TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/090489/09048900.042

Text File | 1990-09-22 | 14KB | 235 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