Americans Leaving Colombia to Avoid Backlash

Some Americans began leaving Colombia in the face of an expected backlash as the government pressed its war on drug traffickers in several ways.

Minister of Government Orlando Vasquez asked Congress to adopt legislation making permanent the emergency measures decreed by President Virgilio Barco Vargas last month to combat the drug lords. These include the extradition of traffickers wanted for trial in the United States.

Under a new decree law, the government also named a military officer to replace the civilian mayor of a tropical stronghold of drug-backed death squads and cocaine processors. And the Supreme Court began debating the legality of the Draconian powers adopted by Barco under rules of the state of siege now in effect in this country.

Colombia’s largest newspaper, El Tiempo, reported that the crackdown has forced the closure of some cocaine laboratories. And in Miami, American authorities said that the flood of drugs into the United States has been drying up since the Colombian crackdown began, raising the price of cocaine and shrinking the size of crack rocks made from cocaine.

Americans began leaving Colombia in the wake of the first extradition to the United States under Barco’s emergency decrees, that of Eduardo Martinez Romero, accused chief money launderer of Colombian cocaine cartels.

Twenty families of employees of Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum Co., which has been developing Colombia’s largest oil field, left the country Wednesday night, a company source here said Thursday on condition of anonymity.

Three Americans playing on popular semi-pro basketball teams in Medellin, home region of the largest and most violent of the Colombian drug cartels, were also reported leaving.

Ron Davis and Napoleon Petteway, both of New York City, playing for the Banco Cafetero team, and Kenneth Garret of Chicago, of the Sprite squad, “are returning to the United States right away,” Jaime Arenas, president of the Colombian Basketball Federation, told the Associated Press.

“Unfortunately, we had to do this because of the violence affecting Colombia and in particular Medellin,” Arenas said.

Senior U.S. diplomats and drug enforcement officials in Bogota have said several times that once extraditions started, they expected drug-related terrorism in Colombia to increase.

Another form of reaction occurred Thursday when masked students at this country’s largest university burned an American flag and clashed with riot police in what police said was an anti-American backlash provoked by Martinez’ extradition.

During the incident at the National University in Bogota, witnesses said that between 1,000 and 1,500 students demonstrated and that about 30 of them, covering their faces with makeshift masks and shouting “Gringos, go home,” threw stones and Molotov cocktails, in addition to burning the flag.

Riot police responded with tear gas, and university authorities suspended classes for the day.

Barco moved Thursday under a decree-law giving him power to put military mayors in charge of violence-plagued cities, but he rescinded the action after protests from other politicians. Infantry Maj. Alvaro Matallana was named to replace elected civilian Mayor Mario Estrada of Puerto Boyaca, 95 miles north of Bogota, but Matallana soon got his job back.

Puerto Boyaca has been a stronghold of right-wing death squads that the government says are controlled by cocaine cartels and is in a region where cocaine-processing laboratories are believed to be numerous.

Until two years ago, Colombian mayors were appointed by the national government. The current officeholders are the first elected mayors.

Later Thursday, a bomb exploded in a Medellin fast food restaurant, injuring two policemen.

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