By Andrew Gray MIAMI, Jan 14 (Reuters) - U.S. efforts to seize and disrupt cocaine shipments from Latin America yielded substantially less of the drug last year, officials said on Monday. The amount declined from 262 tonnes in 2006 to 210 tonnes in 2007, said Adm. Jim Stavridis, head of the U.S. military's Southern Command, responsible for operations in Latin America. Stavridis said the decline may be partly because drug smugglers have changed tactics. The 2007 figure was the lowest since 2003, according to officials. "In any given contest between offense and defense... you've got to adjust your tactics and move forward," Stavridis said. "The drug dealers are using more things like this semi-submersible," Stavridis said outside his Miami headquarters, gesturing to a gray model of a small vessel he has placed there to remind his team of the enemy they face. The model was created by U.S. experts, based on small semi-submersible craft recovered from drug cartels by Colombian security forces in the 1990s. "We're using the same kinds of techniques that we used to hunt submarines in the Cold War to try and find these kinds of semi-submersibles," he said, citing methods including advanced acoustics, satellite imagery and more use of helicopters. Stavridis said the drop in numbers could also mean more Latin American cocaine was heading for Europe rather than the United States. It could also suggest the cartels are increasingly using drugs as a form of payment inside Latin America, he said. The statistics cover Latin American cocaine seized from boats and aircraft and on land with the support of a U.S. task force coordinating that effort, based in Key West, Florida. It also includes estimates of the amounts of cocaine destroyed by smugglers when facing an interdiction operation. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. military's Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited both the Joint Interagency Task Force South and Stavridis' headquarters on Monday. Mullen said the message he had heard from task force staff was "the bad guy's moving faster than we're moving." He told task force staff he worried about how much the United States was able to focus on fighting drug smuggling with so much attention devoted to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But their mission was "a big deal," he said, and urged them to persevere. (Editing by Alan Elsner)
Colombian politician Clara Rojas embraces her son Emmanuel at a foster center in Bogota January 13, 2008. The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, rebels on January 10 freed Colombian ...
