TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/090489/09048900.042

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 13.3 KB | 256 lines

                !▒                                                            NATION, Page 12

Going Too Far


The drug thugs trigger a backlash in Colombia and Kennebunkport

By George J. Church


    Try to imagine drug gangsters murdering both Attorney
General Dick Thornburgh and his predecessor, Edwin Meese. Next,
pretend that drug triggermen and guerrilla allies rub out
almost half the Supreme Court -- say, Justices William Brennan,
Byron White, Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor -- along
with hundreds of lower-ranking but still prominent jurists.
Expand the list of victims to include Washington Post editor
Ben Bradlee and Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, both
slain, and Amy Carter, kidnaped and held briefly as a warning
to authorities who might get tough with the narco-barons. And
then the grand climax: the 1987 assassination of George Bush,
murdered at a campaign rally just as he had become the favorite
to be elected President the following year.

    In the U.S. such carnage and terror striking at the vitals
of effective government would be simply unbelievable. Yet an
almost precisely equivalent list of crimes has been committed in
Colombia over the past nine years. Since 1980, assassins have
gunned down 178 judges; eleven of the 24 members of the Supreme
Court died in a 1986 shoot-out between the army and leftist
guerrillas thought to have been paid by the drug barons. Also
hit were two successive Justice Ministers (one survived), an
Attorney General, the police chief of the nation's second
largest city, Medellin, and the editor of the newspaper El
Espectador in the capital city of Bogota. The drug lords also
kidnaped the 33-year-old son of a former President.

    Then, two weeks ago, a drug hit team pumped five bullets
into Luis Carlos Galan. A Senator and protege of incumbent
President Virgilio Barco Vargas, Galan was the clear front
runner to win the presidency in next May's elections. But by
killing him the narcotrafficantes may have finally gone too
far. Instead of further intimidating the government, the murder
of Galan helped intensify a crackdown that by last week had
escalated to what a drug lords' communique called "absolute and
total war."

    The raids, arrests and counterstrikes that followed
presented the spectacle of a country fighting for its life
against criminal combines financed by America's drug habit. The
violence spurred the Administration to jump-start its antidrug
program, scheduled to be unveiled next week in George Bush's
first major TV address to the nation. From his vacation home in
Kennebunkport, Me., the President announced a $65 million
package of emergency military aid to Colombia, more than 2 1/2
times the $25 million the nation had been scheduled to receive.
At the same time, the State Department warned that "Americans
traveling to Colombia could expose themselves to extraordinary
personal danger." Spokesman Richard Boucher said that State
"strongly urges Americans to avoid visiting Medellin,
headquarters of the drug traffickers' cartel."

    Even before the U.S. announced its infusion of emergency
assistance, Colombia's government had scored some early
victories, confiscating in raids hundreds of millions of
dollars' worth of drug kingpins' property. Included were 143
fixed-wing planes and helicopters believed to be used to
smuggle drugs to the U.S., a number of yachts, and the mansions
and ranches of the most prominent lords of the Medellin cartel:
Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha.
Colombian television showed viewers some indications of the
drug lords' obscenely lavish life-styles. One of Rodriguez
Gacha's spreads north of Bogota boasts several swimming pools,
an artificial lake and a two-acre flower garden. Another
Rodriguez Gacha mansion, inside Bogota, features a crystal
staircase set amid pink marble walls and bathrooms equipped with
gold-plated fixtures and rolls of Italian toilet paper on which
were printed copies of classic artworks. Escobar's prize
possession, a 1,000-acre ranch known as El Napoles, even had a
private zoo stocked with giraffes, dwarf elephants, rhinoceroses
and some 2,000 other exotic animals, many imported illegally
from Africa. President Barco decreed that the drug lords can get
their property back only if they claim it in person and prove
it was acquired with profits from legitimate business, not
drugs.

    Most important, Barco proclaimed a state of siege that will
allow him to extradite to the U.S. any of the 80 drug thugs
indicted by American prosecutors without getting a judge's
signature on the order. That end-runs one of the biggest
barriers to punishment of the gangsters: an intimidated
Colombian Supreme Court in 1987 declared a U.S.-Colombia
extradition treaty invalid on the flimsiest of technicalities.
Both Washington and Bogota officials declare that the drug
lords fear extradition more than anything else because they
cannot terrorize judges and juries in the U.S. as readily as
they can those in Colombia. The gangsters agree. Their
communiques have been issued in the name of a group that calls
itself, with defiant sarcasm, the Extraditables. It has adopted
the slogan "Better a Tomb in Colombia Than a Jail Cell in the
U.S."

    Though Colombian police initially rounded up and arrested
11,000 people -- many of whom were quickly released -- by Friday
they had nabbed only six people on the U.S. Justice Department's
120-name "long list" of those wanted for questioning, and not
one of the suspects on a most-wanted list of twelve supplied to
the Bogota government. The biggest catch: Eduardo Martinez
Romero, believed to be a financial adviser to the Medellin
cartel. He is one of several people indicted in the U.S. for
involvement in an alleged $1.2 billion money-laundering scheme,
in which drug money was passed off as the supposed profits of
jewelry and gold-trading businesses. Martinez is described as
only a middle-size fish, but he could turn out to be highly
important. If he is extradited and decides to talk in return for
a light sentence, he might point out where his chiefs have
hidden billions of dollars in profits and investments. The U.S.
and friendly nations could then seize those assets.

    At week's end U.S. authorities, long out of practice in
extradition cases involving Colombia, were racing against a
Monday deadline to complete a small mountain of paperwork
needed for Martinez's extradition. If they could not meet that
deadline, Martinez would have to be turned loose. Since he had
not been charged with any crime in Colombia, he could be held
only seven days after his arrest, even during a state of siege.
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration was reportedly keeping a
plane ready to fly him to America as soon as the last i was
dotted on the extradition papers.

