Drug traffickers have recently been using Cuba to meet or seek refuge, according to information that has emerged from a string of narcotics arrests and scandals in Latin America this year.

The latest case became known when the chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Miami, Vincent Mazzilli, said the top leaders of a huge Colombian-Mexican drug smuggling consortium arrested last week had met at least once in Havana.

Mazzilli said Colombia's Alejandro Bernal Madrigal and Mexico's Armando Valencia had met this year at a Cuban site he did not identify. They were indicted in Miami on charges of heading a network responsible for smuggling 20 to 30 tons of cocaine a month to the United States.

The indictments were part of Operation Millennium, announced simultaneously by Attorney General Janet Reno in Washington, Colombian National Police Chief Rosso Jose Serrano in Bogota and Mazzilli in Miami.

Mazzilli made a point of saying that the investigation had not implicated any Cubans and that the ``obvious reason for the meeting in Havana was that Cuba was ``outside the reach of U.S. and Colombian authorities.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND

Skeptics alleged that Cuban authorities must have known of the meeting.

``In a country where every human rights activist, political dissident and journalist is followed, that narco-traffickers can meet without the Cuban secret police knowing is a tale from Alice in Wonderland, said Rep. Robert Menendez, D-N.J.

Whatever the truth, it's clear that Bernal Madrigal and Valencia were not the first suspected drug traffickers to visit Cuba.

Last month, a reputed member of Colombia's Medellin Cartel, Hector Dario Yepes, was arrested in Panama after he arrived on a flight from Havana. Extradited to Colombia, Yepes said he had been in Cuba as a tourist.

And last April, two suspects in one of Peru's largest narcotics cases ever fled to Cuba after authorities seized 2.3 tons of cocaine hidden among boxes of fish in a shipping container in the Pacific port of Callao.

Peruvian authorities identified the leaders of the smuggling plot as Boris Foguel y Suengas, 39, a Panamanian businessman, and Bruno Chiappe, a Peruvian auto broker.

Chiappe later returned to Peru and turned himself in to police on the advice of his lawyer, Javier Corrochano, to take advantage of a law that offers lower penalties for criminals who confess and repent.

HOTEL MEETING

Corrochano told El Nuevo Herald that while in Cuba, Chiappe met with Foguel in a suite at the Melia Cohiba hotel in Havana, and that Foguel stayed regularly in a house in Havana that he shared with a Cuban girlfriend.

``It is powerfully interesting to me that [Foguel] can walk around freely, Corrochano said. ``But since Interpol doesn't get much attention there. . . .

Foguel, in an interview with the Lima news weekly Caretas reported to have taken place ``somewhere in Central America, said he had run an import-export business in Cuba for some years. Among the products he mentioned were prefabricated houses.

Peruvian police have alleged that the Foguel-Chiappe group, nicknamed The Camels, laundered about $24 million through investments in buildings, luxury vehicles and bankrupt or fictitious enterprises.

The Cuban government told Peruvian authorities that it had no record of any visit to the island by Foguel.

Earlier this year, the Mexican newspaper Reforma reported that police believed that Mario Villanueva, a former governor of the state of Quintana Roo wanted on drug charges, was hiding in a small town near Havana.

Mexican police also claim to have some evidence that Amado Carrillo, a powerful drug lord who died in 1997, visited Cuba several times beginning in 1994 and stayed in a government house reserved for important foreign visitors.