Colombia Candidate Slain; Bogota Blames Drug Lord

A leftist Colombian presidential candidate was assassinated Thursday at the Bogota airport in an attack blamed on drug lords.

According to police and witnesses, a young man reached out as if to welcome the candidate, Bernardo Jaramillo, 38, of the Patriotic Union, and instead shot him with a submachine gun hidden in a newspaper. He died later at a hospital.

Gen. Miguel Maza Marquez, Colombia’s intelligence police chief, said an investigation determined that the leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel, Pablo Escobar, ordered the assassination.

A communique from the National Security Council said police intercepted radio communications between Escobar and one of his subordinates implicating the drug boss in the killing early Thursday at Bogota’s El Dorado International Airport.

Bodyguards with Jaramillo shot and wounded the gunman before he was captured. At least two other people were reported wounded.

“A man walked up to him to greet him like a supporter and then began shooting,” one of the bodyguards told Caracol radio, which also reported Maza Marquez’s statement. “Bernardo fell to the floor and was protected by his wife and bodyguards while we fired on the aggressor.”

Maza Marquez said Escobar’s alleged order was confirmed by the 18-year-old gunman during interrogation and that the youth said he was paid $625 to kill Jaramillo.

The gunman fired on Jaramillo after the candidate and his wife, Mariela, arrived at the airport for an Avianca flight to the tourist city of Santa Marta on Colombia’s north coast, officials said.

Jaramillo was hit four times, twice in the throat and twice in the abdomen, officials said. His wife was apparently unhurt.

Caracol’s Bogota station received a telephone call from a man who said the Medellin cartel killed the candidate, who was to run in the May 27 elections. The caller said four gunmen were involved and that three escaped.

The Patriotic Union is the biggest leftist party in Colombia, but Jaramillo had not been considered a front-runner in the May elections. He was elected a senator in this month’s congressional elections.

He resigned as party president in February, 1989, and fled the country, citing death threats, but he returned six weeks later.

Drug traffickers in August, 1989, killed another presidential hopeful, Luis Carlos Galan of the governing Liberal Party. That killing sparked a government crackdown on drug lords and the extradition of 14 drug suspects to the United States.

In January, the Medellin cartel said in a communique that the government had won its war, and it appealed for an end to extraditing suspects to the United States.

The caller Thursday said the cartel is renewing the war because President Virgilio Barco Vargas refused an offer for the traffickers to give themselves up to be tried in Colombian courts.

As word spread of Jaramillo’s death, disturbances flared in downtown Bogota. People burned a bus and shattered windows of a few stores. The Patriotic Union called for a national strike.

BACKGROUND The Patriotic Union, Colombia’s largest leftist party, says more than 1,000 of its members have been killed since the party was formed in 1985. Right-wing death squads have been blamed for most of the slayings. However, who runs such squads is disputed. Government authorities say drug traffickers may be involved. The Patriotic Union, however, says Colombia’s army and police are involved. In March, 1989, four gunmen at the Bogota airport killed a member of the party’s executive committee and wounded Ernesto Samper, presidential candidate of the ruling Liberal Party.