    Yet Escobar, Rodriguez Gacha and the other drug lords had
all escaped -- perhaps into the Colombian jungles, maybe to
Peru, Brazil or Panama, where strongman Manuel Antonio Noriega
has helped them hide out during previous crackdowns. The
Extraditables on Thursday issued a bulletin (printed on
stationery with the cartel's makeshift trademark) declaring war
to the death on any politicians, judges, journalists or members
"of the political and industrial oligarchy" who oppose them,
adding menacingly that they would not "respect the families" of
their targets. To underscore those threats, the gangsters
bombed the headquarters of the Conservative Party and of
Galan's Liberal Party campaign organization, and burned the
ranches of former Finance Minister Edgar Gutierrez Castro and
Senator Ignacio Velez Escobar.

    Can the Colombian government win this war against the
gangsters who smuggle into the U.S. an estimated 80% of all the
cocaine snorted or smoked by Americans? The record is not
encouraging. The drug barons have been forced to flee abroad
before, notably during the crackdown that followed the 1984
assassination of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, only to
return and flaunt their wealth and power more ostentatiously
than ever.

    President Barco will have to sustain the campaign -- at
considerable risk to his own life -- long after public outrage
at the rubout of Galan has subsided. In an interview with TIME
earlier this year, Barco asserted, "We're fighting a struggle
that implies such high costs as no other nation has been
willing to pay." But, he said, "fighting against drugs means
fighting for democracy."

    Even if Barco persists, though, Washington is concerned that
the Colombian government cannot match the drug gangs in money,
firepower or training. The cartel runs a regular school for
motorcycle-riding assassins (called sicarios) just outside
Medellin. There, as shown on a videotape boldly distributed by
the coke cartel, aspiring murderers are drilled in such
techniques as twisting around on their choppers to blanket a
car with lethal gunfire as they roar past. The trainers have
been identified as British, South African and Israeli
mercenaries; an embarrassed Israeli government pledged last week
to investigate the reports and, if they are true, do all it can
to stop such activity.

    The U.S. aid package to Barco's military and police could
help redress the imbalance. In response to Colombian requests,
by Thursday evening Bush's White House staff outlined to the
President what could be scraped together. Bush insisted that
the aid had to reach Colombia fast and be paid for without
hurting other countries or Government programs. The assistance
was shaped into a formal plan by Friday morning and announced
by the White House that afternoon, following consultations with
congressional leaders. It includes 20 Huey helicopters, machine
guns, mortars, 18-man assault boats, jeeps, radio equipment and
ambulances. The first installment, consisting of eight Hueys
and various small arms and ammunition worth $20 million in all,
should be delivered in the next 14 days, the rest within a
month or so.

    There is some talk too of sharing more intelligence with the
Bogota government. In the past, the DEA pointed the Colombians
to the sites of cocaine labs. But the CIA and the National
Security Agency refused to make available satellite photographs
and electronically intercepted messages -- with some
justification, considering how thoroughly the Colombian
government was thought to be honeycombed by drug-gang spies.

    Despite some initial press speculation, however, Bush from
the beginning firmly ruled out the use of U.S. troops, and made
that stand public after telephoning Barco Monday night. Barco
briefly raised the subject only to dismiss it; the Colombians,
he said, do not want any such assistance. Both Presidents are
well aware that the presence of armed Yankees would be bitterly
resented as U.S. interference. The White House, however, rather
nervously disclosed that a "small" band of Americans will be
dispatched to train the Colombians in the use of the military
equipment they will be getting. One official estimated the
number of trainers and support personnel at 50 to 100.

    U.S. troops may not be needed anyway: possibly the drug
lords began the latest round of murders in desperation because
the Colombian government was already putting a deep crimp in
their activities. One of the hits was on Medellin police chief
Valdemar Franklin Quintero, who had commanded an operation
called Rainbow that resulted in the destruction of 28
cocaine-processing laboratories and the capture of eleven tons
of the drug.

    Even more important, Colombian authorities in the first six
months of 1989 seized more than a million gallons of processing
chemicals such as ether and acetone -- enough to make 320 tons
of cocaine, almost the entire estimated yearly output of the
cartel. It was the rubouts of Franklin Quintero and Superior
Court Magistrate Carlos Valencia, who invalidated a jury's
verdict acquitting Rodriguez Gacha of murder, that caused
President Barco to declare that he was reviving the extradition
process. The murder of presidential candidate Galan, occurring
minutes before Barco went on television, then prompted the mass
arrests and the escalation to full war.

    Though the U.S. has a big stake in the battle in Colombia,
it cannot do much besides send materiel and cheer for Barco.
Washington's antidrug policy is moving away from interdiction of
supply to cutting down demand at home. Bush's program will
propose shifting funds to expanded drug-education and
-treatment programs, and stiffer penalties for casual users.
Such an emphasis on curtailing the U.S. appetite for cocaine and
other drugs is fine by the Colombians. As President Barco told
TIME, "Every time a North American youngster pays for his vice
in the streets of New York, Miami or Chicago, he becomes a link
in the chain of crime, terror and violence which has caused us
so much damage and pain. The best help the U.S. could give for
the tranquillity and the defense of human rights of Colombians
would be attacking face to face the consumption of drugs in
that country."

    After years of nagging Colombia to crack down on its cocaine
gangsters, the U.S. is seeing the government literally risk its
life to do so. Now the question is how hard America is prepared
to fight the drug war in its own streets.


-- Dan Goodgame/Kennebunkport, John Moody/Bogota and Elaine
Shannon/Washington