Colombian Police Kill Drug Lord : War on Narcotics: Rodriguez Gacha was a leader of the Medellin cartel. U.S. hails the ‘first big break we’ve had.’

In their single biggest victory in the drug war, Colombian police Friday shot and killed notorious narcotics trafficker Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, who as a leader of the Medellin cartel waged a campaign of terror to maintain the world’s biggest cocaine empire.

Rodriguez Gacha and six others, including his son, Freddy Rodriguez Celades, had resisted a 72-hour siege before they died in a half-hour gun battle with an elite police unit that had tracked them to a remote hide-out on the nation’s Caribbean coast, Colombian authorities reported.

The death of the man known as El Mexicano reflected a stunning reversal in a government crackdown that had failed for four months to apprehend any of the cadre of kingpins most wanted by the United States and Colombia.

“This is the first big break we’ve had,” declared acting Drug Enforcement Administration chief Terrence M. Burke.

In a hastily arranged news conference in Washington, drug czar William J. Bennett hailed the action as a symbol of the determination of the Colombian government to confront the traffickers despite their pledge to wage “all-out war” on citizens and officials.

Both Bennett and Burke declined to speculate on the potential impact of Rodriguez Gacha’s death on the overall war on drugs. Another official, however, said that the action had provided an enormous confidence boost to anti-drug officials, who often before had seen powerful traffickers slip through Colombian authorities’ grasp.

“This is the one we’ve been hoping for,” the official said.

President Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia officially informed the United States of Rodriguez Gacha’s death in a late-afternoon telephone conversation with Bennett, the Bush Administration’s top anti-drug official.

According to Bennett, Barco stressed that the operation was “very important psychologically” for a Colombian people traumatized by months of bombings and assassinations ordered by cartel leaders who seemed invulnerable to the much-touted government crackdown.

“President Barco now believes that doubts about the Colombian government’s resolve and ability to defeat the cartel should now recede,” Bennett said.

Together with his Medellin cartel associate Pablo Escobar, the 42-year-old Rodriguez Gacha ranked as the trafficker most wanted by the Colombian government, which for more than a month has focused its anti-drug crackdown around operations designed to find the two fugitives.

He was also near the top of a Justice Department list of the “Dirty Dozen” traffickers targeted by U.S. officials as kingpins whom the United States wants to extradite to this country to face trial under long-pending indictments.

While his death eliminates Rodriguez Gacha as a potential source of intelligence, officials expressed no remorse about the violent demise of the man who reaped billions of dollars from the cocaine cartel accused of ordering dozens of murders and implicated in the August assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan.

Rodriguez Gacha “was a very significant man--a man who had killed many innocents--men, women and children,” Barco said in the message relayed by the U.S. officials late Friday afternoon.

“President Barco remains determined to pursue cartel fugitives,” Bennett said. “And the United States remains determined to do everything in its power to support President Barco and the government of Colombia in this effort.”

The death of a single trafficker--even one as powerful as Rodriguez Gacha--is unlikely by itself to have an adverse impact on an enterprise as vast and sophisticated as the Medellin cartel, analysts cautioned.

“You can cut off the head, but this body keeps kicking,” said one congressional source.

But they said that the death of Rodriguez Gacha could further disrupt the trafficking operations by driving home to other narcotraficantes the message that the government crackdown knows no bounds.

Rep. Benjamin A. Gilman (R-N.Y.), the ranking minority member of the House Narcotics Committee, described the cartel leader’s death as an indication “that enforcement is starting to work.”

The congressman, who with five other committee members returned to Washington on Friday from a trip to Colombia, said that the episode should counter widespread doubts about the ability of Colombia’s government to fight the super-rich cartels, which have used bribery, terrorism and murder to maintain their power.

“As one of the victims of the bombing of the national police headquarters told us, ‘Don’t judge the Colombian people by a few bad apples,’ ” Gilman said. “On the whole, I think the top people there don’t want to lose their country to the drug cartels, and they will fight to win.”

The Colombian president had come under increasing attack by citizens who were troubled by his government’s apparent powerlessness in the face of the traffickers’ campaign of terror, blamed for bombings in recent weeks aboard an Avianca jetliner and in a downtown street that together killed more than 150 people.

Reflecting widespread discontent, Colombia’s House of Representatives voted this week to allow voters to decide in a national referendum whether extradition of the traffickers should continue. But its Senate, by a slim margin, appeared to have derailed the effort Friday.

The domestic boost that President Barco is likely to win from the successful effort is also important to the United States, which regards him as a vital instrument in its stepped-up effort to extend its war on drugs to the Andean nations that are the source of all but a tiny fraction of the world’s cocaine supply.

Administration officials have freely acknowledged that a success in Colombia, which has been granted $65 million in emergency U.S. assistance to bolster its fight, was vital to the prospects of their entire Andean strategy. Indeed, those officials had turned increasingly testy in recent weeks when asked to cite indications of progress.

The frustrating manhunt for Rodriguez Gacha and Escobar--each of whom was the subject of a $625,000 reward offered by the Colombian government--probably allowed other traffickers to resume the massive shipments of cocaine that had been disrupted in the early weeks of the crackdown, U.S. officials in Colombia said recently.

But the officials defended the Colombian preoccupation with the two men on grounds that their records of murder and mayhem made their apprehension indispensable if the Colombian government was to demonstrate that it had confronted the cartels head-on.

Rodriguez Gacha was said by security officials to have narrowly escaped numerous attempts to capture him, including an episode last August when residents tipped him off shortly before security forces were about to close in at a discotheque in his hometown of Pacho.

Rodriguez Gacha grew up poor, and his formal education was limited to grade school. But his friendly manners and ruthless ways made him a success in the cutthroat world of emerald smuggling, where he made his first fortune while learning the skills that would make him one of the most powerful of cocaine traffickers.

Known as El Mexicano because of his fascination with Mexican culture, Rodriguez Gacha owned a string of ranches with such Mexican names as Chihuahua, Sonora and Mazatlan.

Among many of his countrymen, he was a popular celebrity whose friends apparently included national police and military officers. At home in Pacho, an intelligence official said, “He had the sympathy of the majority of the town.”

Times staff writer Don Shannon contributed to this story.