Bush Blasts Colombian Drug Lords : Condemns Murder of Candidate, Backs Extradition Treaty

President Bush on Saturday angrily condemned the assassination of the leading Colombian presidential candidate and said “the narco-traffickers who again have robbed Colombia of a courageous leader must be defeated.”

The President, saluting the decision by Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas to reinstate a suspended extradition treaty with the United States, pledged that “the U.S. is ready to coordinate the extradition of these criminals as expeditiously as possible.” He said he had instructed the Justice Department and the State Department “to begin working on this immediately.”

On Friday night, unidentified gunmen shot and killed Sen. Luis Carlos Galan as the politician was approaching a platform to give a speech at a campaign rally in the town of Soache, about 12 miles from Bogota, the capital. Galan, 46, was the leading candidate for the ruling Liberal Party’s nomination for president in Colombia’s elections next year and was considered the front-runner to replace Barco.

State of Siege in Colombia

Minutes after the shooting, Barco vowed on national television to revive the extradition treaty, using his extraordinary powers under a state of siege. The treaty was ruled unconstitutional by the Colombian Supreme Court on a technicality.

In Bogota on Saturday, Colombia’s defense minister, Gen. Oscar Botero, announced a sweeping new crackdown on drug traffickers called Operation Extradition.

“We will wipe drug traffickers off the face of Colombia,” Botero vowed. “Either that, or the country will perish in a blood bath of violence.”

Colombia’s national police director, Gen. Miguel Gomez Padilla, promised to “make total war against the narcotics traffickers, and we will clean the country of them.”

Vow to Continue Killings

But the nation’s most feared drug cartel on Saturday declared it would keep killing government officials.

“Now the fight is with blood,” said the Medellin cartel in a brief communique that was broadcast by the RCN radio network and printed by the Bogota daily La Prensa.

The cartel is believed to be responsible for 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the United States. Its greatest fear, narcotics experts say, is extradition.

“We do want peace. We have screamed for it, but we will not beg for it,” the statement said. It was signed “The Extraditables,” a reference to the traffickers likely to be extradited to the United States.

However, the statement did not specifically claim responsibility for Galan’s death.

Galan, an outspoken critic of drug traffickers, had survived an attempt to kill him earlier this month in Medellin, capital of Colombia’s Antioquia province and the city from which the notorious cocaine cartel takes its name. Police said Saturday that they had detained three suspects in Friday’s attack, which also claimed the life of a local councilman and wounded at least six others.

News reports in Bogota said that at least seven gunmen took part in the assault.

Earlier Friday, the police chief in Antioquia province, Col. Waldemar Franklin Quintero, who had campaigned against cocaine traffickers, was killed by machine-gun fire on his way to work. The Medellin cartel--again using “The Extraditables” as its signature--later claimed responsibility for Franklin Quintero’s slaying in telephone calls to local media.

Measured ‘Justified by Threat’

In his Friday speech, Barco said that “the severity of the measures (to be adopted) is justified by the threat represented by the narcotics traffickers.”

As Bush’s pledge to work with Colombia was being made public in a written statement released by the White House, his aides were putting the finishing touches on a new Administration drug program, to be announced by the President on Sept. 5. Administration officials say the program will put greater emphasis on halting the use of drugs, while including no new assistance for border interdiction of smuggled narcotics.

But the plan also calls for more than tripling military and economic assistance to the cocaine-producing countries of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru, including the assignment of U.S. advisers to train troops there in anti-drug warfare. The three nations are receiving about $57 million from the United States this year.

In his statement, Bush said that he is considering ways “to do more for the Andean countries” in connection with his national drug strategy.

He also said that he will meet with Barco “at the earliest convenient moment to consider a coordinated approach to this problem.”

“In such difficult times, democratic nations faced with common threats to their national security must stand together,” Bush said. “Today, we stand together with Colombia.”

The President said that the United States will support Colombian efforts “to move aggressively against these criminals who seek to destroy both our societies.”

Bush offered his “heartfelt sympathy” during this period in which Colombia is “suffering from a wave of assassinations of judges (and) police officials.”

He said that the United States should remember that “others are paying very high costs for the unchecked rampage of the international criminals trafficking in cocaine and undermining the lives of law-abiding citizens.”

The President, vacationing here, spent the morning on his cigarette-class boat Fidelity, which underwent an annual Coast Guard safety inspection at midday. Later, he played golf for the third day in a row.

Law enforcement authorities in the United States have been seeking the extradition of many suspected Colombian cocaine traffickers, including the leaders of the Medellin and Cali cartels that U.S. officials say control most of the cocaine smuggled into the United States.

The State Department issued a strongly worded statement Saturday, saying it is “appalled” by the killings in Colombia and praising “the tough measures” announced by Barco and other Colombian officials.

Unwavering Cooperation Urged

“These brazen attacks against Colombian judges, law enforcement officials and politicians dramatically demonstrate that unwavering international cooperation is essential if we are to win the war against the narcotics Mafias,” the State Department said.

Among suggestions for such cooperation has been a proposal that the United States should help finance and train an international military force, modeled on U.N. peacekeeping forces, to help combat the drug cartels.

One proponent of such a unit is Jamaican Prime Minister Michael Manley, who told the National Assn. of Black Journalists in New York on Friday, “We are dealing with an international criminal conspiracy on a scale that the world has never seen in its history.”

Gerstenzang reported from Kennebunkport and Mann from Washington.