Defector Says Drug Cartels May Target U.S. Officials

A defector from a “hit squad” for Colombian drug traffickers warned Wednesday that the Medellin cartel could seek retaliation against U.S. officials for the crackdown on the cocaine trade, saying he had heard one cartel leader declare several times that foreigners would have to be killed.

Testifying behind a screen under heavy security, Diego Viafara Salinas, who fled Colombia earlier this year, told the Senate Government Affairs permanent investigations subcommittee that Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a leading Medellin cartel member, “advised on several occasions when problems popped up that many foreigners would have to be killed.”

“We are at the brink of a very dangerous situation,” Viafara Salinas said, contending that members of the committee or even President Bush could be targets of Colombian drug kingpins.

“You believe they would not hesitate?” asked Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the subcommittee chairman.

“Yes, that is why I am warning you,” Viafara Salinas said, his voice rising in Spanish.

Sen. William V. Roth Jr. (R-Del.), the panel’s ranking minority member whose staff conducted a yearlong investigation of the Colombian cartels, said the warning could not be dismissed out of hand.

But a committee investigator ranked the warning as “conjecture,” noting that Viafara Salinas had never heard any specific plans for assassinations inside the United States.

“Many of us will be witnesses to atrocious acts in the United States,” Viafara Salinas insisted. He said he knew of “a couple of hit men” who have been in Southern California for the Colombia drug traffickers for a year and a half. “They even took English courses before they came,” he added.

The witness, who was not allowed to speak to reporters, gave no details about the “hit men.”

Viafara Salinas described being involved with the leftist M-19 guerrilla group in his college days in Colombia and then infiltrating an anti-guerrilla paramilitary unit in 1983 that two years later became allied with narcotics traffickers.

Viafara Salinas, who served as a medic for the paramilitary group, said that on several occasions he “took part in wholesale slaughters of innocent persons.”

Victims were “leftists, sympathizers, workers and peasants,” he said. Torture and executions were commonplace, he said.

Viafara Salinas said that he “became pretty well acquainted” with Rodriguez Gacha during the six years he served in the paramilitary unit and that the Medellin leader “was fanatical about eliminating all left-wing politicians and subversive groups in Colombia.”

After learning of a January, 1989, meeting of drug traffickers led by Rodriguez Gacha at which the need to purge untrustworthy persons from the unit was discussed, Viafara Salinas became concerned about his own safety, particularly because of his previous link to M-19.

He escaped to Bogota, where, he said, he went to the offices of the newspaper El Espectador. The paper was recently bombed by drug traffickers because of its anti-cartel position.

Persuaded by editors to cooperate with Colombian authorities, he provided information on the location of several cocaine laboratories that were raided. Then, he came to the United States as a federally protected witness.