Targeted by Drug Lord, U.S. Envoy Says : South America: The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia reveals the threat as the DEA and police smash a cocaine network.

The U.S. ambassador to Bolivia said today a jailed former interior minister had ordered his assassination in revenge for the envoy’s role in bringing him to justice on drug-smuggling charges.

Also, Bolivian anti-drug police and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents said today they have destroyed one of South America’s most important drug-trafficking networks in a five-day series of raids.

The U.S. and Bolivian teams simultaneously hit ranches, labs, distribution networks, radio transmitting facilities, air strips and a nightclub, DEA Bolivia chief Don Ferrarone said.

U.S. Ambassador Robert S. Gelbard said he believed former Interior Minister Luis Arce Gomez ordered paramilitary forces in Bolivia to kill him “because I was instrumental, with the cooperation of the Bolivian government, in getting Luis Arce Gomez to Miami,” where he is awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges.

According to the U.S. Embassy, the information about the assassination order was provided by high-ranking Bolivian anti-drug officials and was being taken seriously. No such attack has been made.

Arce Gomez became the country’s highest-ranking law enforcement official after a coup interrupted democratic rule in the country in 1980. But he provided protection to traffickers, the DEA says, and was known as the “minister of cocaine.”

Arce Gomez was arrested by Bolivian police and U.S. drug agents on Dec. 10, 1989, and extradited to the United States by order of President Jaime Paz Zamora.

The smashed cocaine-trafficking network belonged to Carmelo Meco Dominguez. Law enforcement agents said the 34-year-old kingpin handled five to 10 tons of pure cocaine a month, much of it bound for the U.S. market. They said Dominguez is one of Bolivia’s three top cocaine traffickers.

Dominguez was arrested Wednesday in Santa Cruz, Bolivia’s second-largest city, 350 miles east of La Paz, said Raul Loayza, Bolivia’s undersecretary of the interior.

“We have destroyed one of the top trafficking operations in Bolivia and South America,” Ferrarone said.

The raids began Monday in the Chapare coca leaf-producing region.