Colombia's Cocaine Convulsion

...This situation worries Andres Pastrana, who proved victorious in Bogota's March mayoral election...

...In 1987 growth topped 5 per cent for the second consecutive year...

...One Western diplomat commented, "Imagine one of those young investigators being called in the middle of the night and being informed that a killing has been committed...

...The killers are out to destroy Colombian democracy...

...Mejia does not know who wants her out of the way, but suspects she is on the list because of her high profile as an investigative reporter...

...Since its inception, more than 500 members of the UP have been killed...

...The money is being used to train judges and lawyers, and to help refine the special investigators' skills...

...The agency estimated that $35 billion worth of illegal drugs entered the U.S...

...the task is performed by special legal investigators...

...The American mafia might send a note of apology to the next of kin...

...A study released this past May by the Bogota-based Research Center of the University of the Andes revealed that Colombia has an annual murder rate of 52.8 per 100,000 (about five times that of theU.S...

...Amnesty International concurs with Salinas in holding the military primarily responsible for the violence...

...In a chat about drugs one night in my hotelroom, my guide, German Baquero, sketched a scenario reminiscent of the United States: "You can buy basuco on practically any street corner in Bogota...

...Every day, when I wake up and go to work, I ask myself: What should I do...

...Colombians note that the Medellin Cartel seems to have more money than the government...

...In November 1985, M-19 guerrillas seized the Palace of Justice in Bogota...

...Conventional wisdom has attributed Colombia's economic vigor to the drug money (put at between $500 million and $1 billion a year) secretly making its way back to the country...

...the price for a contract killing in Colombia ranges from$40to $8,000...

...The drug bosses are savage in dealing with their opponents...

...They have constructed zoos and sports arenas, bought ambulances for hospitals, and financed housing projects for the country's homeless...

...observers say they were the largest since those sparked in 1948 by the assassination of popular Liberal party candidate Jorge Eliecer Gaitan (an event that led to a decade of bloodshed known as la Violencia, in which an estimated 200,000 people died...

...Over the past four years, Mejia has been involved in covering the negotiations between the government and the Leftist rebels...

...In Bogota (population 5 million) there are an estimated 15,000 criminal gangs...

...Ask Colombians who is behind the wave of violence and you get differing answers...

...Americans know Colombia as the country that has exported drugs to the U.S.," Pastrana told me...

...The drug problem is not one affecting just Colombia and the U.S...

...The protection business is booming...

...The October demonstrations resulted in at least six deaths throughout the country and the looting of downtown Bogota...

...This year the U.S...

...is giving the Colombian government $600,000 to help make its justice system more efficient...

...But we have a big consumption problem, too...

...So serious has the epidemic of murder, assassination and kidnapping become in this South American Republic that in 1987 the government appointed a select commission to study the problem...

...In Coming Issues "Gorbachev's Balancing Act" by Robert V. Daniels "Colorado Water Fight" by Hal Langfur "Taking Stock of the Stock Markets' by George P. Brockway Western diplomats give Barco high marks for effort...

...Officials of the Patriotic Union Party (UP) quickly finger Right-wing death squads...

...soon...

...He, Maria Luisa Mejia and others living in constant fear no doubt hope such a meeting will concern itself as well with uncovering those who have designated them for death...

...Its authors gave her a simple choice: Leave the country or die...

...Embassy officials particularly bemoan the fact that the government has to use inexperienced lawyers, while the cocaine mafia retains some of the country's best legal minds...

...Pardo's murder triggered widespread demonstrations...

...He probably can't afford a car and has to catch a bus at his own expense, go to the scene of the crime and try to figure out who is guilty...

...Escobar, for example, once held a state legislative seat in his native Medellin Province...

...Among Colombian males between 15 and 44, homicide is the number one cause of death...

...The cartel strives to maximize profits, just as any economic monopoly would...

...This spring one of the police raids in the mid-Magdalena region netted 10 tons of cocaine, surpassing the nine tons confiscated by Colombian law enforcement in all of 1987...

