Colombia Official Credits Nation’s New Attitude in Fall of Drug Lord : War on cocaine: The acting president also cites earlier extradition of one of Rodriguez Gacha’s lieutenants.

A top government official Sunday credited a new willingness by Colombians to inform on the drug lords and the extradition to the United States of a second-level trafficker more than a month ago with setting the stage for the killing Friday of a leading member of the Medellin cocaine cartel.

The slain drug baron, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, 42, had emerged from hiding and risked discovery only because he had to take care of a cocaine shipment that normally would have been handled by his lieutenant, Rafael Abello, said Carlos Lemos Simmonds, No. 2 to President Virgilio Barco Vargas in the Colombian government. Abello was captured and extradited to Oklahoma on drug-smuggling charges last month.

“Why was Rodriguez Gacha in Cartagena trying to send a cocaine shipment to the U.S.? Because the man who took care of that part of the country for him was no longer there, so he had to leave his hiding place to take care of the situation himself,” said Lemos in an interview with The Times and another U.S. newspaper.

Lemos said that another vital factor in tracking the cocaine baron to his bloody end was the willingness of “about a dozen Colombians” to inform on him and claim their shares of a $625,000 reward offered by the government for information leading to the capture or death of Rodriguez Gacha or Pablo Escobar, the godfather of the cartel.

“I would think that Escobar is now quite worried,” said Lemos on his first day as acting president of Colombia in Barco’s three-day absence at a meeting of the presidents of five South American nations on Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands.

“Now the barons know that the government is capable of getting them, and it’s no longer so easy to bribe informants. There are people who will inform against them,” the acting president said.

Lemos also credited a continuing cleanup of drug cartel infiltrators in the armed forces and police agencies with nailing Rodriguez Gacha before hirelings could alert him to a closing dragnet of the national policy agency’s new Elite Force. In the past, and as recently as two weeks ago in Escobar’s case, police turncoats in the pay of the cartel have tipped off the drug lords in time for them to escape raiders.

Ironically, Lemos noted, police now believe that Escobar was in the northern coastal area at the same time that Rodriguez Gacha was killed but slipped away without being detected.

Rodriguez Gacha had gone to Cartagena to supervise the loading of 295 kilos (650 pounds) of cocaine on a ship bound for the United States, according to the Bogota newspaper El Espectador. Police seized the drugs.

Another irony, according to the newspaper, was that Rodriguez Gacha was dashing for safety at the nearby farm of another extradited associate when he was gunned down. The farm belonged to Eduardo Martinez Romero, the cartel’s accountant, extradited to Atlanta in September on charges of masterminding a $1.5-billion money-laundering scheme.

Lemos said that Rodriguez Gacha was killed by automatic weapons fire from a helicopter gunship and fell with an empty machine gun in his hands.

The acting president said that Colombian police officers and soldiers, as well as many ordinary citizens, have been galvanized by recent acts of cartel terrorism, including the bombing of an Avianca passenger jet with the loss of 111 lives and a truck bomb outside the security police headquarters in Bogota that killed 63 and injured about 1,000.

“They were such horrible events that they moved the whole nation against the drug barons,” said Lemos, adding that before the mass bombings, many soldiers and police viewed the drug traffickers as less threatening than Colombia’s leftist guerrillas, whom they have been fighting for years. “Now the drug barons have taken their place as the principal enemy,” he said.

Like many officials of the government, which has placed the armed forces and police on special alert, Lemos said that he expects more violence. “It is almost certain that there will be some retaliation from them, some revenge.”

But Lemos said that he does not expect the narco-terrorism to extend to Cartagena when President Bush meets with Barco and two other Andean nation presidents there in February. “He’s going to be inside a naval base that is quite easy to protect,” Lemos said. “He is a brave man, and he is taking a risk, but we believe we can protect him.”

Lemos said the February summit is vital to the forging of Pan American drug-war strategy among the United States and the coca-producing nations of Peru, Bolivia and Colombia.

Sharing the widespread feeling of elation here over the Rodriguez Gacha killing, Lemos said: “We’ve won a great psychological battle. People thought that Rodriguez Gacha and Escobar were invulnerable. We have not only killed Rodriguez Gacha but also the legend, and that’s a very, very good thing, not only for the government but for the whole Colombian nation.”

The government expects that one major result of Rodriguez Gacha’s death will be an internal war among his followers and between other drug barons.

“Perhaps Escobar will try to be the ‘capo di capi , ‘ and some of Rodriguez Gacha’s lieutenants are not going to like that. They’re going to be busy fighting and trying to stop the disintegration of the Rodriguez Gacha organization,” he said.

Lemos conceded somewhat ruefully that the drug war is far from over. “But this operation proves that if we are not winning the war, at least we are not losing it,” he said.

Without officially confirming the story that has circulated among police agencies, Lemos acknowledged that Rodriguez Gacha’s 17-year-old son, Fredy, also killed in the Friday shoot-out, probably was released from jail recently as a ruse. Police sources said that Fredy, who was arrested on minor charges in September, was released “for lack of evidence” in hopes that he would unwittingly lead them to his father.

Fredy’s mother and Rodriguez Gacha’s brother went Sunday to the mass grave at Sincelejo, where the two were unceremoniously buried Saturday, and retrieved their bodies. The bodies were taken to the drug barons’ family home of Pacho, about 40 miles northwest of Bogota, where thousands attended the reburial.