Traffickers Surrender 3 Cocaine Labs on Eve of Summit : Colombia: The gesture is seen as a peace bid. Bush begins talks today with three Andean leaders.

As President Bush and three Andean colleagues prepared to converge here today for a drug-war summit, Colombian traffickers reinforced calls for peace by turning over three cocaine laboratories.

It was the biggest gesture yet in a monthlong series of attempts by the notorious drug lords to blunt a government crackdown by showing that they are mending their venal and violent ways.

“As one more contribution to our promise of struggling for peace so that democracy will be strengthened, we have decided to give up the three largest and most modern laboratories for processing cocaine that currently exist in the country,” declared a communique published Wednesday. It was signed “The Extraditables,” a code word for the so-called Medellin Cartel of cocaine traffickers, headed by fugitive kingpin Pablo Escobar.

Traffickers had two dozen Colombian reporters escorted secretly to the three laboratories, hidden in the swampy Darien wilderness of northern Colombia, near the Gulf of Uraba and the Panamanian border. Broadcast reports on the surrendered labs filled Colombian airwaves Wednesday as security forces moved in to take over the illegal installations.

The drug lords apparently timed the gesture to steal some of the media thunder from Bush’s meeting today in Cartagena with presidents Virgilio Barco Vargas of Colombia, Alan Garcia of Peru and Jaime Paz Zamora of Bolivia.

The four leaders will sign a joint declaration outlining strategy for fighting cocaine traffic, from its South American origins to its U.S. destinations. The declaration also will emphasize the need to control American demand for illegal drugs and to bolster the Andean economies with legal trade and aid.

The summit has also encountered a good bit of domestic opposition from Colombians. About 10,000 people protested Bush’s visit with a march through Bogota on Wednesday, burning U.S. flags and setting off firecrackers.

An estimated 1,500 journalists and technicians will cover the Cartagena summit. But few will get close to the presidents, who are to meet in a colonial fort at the heavily guarded Colombian naval academy on Manzanillo Island.

Nearly surrounded by the waters of Cartagena Bay, the site can be reached by single road over a narrow neck of land. As pre-summit security intensified Wednesday, armed Colombian marines guarded the entrance while others patrolled the bay in motor launches.

Authorities said 5,000 troops and police are deployed around Cartagena, which was a heavily fortified port in Spanish colonial times. Much of this week’s security activity is concentrated around Cartagena’s sprawling convention center, from where many reporters will watch the summit on closed circuit television.

In addition, the U.S. Navy moved a destroyer and an amphibious assault vessel, complete with Marines, helicopters and fighter-attack jets, to the waters off the coast.

Despite some recent press reports in the United States that an attack on Bush by drug traffickers was feared, Colombian officials said they expected no problems.

“We do not have serious evidence that would permit us to think of the possibility of an attack on the presidents,” Miguel Maza Marquez, head of Colombia’s police intelligence agency, said in a press conference Wednesday.

Colombian drug traffickers have been accused of killing thousands of people, including government ministers, police officials and judges, in retaliation to a government crackdown against them. In the last four months of 1989, they set off scores of terrorist bombs around the country, including one that killed two people in the Cartagena Hilton last September.

Another bomb demolished a domestic airliner leaving Bogota with 107 people aboard, and yet another devastated a large area around the police intelligence headquarters in Bogota, killing 67 people.

On Jan. 17, however, “The Extraditables” said they were suspending their campaign of violence. They promised to release kidnaped hostages, turn in arms and explosives, and surrender clandestine drug laboratories in return for “legal and constitutional guarantees.” In a series of gestures since then, the traffickers have released several hostages and turned over a ton of dynamite.

Analysts said their main goal apparently is to persuade the government to stop the extradition of Colombians to the United States for trial there on drug charges.

In announcing the surrender of the cocaine laboratories in northwestern Colombia, the traffickers said the three installations had a combined production capacity of 20 tons a month. Over a year, that would amount to 40% of the 600 tons that U.S. officials estimate as Colombia’s total cocaine exports.

One American official suggested Wednesday that the capacity of the surrendered labs was exaggerated and that their surrender was a token gesture.

“I don’t think they have quite turned over everything,” the official said. “When they start turning themselves in, I’ll start paying attention.”

Maza Marquez, the police intelligence chief, told reporters that the three laboratories were no longer in use when they were turned over.

“We are not convinced by this gesture,” he said.

Radio reporters who saw the laboratories, however, said they were complete with functional power plants to operate elaborate refining equipment and even to run air conditioners in some rooms. They said they found refrigerators still stocked with cold beer.

Escorts told the reporters that the laboratories had cost $20 million and employed 150 people. The three installations, miles apart from one another, were deep in swampy forests near lagoons where hydroplanes could land, the reporters said.

The surrender of the laboratories followed the pattern of a publicity campaign that Carlos Lemos Simmonds, the minister of government (roughly equivalent to interior minister in other countries), said is aimed at convincing Colombians that the traffickers have become worthy of public trust and government leniency. Lemos told two foreign correspondents Tuesday in Bogota that the campaign also carries an implicit threat that if there is no positive response by the government, “narco-terrorism” may resume.

“They do not lose hope that the Colombian government, under public pressure, will make concessions to them,” Lemos said.

Among the concessions that the traffickers hope for is an end to extradition, he said. Since August, when the government issued an emergency decree permitting extradition, 14 accused traffickers have been sent to the United States for trial.

Lemos said 14 more extradition requests are being processed, and the government does not intend to negotiate with the traffickers on that or any other issue.

BACKGROUND

Coca, a shrub sacred to Andean highlands Indians who have chewed its leaves for centuries to counter hunger and thirst, is the natural resource of an illegal international industry worth billions of dollars. Chemically processed into cocaine, coca grown in the Andes can be harvested three or more times a year, experts say. Peru and Bolivia grow most of the world’s coca, but Colombia dominates in producing cocaine and smuggling it to other countries, especially the United States. Peru’s annual coca production is about 115,000 tons, U.S. officials say, and Bolivia produces an estimated 130,000 tons. Police experts estimate that Peruvian drug gangs earn about $1.2 billion a year from the drug trade. They add that about $200 million is paid annually to guerrilla groups for protection of processing labs and the planes that transport the coca base.