...official elaborated: "We want to help the law enforcement officials to be able to go to the scene of the crime and find clues...

...Three of those invited said no thanks...

...A capo here will kill you, your wife, your children, your relatives, if he can find them, and even your pets...

...In Medellin Province, young men in their teens or early 20s are going to school to become sicarios (assassins...

...They pointed instead to the country's increasing economic development and the implementation of sound economic policies, like the government's devaluation ofthepesoby more than 50 per cent in 1985...

...When your life is threatened, it changes completely...

...Colombia has had a longer and more intense history of guerrilla activity than any other Latin American country...

...Our officials and party members are being murdered by members of the Army in alliance with the drug traffickers," claimed ObidoSalinas, the UP's executive secretary, during an interview in the party's rundown headquarters in one of Bogota's poorer barrios...

...During an earlier two-week trip I made here in January, Carlos Hoyas, the Attorney General, was murdered...

...A fourth thought it much better for his health to vote against the law's validity, and the treaty was thus declared unconstitutional...

...President Barco quickly signed the measure back into law, but drug bosses went to court challenging its constitutionality...

...Graduates are given motorcycles to do their work...

...At last count 137 paramilitary groups were roaming the country in search of victims...

...Up to now, there have been accusations and mutual finger pointing between Colombia and the U.S.,' says Alfredo Vasquez of the Committee for the Defense of Human Rights...

...Though the UP won only 14 congressional seats and 4.4 per cent of the vote in 1986, it scored the Left's biggest electoral victory of the century...

...According to the study, in recent decades only Zimbabwe in 1979 and El Salvador and Guatemala in 1980 have had higher peace-time murder rates...

...In 1987, an estimated 500 Colombian police officers were under investigation for drug trafficking...

...The government is also hampered by poorly conducted criminal inquiries...

...Fellow cartel member Carlos Lehder Rivas ran for a state legislative seat in the March elections, even though he is now in a Jacksonville, Florida, jail awaiting sentencing for a drug trafficking conviction...

...But I believe in the type of journalism I' m doing...

...They want me to stop working," she says...

...They have pooled their resources and established agreed upon sales and distribution networks to avert costly rivalry and bloodshed...

...After signing the truce, FARC created the UP to run candidates in the 1986 congressional and presidential elections, and in Colombia's first mayoral elections, held last March...

...The government declined, but the fact that it was willing to sit across the table from the drug bosses told the world something about their power...

...The dealers now are selling it even to schoolchildren in the primary schools...

...What the guerrillas advanced the drug mafia has pretty well finished...

...State Department study revealed that 600,000 Colombians out of apopulation of 29 million use coca derivatives...

...The most popular of these appears to be basuco, the residue of the coca leaves...

...Drug Enforcement Administration says processes and distributes 75 to 80 per cent of the cocaine used in the United States...

...But compared to ours, they can be described as gentlemen when they kill...

...The government has countered with statistics indicating that the country's drug bosses are largely to blame for the bloodshed...

...DRUGS AND POLITICS IN LATIN AMERICA-2 Colombia's Cocaine Convulsion BY RON CHEPESIUK Bogota Sitting in her office at the television studios of Channel 7 here, Maria Luisa Mejia hardly gives the impression of being a young woman who could so anger some people that they would want her dead...

...In its April report on Colombia's human rights situation, the organization urged the government to conduct an exhaustive and impartial investigation of the matter and demanded that it "take the necessary steps to protect human rights...

...and an attempted bombing in Medellin of a building owned by drug kingpin Juan Escobar left two dead and caused damage up to a half mile away...

...The drug barons have tried to portray themselves as maligned Robin Hoods, courting the Colombian public by distributing their loose change to the people...

...They note that in the past few months Colombian authorities have conducted raids on the estates of Juan Escobar (during one of them he just managed to escape in his underwear...

...Pastrana will have to contend with drug bosses who have at their disposal unlimited wealth to suborn the system and protect their interests...

