Special Victims of the Cocaine Cartels : Colombians: Natives of the South American country who are living in Los Angeles County say they are unfairly branded as a result of the crimes of the drug barons.

For much of his life, Alvaro Villa has borne his Colombian identity like a badge of prestige--with honor and with pride.

But nowadays, it is often a sore topic.

“I have always been proud to say I was Colombian,” said Villa, a robotics salesman from Valencia. “But lately, I have not been telling many people. . . . When they find out, they think you are a part of the (drug-dealing) cartels, and I’m not. They think all Colombians are drug dealers and criminals--and we aren’t.”

In much the same way Italians were unfairly branded as criminals during the heyday of Al Capone, many of the estimated 80,000 Colombians living in Los Angeles County say they are now gratuitously stereotyped--and hassled--as a result of the crimes of the murderous cocaine barons in their homeland.

Respected Colombian businessmen are frequently detained in airports. Colombian housewives are the butt of cruel jokes. Colombian teens are solicited for kilos of dope.

“You go to look at an apartment, and they ask you where you are from, you say South America,” said Los Angeles securities broker Carlos Williamson, also from Colombia. “If they ask you from where in South America, you say Colombia and then you worry about getting the apartment.”

In reality, said a Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman, only a handful of the Colombians in the county are connected to the cartels.

“There are hundreds of the cartels’ cells here,” said Ralph Lochridge, a spokesman for the agency. “But anyone who’d say that the majority of the Colombian population is involved in drugs here is not only wrong but crazy.”

But the flawed perceptions regarding Colombians--coupled with what some in the local Colombian community contend are exaggerated media reports of drug activity in South America--have fanned a paranoia that has even some Colombians suspicious of one another.

“I am afraid to get friends from Colombia,” said Roselena Simmons, a native of Medellin who lives in Agoura. “I am very careful to choose them. If you don’t know someone’s background or know their family, you don’t get friendly with them.”

Unlike some other ethnic and racial groups, Colombians have done little to counter the misconceptions, said psychologist Luz Patricia Bayer, 29, a native of Bogota.

Although much of the Colombian community settled in Long Beach and Pasadena during an immigration boom in the 1960s, more recent immigrants in the 1970s and 1980s scattered throughout the county.

Partly as a result, the Colombian community never developed its own version of the Jewish Anti-Defamation League or the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People.

“We are pretty passive people here,” said Bayer. “The Colombians in Los Angeles County are not unified.”

But Colombians say their community can display solidarity when they feel it’s most needed. In September, for instance, more than 300 Colombians gathered at St. Basil’s Roman Catholic Church in Los Angeles to pray for peace in their violence-racked native country.

Still, many Colombians feel their everyday lives carry an extra share of annoyances.

For example, Villa said, he returned from a business trip in Japan last September only to be greeted by customs and immigration agents at Los Angeles International Airport.

“I showed them my passport and my green card, they checked me and they let me go,” said Villa, who is originally from Medellin. “I didn’t really think anything of it at first.”

But just as Villa snatched his suitcases from the luggage carousel, “an agent was on me again.”

“This time (the customs inspectors) poked at my bag and prodded me,” he said. “They didn’t do that to everybody. They just singled me out, I think, because I am Colombian.”

Villa said he tried to give an agent his company’s brochure, but the man refused to accept it.

“He just had it in his mind that I was a criminal,” said Villa, who was released several minutes later. “Nothing I could show him was going to change his mind.”

Villa said he was offended by the incident, but tried to be understanding.

“It’s difficult looking at a human being and telling that’s he’s decent,” he said.

Mike Flemming, a U.S. Customs Service spokesman, said most Colombians stopped are detained not because they are Colombians but because most are traveling from Colombia, “a high-risk country.”

“Depending on where the flight is coming from, we may conduct an investigation,” he said. “If it’s a cold flight--a flight we don’t have much information on--we don’t know who a person is or if they are a smuggler.”

Flemming said that, in most cases, the frisking and inspection of passengers is “based solely on the judgment and experience of the individual inspectors.”

“We develop profiles (of possible drug smugglers) over the years, but we don’t base it on a person’s race or ethnicity,” he said. “We’re not trying to discriminate against anyone, but we look at where (passengers) come from.”

Even among close friends, some Colombians said, they find themselves the victims of many people’s misconceptions.

“I hear a lot of jokes about it,” said psychologist Bayer. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re Colombian? Where are the drugs?’ You get tired of it.”

Others have learned to insulate themselves from the jokes and the harassment.

“People just want to make an issue of it, but I don’t really feel persecuted,” said Fanny Potes, a Los Angeles environmental engineer originally from Bogota. “We are hard-working people who have just gone through a very difficult time. Anybody who is a foreigner here goes through the same thing.”

Luis Salazar, who runs a sanitary supply company in Anaheim, said he has run across some Colombians who shield themselves from discrimination by denying their heritage.

“I was talking with a friend the other day, and he told me he was from Spain,” said Salazar, who was born in Medellin but has spent most of his life in the United States. “After talking to him longer, I found out he was not from Spain, but from Colombia. He said that, because of how things are, he doesn’t tell people where he’s from.”

“We have been labeled like the Italians in the ‘20s and ‘30s,” he said. “If you were Italian and from Sicily, you were part of the Mafia. . . . Now, if you are Colombian you are part of the cartel.”