Medellin Cartel Offered New Concessions to Surrender : Colombia: Government promises drug traffickers no extradition to U.S. in return for confessions to at least one crime each.

The Colombian government granted Medellin drug cartel members new legal guarantees Monday in yet another concession to try to persuade them to turn themselves in.

But the administration of President Cesar Gaviria tried to answer critics’ charges that it is caving in to traffickers by rejecting the cartel’s main condition for such a mass surrender.

Medellin traffickers have denounced as unconstitutional a government requirement that surrendering suspects confess to at least one crime in order to receive lenient treatment. The government refused to drop the demand, saying confessions are necessary to ensure that the drug traffickers are jailed.

“The foundation of this process is (traffickers) submitting themselves to Colombian justice,” said Justice Minister Jaime Giraldo Angel in a Monday press conference. “On this point the government has not budged one millimeter.”

Giraldo was responding to strong criticism of the government’s policy by foreign officials as well as some local press commentators and politicians. The critics say that the Gaviria administration is repeatedly changing the law according to the cartel’s wishes.

An earlier government decree, issued Sept. 5, promised no extradition to the United States and reduced prison sentences for traffickers who confess their crimes. A subsequent statement from the Extraditables, as cartel members call themselves, demanded that the government further clarify its promise.

Giraldo said the new decree gives those who confess even one crime an “absolute guarantee” of no extradition--a major demand of the cartel, whose members greatly fear being prosecuted in U.S. courts.

The cartel statement also said the government should protect the human rights of its members by housing them in special compounds guarded by either the army or human rights groups. The cartel members have long sought to be treated in a category separate from common criminals.

The government’s latest decree seems to meet that demand. It stipulates that the attorney general’s human rights office must delegate an agent to oversee each drug suspect’s surrender and trial. The decree also says that suspected traffickers and terrorists will be housed in special jails--guarded by the army to prevent attacks from “outside source”--currently being prepared in several cities.

The new decree states that suspects will serve no more than 30 years in prison no matter how many crimes they have committed. It maintains reduced sentences for traffickers who cooperate with authorities.

According to the plan, Pablo Escobar, the Medellin cartel leader accused of killing hundreds of people, could spend as few as 15 years in prison, Giraldo said. But he stressed that Escobar and others will either accept the decree and serve a significant sentence in Colombia or be captured and extradited.

Giraldo’s statement is unlikely to reassure those foreign and Colombian officials who view the government’s offer of lenient treatment as mistaken, if not disastrous. They say Gaviria should never have shown traffickers any flexibility.

“Every time the government makes a change in the law, the drug traffickers make new demands,” Carlos Lemos Simmonds, a member of the president’s Liberal Party and a former interior minister, said in a recent interview. “This process is not likely to end until the drug traffickers receive something approaching full amnesty.”

An international law enforcement official said Gaviria was making “a horrible mistake” by believing the promises of the Medellin cartel. He noted that traffickers had courted the government with a pledge to turn in their cocaine laboratories. But a recent report from Interpol, an international police agency, states that the cartel has moved a significant amount of its operations into neighboring countries including Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia.

“What the drug traffickers will turn over here will be the leftover garbage,” said the official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Colombia’s police force, the official adds, has not eased its efforts to rid the country of drug traffickers and their operations. “But everyone is discouraged because after so many sacrifices, the government is now ready to cut a deal (with the cartel),” he said.

Escobar and other cartel leaders are accused of masterminding a terrorist campaign that killed hundreds of Colombians, including 250 police officers in 1989 and early this year.