...Traditionally in Colombia, a twoparty system of Liberals and Conservatives has monopolized political power...

...When the smoke cleared another seven justices resigned, and replacements have been hard to find...

...Sicarios have been responsible for the murders of such well-known Colombians as Foreign Minister Rodrigo Lara, El Espectador editor Guillermo Cano, UP figure Pardo, and most recently, Attorney General Hoyas...

...Mejia stayed, but that first death list and the more than 20 others issued subsequently have sparked an exodus from Colombia of artists, writers, doctors, journalists, and scientists—leading members of the country's intellectual and creative elite...

...I plan to work with the university researchers, the private sector and the central government in developing programs to deal with the problem...

...Political problems caused by the rampant lawlessness in Colombian society have been mitigated to some extent by a healthy economy...

...She is one of Colombia'sbest known journalists, amedia star with the name recognition of a Diane Sawyer or Barbara Walters...

...They even give the children a free sample...

...Vasquez is himself on a death list...

...The Colombian press publishes daily reports of the slaughter...

...We need an international summit that would involve all the affected countries...

...Ron Chepesiuk, a free-lance writer here making his first NL appearance, specializes in Latin American affairs...

...Congressional hearings and grand jury testimony in Miami concerning Panama's General Manuel Antonio Noriega have in fact revealed that the Colombian drug lords have bought off high government and military officials in Panama, the Bahamas, Haiti, and Honduras...

...The success of the upstart UP, say party officials, has made its members prime candidates for death...

...It is smoked like a marijuana cigarette, and its effects are comparable to those of crack...

...She has interviewed all the major leaders of the country's four largest guerrilla groups—the April 19 Movement (M-19), the Colombia Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), the National Liberation Army (ELN) and the People's Liberation Army (EPL)—and suspects elements opposed to the peace process, quite possibly in the military, drew up the list...

...Dressed in brown corduroys and a plain white blouse, she almost looks fragile as she explains in a soft voice how her life has changed since last August, when she learned that her name had been placed on a death list along with 33 other prominent Colombians...

...In Colombia the police do not investigate crimes...

...To strengthen the country's police, Armed Forces and judicial system, Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas has moved to adopt U.S...

...I heard about your mafia in the U.S.," says Enrique Santos, publisher of El Espectador, Colombia's second largest newspaper...

...Indeed, exports in such nontraditional areas as oil, coal and flowers have been soaring...

...Still, skeptics insist there is really little left of the judicial system to upgrade...

...The parents are going out of their minds...

...There are nearly 400 private security companies, employing about 40,000 guards...

...inflation was held to 23 percent, modest by Latin American standards...

...Moreover, they do not earn much more than the minimum wage...

...With its vast tropical plains, thick rain forests and rugged mountain ranges, it offers ideal guerrilla terrain...

...Its 300-page report, an instant best seller, documented with startling statistics what many Colombians suspected: The violence is so pervasive that it is undermining their society and its democratic institutions...

...They bear such names as "Love for Medellin," "Death to Revolutionaries," "The Extraditables," and, more poignant, "Rambo and the Terminator...

...When bribery hasn't worked, the mafia has resorted to murdering those who have gotten in their way...

...Their greed and power have turned murder into an industry...

...in 1987...

...We are trying to help the country bring its justice system into the 20th century...

...Like many other Colombians, Vasquez sees no end to the killing...

...The constant threat of death, says Mejia, has been difficult to adjust to: "I've tried to continue my life as I've always done, but now I find it impossible...

...The killing doesn't just affect our party but the entire system...

...At the power center of Colombia's drug mafia is the Medellin Cartel, a small group of ruthless criminal entrepreneurs that the U.S...

...anti-drug techniques, including the use of plea bargaining, a witness protection program and helicopter raids on processing plants...

...As Colombian law now stands, and recent events have proved, Ochoa and his colleagues can operate freely inside the country's borders...

...The Supreme Court split 12-12 when it voted on the issue in April 1987...

