Colombia Raids Drug Estates, 11,000 Jailed : Major Traffickers Elude Capture; Planes, Cars and Livestock Seized in Nationwide Crackdown

Soldiers and police raided the estates of cocaine barons Monday, seizing aircraft, cars and cattle and bringing the number of people arrested in three days to more than 11,000, authorities reported.

One of those arrested Monday was identified as a finance chief of the Medellin drug cartel. The cartel bosses have so far eluded the emergency-rule crackdown, but new raids were being reported hourly across the nation.

President Virgilio Barco Vargas authorized the raids after the killings Thursday and Friday of a judge, a provincial police chief and Sen. Luis Carlos Galan of the ruling Liberal Party, the front-running candidate for next year’s presidential elections and an outspoken opponent of the drug bosses.

“We haven’t yet been able to capture the drug cartel chiefs, but we have struck hard against their immense fortunes,” Colombian army Gen. Manuel Bonnet Locarno said.

At the same time, Colombia asked a special session of the Organization of American States in Washington for international support for its crackdown on the narcotics industry.

In a draft resolution presented to a hastily called session of the OAS’ permanent council, the Bogota government informed the organization of the recent wave of killings of judges, law enforcement personnel and leading political figures and called for “international solidarity.”

It did not, however, ask for any specific action by the OAS council or its 32 member nations. The U.S. delegate suggested that the United States might support military action against countries that harbor drug traffickers.

In Kennebunkport, Me., White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said that President Bush had spoken with Barco by telephone Monday night and was told that U.S. tboops are not needed to help him fight drug trafficking in his country.

Barco indicated that he had read “press speculation about the use of U.S. troops in Colombia,” Fitzwater said in a written statement. “He (Barco) affirmed to the President that U.S. troops would not be necessary,” Fitzwater said.

Bush was said to have expressed to Barco U.S. willingness to “render appropriate assistance as rapidly as possible” while voicing admiration for Barco’s efforts “to restore law and order.”

Colombia’s Gen. Bonnet, in an interview broadcast by a national radio network, said that the government’s strategy is “economic war” on the drug traffickers.

Defense Ministry communiques reported that more than 11,000 people have been detained in about 350 raids, but Bonnet said that most of those picked up so far are believed to be simple employees or low-level underlings of the drug barons.

However, military authorities in Sincelejo, capital of Colombia’s northern state of Sucre, said that they had captured Eduardo Martinez Romero, whom they identified as a finance chief of the drug combine based in Medellin, an industrial city from which the notorious cartel draws its name. They said Martinez was captured at a ranch two hours outside of Sincelejo but gave no other details.

4 Tons of Paste

Statements from the Defense Ministry said that 622 weapons, 1,023 vehicles, scores of planes and helicopters and four tons of cocaine paste were confiscated.

Early Monday on Bogota’s northern outskirts, soldiers swarmed over an opulent compound said to be owned by Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, one of the country’s biggest cocaine dealers.

The estate included tennis, soccer and basketball courts, a duck pond with a water wheel, a gymnasium with weight-lifting equipment and an indoor swimming pool. Soldiers guarding it said that Rodriguez Gacha owns many other estates.

Among the targets of the raids were scores of properties owned by Rodriguez Gacha, 41, and other drug lords, including Pablo Escobar, 39, and Jorge Luis Ochoa, 39. At one of Escobar’s ranches, soldiers confiscated 2,000 head of cattle and 100 pigs, the Defense Ministry said.

After last week’s slayings, Barco invoked the powers of a state of siege that has been in effect since 1984. It gives the armed forces and police special powers to detain suspects, stiffens penalties for those convicted of drug dealing and allows confiscation of property. In addition, those arrested may be held incommunicado and without charge for up to seven days, compared to 24 hours under ordinary circumstances.

The president also authorized the government to extradite drug suspects wanted in the United States, a measure that the cartel has opposed with threats and murder.

The Medellin cartel, together with a less notorious rival group based in the western Colombian provincial capital of Cali, is believed by Washington to control up to 80% of the cocaine smuggled into the United States.

Joe Keefe, a spokesman for the Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington, said that since Saturday, when Barco announced the resurrection of a suspended U.S.-Colombian extradition treaty, the Justice Department has been “reviewing all fugitives” that are wanted for trial in the United States.

Keefe said that a number of agencies, including the DEA, are participating in the review, together with federal prosecutors.

Keefe said he could not yet make public the names of Colombian drug dealers on the list, but he said it would logically include major drug kingpins already named in indictments returned by federal grand juries.

Another DEA spokesman, Frank Shults, said that “all the biggies are on the list,” including Rodriguez Gacha, Escobar and Ochoa.

Shults said that it is too early to speculate about whether the DEA will send more agents to Colombia, beefing up a force of two dozen agents here now, to help locate drug traffickers wanted on charges in the United States.

Whereabouts Unknown

The DEA doesn’t know where all of them are and is not yet sure exactly how Barco’s announced willingness to extradite them to the United States for trial will work out, Shults said.

“A lot remains to be seen,” he added. “We know basically . . . that President Barco has made this overture, but the specifics haven’t come forth yet. We stand ready to help however we can.”

Between 1985 and 1987, while the extradition treaty was in effect between Washington and Bogota, 13 Colombians were extradited to the United States to stand trial on drug charges. These included Medellin cartel leader Carlos Lehder, who was convicted and sentenced in July last year to life in prison without parole plus 135 years.

In 1987, the Colombian Supreme Court overturned the treaty on a technicality, but Barco decreed its revival under his state-of-siege powers.

NO U.S. TROOPS--Colombia’s leader tells President that U.S. troops are not needed for drug fight. Page 10