No. 4 Trafficker in Medellin Seized : Colombia: Officials say drug kingpin Abello will be extradited to the United States.

Colombian police announced Wednesday that they have arrested the fourth-ranking trafficker in the Medellin cocaine cartel.

Jose Rafael Abello, who was seized Tuesday night as he dined in a Bogota restaurant, will be extradited to the United States to answer cocaine charges in a federal court in Oklahoma, a police spokesman said.

The arrest was regarded by Colombian authorities as a milestone in their drive against traffickers who use Colombia as the hub for world cocaine distribution.

Police officers said that Abello, 34, nicknamed “the Monkey,” was No. 4 in the Medellin cartel and one of three important cartel figures now in Colombian custody. The others are Evaristo Porras, who was captured in Ecuador and extradited to Colombia on Oct. 2, and Bernardo Pelaez, arrested in Colombia in mid-September.

The three are the highest-level traffickers caught since President Virgilio Barco Vargas began a blitz against the Medellin cartel on Aug. 18, a police official said.

The official, who for security reasons asked not to be identified, said agents of Colombia’s Administrative Department of Security arrested Abello at dinner. Although Abello was accompanied by bodyguards, he did not resist arrest.

Abello, based in the port city of Santa Marta, was the Medellin cartel’s chief of transportation on the northern coast, where most Colombian cocaine leaves by private plane or ship en route to the United States, the official said.

He said Abello was outranked in the cartel only by fugitive kingpins Pablo Escobar, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha and Jorge Luis Ochoa.

“He was an intimate friend of Pablo Escobar,” the official said. “He had a monopoly on transportation from the coast.”

He said Abello had fled Santa Marta after President Barco’s crackdown began, and that intelligence information helped agents track him in Bogota.

He said no charges have been filed against Abello in Colombia but that the United States had requested his arrest for extradition several weeks ago, based on federal charges in Oklahoma of “conspiracy and distribution of cocaine.” The U.S. Embassy in Bogota refuses to comment on extradition cases.

In Washington, Justice Department officials said that Abello, born in 1954, was indicted in October, 1987, in the northern district of Oklahoma on charges of conspiracy to import cocaine and conspiracy to distribute it. He allegedly was part of a group trying to ship 500 kilos of cocaine from Colombia to the United States.

The U.S. officials said Colombia had arrested Abello on its own authority but that the Justice Department had asked the State Department to present papers to Colombia for his provisional arrest, the next step in the extradition process.

Abello was roughly equal in cartel rank to Porras, the Colombian police official said. Porras, 41, was hiding under a false identity in Ecuador when police there arrested him last month. He is wanted in Colombia to serve out a two-year sentence for illegal possession of arms. The 1986 sentence was upheld by the Colombian Supreme Court this week. Porras is also wanted in Peru, where he was arrested in 1978 on cocaine trafficking charges. Peru has requested his extradition.

The police said Porras was once in charge of shipping cocaine paste from Peru for refining by the Medellin cartel. He was based in Leticia, a town in the Amazon lowlands near the Brazil border.

The Colombian newspaper El Tiempo has called Porras “one of the heads of narcotics traffic in Colombia.” He is not wanted in the United States, a U.S. Embassy spokesman said. The Colombian police official said agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration suspect Porras of being involved in major American cocaine deals, but “there is no proof.”

The arrest of Pelaez was announced Sept. 14 by the Administrative Department of Security, which said he would be extradited to the United States for trial in Detroit on charges of “conspiracy and distribution of cocaine.”

Gen. Miguel Maza Marquez, head of the department, said then that Pelaez was “much bigger” in the cartel than Eduardo Martinez Romero, who was extradited to the United States on Sept. 6.

Martinez, charged in Atlanta with laundering money for the Medellin cartel, was the first major cartel suspect to be caught in the current Colombian crackdown.

Escobar and Rodriguez Gacha have eluded police despite a $250,000 reward offered by Colombian authorities.

Times staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow in Washington contributed to this report.

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