Colombia Girds to Face Drug Lords’ Hired Guns

This nation is waging war on a lethal legion of hired gunmen directed by powerful cocaine traffickers and other right-wing groups.

A blitz by security forces has broken up 23 bands of sicarios , or paid killers, in several areas of the country, President Virgilio Barco Vargas reported last week.

“With the capture of more than 50 members of these bands . . . this year, valuable information has been obtained for continuing this fight,” Barco said, announcing a series of new measures targeting sicarios and death squads, including the creation of a special police unit.

Meanwhile, killers continue to ply their trade. Local newspapers reported Saturday that a 15-member death squad dressed in black and armed with automatic assault rifles murdered six farmers in the southern state of Caqueta.

Starting before dawn Friday near the town of San Vicente del Caguan, the killers called on their victims one by one, shooting them dead at their farm homes. Neighbors said the killings were in reprisal for the victims’ giving of food and shelter to passing bands of anti-government guerrillas.

The same day, gunmen firing automatic weapons from a passing car killed three brothers on a street in Medellin, the center of the South American cocaine trade.

Killings Become Routine

Such killings are all but routine in Colombia, and before this year, the clandestine structures that produced the killers seemed all but untouchable. But Barco’s policies and intelligence work in police operations are now producing results.

In the war’s latest action, Medellin police last week raided what they called a “ sicario operation center” on a farm north of the city, arresting three brothers wanted in several homicides.

Gen. Miguel Maza, head of the government intelligence service, said that as a result of previous raids, other bands of sicarios have disbanded, and some killers have turned themselves in. He said that gunmen who surrender and provide information to investigators will receive lenient treatment.

The campaign against hired killers also has turned up a clandestine cemetery where the bodies of peasant farmers were found in unmarked graves. The cemetery was on one of three farms raided early in April in the state of Meta, east of Bogota, where authorities also found what they said were a paramilitary training school and a torture center.

Decrees Expected

This week, President Barco is expected to issue two decrees permitting the government to confiscate properties owned by narcotics traffickers and to investigate private fortunes of dubious origin.

A decree issued last week created a Cabinet-level Advisory Coordinating Commission for action against death squads, bands of sicarios and “private justice,” or vigilante, groups.

A decree establishing the special police unit provided for a force of up to 1,000 armed agents, and the national police chief, Gen. Miguel Antonio Gomez Padilla, said that 250 agents already have been selected for training.

Politicians from all parties have voiced approval of the crackdown on hired killers, but a foreign diplomat cautioned that it will not be easy to control the carnage.

“ Sicarios are a dime a dozen,” the diplomat said in a private conversation.

Reinaldo Gary, member of a presidential task force on violence, said in an interview, “You can’t expect to capture all of them, but you can expect that by dealing them some hard blows, you will be changing the situation.”

Paid killers and death squads have taken their heaviest toll on the Patriotic Union, a political party that includes Communists and former guerrillas of the self-styled Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC).

Spokesmen say that more than 1,000 of the Patriotic Union’s leaders, members and sympathizers have been killed since the party was formed in 1985 as part of a plan for peace talks between FARC and the government. Partly because of the killings, the peace talks failed.

Other victims of hired gunmen include hundreds of police officers, dozens of judges, a supreme court justice, a justice minister, an attorney general and a newspaper publisher.

In the past two years, death squads have committed a series of brutal massacres in which dozens of suspected leftists have been killed. One slaughter wiped out a 12-member judicial commission investigating death squads.

The Medellin Cartel, an alliance of drug traffickers, is blamed for turning the killer-for-hire trade into a national industry.

Ranchers, banana planters, other private entrepreneurs and military officers also have been accused of organizing death squads.