6 Bombs Hit Medellin; Peace Talks Proposed

The city of Medellin shook Tuesday with six bomb explosions, the latest salvo in a terrorist campaign by cocaine traffickers, and the father of three reputed drug barons appealed for peace.

Calling his cocaine-rich sons “poor little ones,” Fabio Ochoa Restrepo proposed in an open letter to President Virgilio Barco Vargas “that there be dialogue, that there be peace, that there be forgiveness. Let us try clearing the board and starting anew.”

Barco is pressing the toughest crackdown ever on Colombia’s powerful and violent cocaine chieftains. In retaliation, traffickers have declared “total and absolute war” on the country’s government and power structure.

In the last week, police have blamed traffickers for 17 dynamite bomb blasts in Medellin, home of the most notorious drug cartel. The explosions before dawn Tuesday were all at stores of Licores de Antioquia, a state-owned liquor distributor.

In Bogota, a bomb exploded at the Jetours travel agency on the upscale north side of the city. But diplomats said the agency’s owner has been kidnaped and missing for several weeks and that the bomb was reinforcement of a ransom demand.

No one was injured in the bombings Tuesday. A passer-by was killed last Thursday by one of two bombs that destroyed offices of political parties in Medellin, and another man died Sunday at one of nine bank branches where bombs exploded.

The traffickers’ terror campaign is believed to be aimed at eroding essential public support for Barco’s crackdown. In one indication of how fragile that support might be, the mayor of Medellin said many families have fled the city in fear.

Mayor Juan Gomez Martinez told Colombian reporters that he had asked the Barco administration for 3,000 police reinforcements but that the government had sent only 100.

He repeated a previous call for peace negotiations. “I insist that to achieve peace, one has to talk to the enemies,” he said. “The policy of total destruction is not, I believe, in Colombia’s interest.”

Also published Tuesday was Ochoa Restrepo’s letter to Barco, appealing on behalf of his sons for dialogue and peace. The sons are Jorge Luis, Fabio Jr. and Juan David Ochoa, all on a U.S. list of the “12 most-wanted” Colombian traffickers.

“Poor little ones, may God protect them,” said the father’s letter.

He suggested that drug traffickers could “stop at once--no more narcotics traffic, no more war, no more killings, no more bombs.” In return, he said, “Let us sit down to dialogue. . . . Let us not be arrogant. Let us not be stubborn. Let us forgive, (as) we were taught by Jesus Christ and our parents.”

He praised Mayor Gomez Martinez for daring to advocate dialogue.

But Information Minister Carlos Lemos told a Colombian radio network, “The government has not considered a dialogue with people who have committed narcotics-trafficking crimes.”