement and crop-control programs, Colombian laboratories processed large volumes of (COCA PLANT) (Erythroxylon coca) into cocaine; by the 1990s, their sophisticated trafficking infrastructure...