...It found technical grounds to declare invalid a U.S.-Colombian extradition treaty concluded in 1979...

...FARC itself has an estimated 9,000 to 12,000 men under arms, scattered around the country in about 32 locations, but they have for the most part been relatively quiescent since signing a truce with the government in April 1984...

...Colombian officials and Western observers I talked to downplayed this factor...

...A1985U.S...

...While interviewing someone, I always wonder who is out there watching me...

...Last year assassins killed two of his closest colleagues on the Permanent Committee, which bravely publishes a monthly press bulletin containing obituaries of the recent asesinados (the assassinated...

...At a secret meeting in Panama last year, the cartel reportedly offered the government $14 billion to pay off Colombia's foreign debt...

...Are they waiting for me outside my front door...

...They are largely untrained and tend to be inexperienced (all too often fresh out of law school...

...They have a difficult time taking fingerprints...

...Andres Pastrana, Bogota's Social Conservative Party mayoral candidate, was kidnapped...

...Colombian authorities say that close to 80 per cent of the Medellin police force is suspected of working for the cartel...

...They believe—and many observers agree—that the Right wing is trying to drive the party out of pohtics...

...It sounds incredible, but if a criminal is arrested in Medellin, there is no way of finding out if he is wanted for a crime in another Colombian city...

...They want to addict the young people to increase demand...

...Two Medellin Cartel members, Juan Escobar and Gonzolo Rodriguez ("The Mexican") Gacha, are on the Forbes and Fortune lists of the world's leading billionaires...

...Many Western diplomats and Colombians feel part of the problem is that the judicial system is no match for the resources and power of the drug bosses, with their planes, large amounts of cash, sophisticated weaponry, and high technology...

...It has been perhaps the biggest casualty of the country's culture of violence...

...His trip was taken as a sign that the Reagan Administration has finally recognized the war on drugs requires the use of multilateral tactics and strategies...

...Last December one Medellin Cartel member whose extradition the U. S. and Colombian governments hoped to arrange, Jorge Luis Ochoa, simply walked away from jail arm in arm with the prison warden and went into hiding...

...one of the highest ever recorded by a country not officially at war...

...AU.S...

...In addition to being buoyed by the good economic news, many Colombians were heartened by Attorney General Edwin Meese's visit to Colombia, Peru and Ecuador in April...

...Under Colombian law, an independent jurist can cast the deciding vote...

...The cartel has even fielded political candidates...

...In the ensuing battle to retake the building, 11 judges were among the approximately 100 people killed...

...and unemployment was at its lowest level in five years...

...Santos and other prominent Colombians drive around in bulletproof cars, accompanied by heavily armed bodyguards...

...The most prominent victim was Jaime Pardo Leal, a law professor at the National University in Bogota, who was gunned down near the capital last October...

...These days in Colombia to have strong opinions or to be politically active is to put your life in danger," says Alfredo Vasquez Carrizosa, a former Colombian foreign minister who is now a university professor and head of the Permanent Committee for the Defense of Human Rights...

...AT the same time that the drug bosses are promoting their image domestically, they are creating a serious addiction problem for Colombia...

...The youths are recruited from the slums and instructed in the use of guns and explosives and methods of sabotage and surveillance...

...In December 1986, after the barons had themselves murdered close to 50 judges in the previous four years, the Supreme Court finally got the message...

...Despite his January kidnapping (he was stumbled upon and freed in the course of a massive manhunt launched by the government after the assassination of Attorney General Hoyas), he has pushed a vigorous anti-drug campaign...

...Though Mejia thought about leaving Colombia, she decided not to because it would be playing into the hands of her would-be assassins...

...So it is not likely that we will see any more drug kingpins like Carlos Lehder extradited to the U.S...

...As they increase production to satisfy the growing world hunger for cocaine, the members of the Medellin Cartel operate more and more like sophisticated heads of major corporations...

...It affects the stability of the Western Hemisphere...

...The UP is the political arm of the proMoscow guerrilla group FARC, a presence herefor20years...