Jailing a Feared Narco-Terrorist Won’t End Narco-Trafficking : Colombia: The government may have had no choice, but in moving to end extradition, it is also letting Pablo Escobar win his war against his own people.

An elderly, popular and eccentric priest may achieve what for years has been a dream for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, its Colombian counterpart and Colombia’s army and police: put behind bars the most-wanted cocaine trafficker in the world--Pablo Escobar, head of the infamous Medellin cartel.

Escobar’s imprisonment would appear to be the culminating victory of a 15-year war on drugs fought on an international battleground. With the three Ochoa brothers in a Medellin prison after surrendering to Colombian authorities and Carlos Lehder in a federal penitentiary in the United States, the top five men on every drug agent’s list would be out of circulation.

The Rev. Rafael Garcia Herreros succeeded in putting Escobar in a position unimaginable to the law-enforcement world. The world’s most-feared drug lord, suspected murderer of countless people, fell on his knees before the 84-year-old cleric, begging his blessing and promising he would surrender to the government.

Of course, Garcia Herreros had some help from the authorities. The groundwork had already been laid, first by a 1990 government decree that offered drug traffickers trials in Colombia and reduced sentences in exchange for their capitulation. In recent months, officials sweetened the pot with additional concessions--specifically in answer to Escobar’s demands.

At the same time, a constitutional assembly, called in a last-ditch attempt to save the country’s foundering institutions, has tentatively agreed to bar Colombian criminals from being extradited for trial. A recent poll found Colombians overwhelmingly approved the change--82% said they oppose extradition.

Eliminating extradition was the primary incentive for Escobar’s personal war of narco-terrorism against his countrymen, one that claimed the lives of hundreds of people. Escobar and his partners didn’t limit themselves to merely getting fat and rich exporting cocaine. They pledged to destroy each of the country’s major institutions. They set out to silence the press, intimidate and corrupt the criminal justice system and congress, and kill anybody and everybody who stood in their way.

Thus, Colombia fell into an interminable vortex of violence without precedent anywhere else in the world. With the surrender of Escobar and his key lieutenants, according to president Cesar Gaviria’s government, Colombians can celebrate “the salvation of national dignity and the pacification of the country.”

“The submission of Pablo Escobar to the Colombian justice that he had challenged is a victory for the state and a reason for psychological relief among the people,” wrote influential columnist Enrique Santos in El Tiempo.

For Colombians, the controversial decision to make peace with the narcos is the application of any country’s sovereign right to choose its own methods to solve its own problems.

But let there be no misunderstanding: What they are trying to resolve is narco-terrorism. Nobody in Colombia talks seriously about ending narco-trafficking. Why should they? President Gaviria has been very clear. There is no solution to drug trafficking without a serious, intensive and coordinated assault on various international fronts.

Colombia has suffered the major losses in this battle, both in lives lost and property destroyed. So far, it has been a sacrifice without meaning, a sacrifice designed more to placate the United States than impress anyone at home.

With the most brutal and dangerous traffickers in prison, the businessmen are taking over. Escobar, the Ochoa brothers and Lehder were the Medellin contingent, driven as much by bizarre ideologies and megalomaniacal fantasies as by greed. Now, it’s Cali’s turn.

The Cali cartel is a far different animal. It is composed of slick and chicly dressed men of business, interested--for now at least--in making and investing money, while opening new markets for their product.

“They are the richest and most powerful capos of the globe,” a Colombian police official recently told a reporter.

With or without Escobar, the business doesn’t stop. It is an industry ruled simply and exclusively by the law of market demands. It allows those who run it to become immensely wealthy in record time. With their wealth comes enormous power. As long as customers continue to line up, there will always be a keeper to mind the store.

With or without Escobar, the industry’s foundation is unshaken. Unlike many legal operations, its infinite profitability depends neither on the financial and business acumen nor the sales talent of Pablo or any other single capo. It doesn’t even depend on his brutality or lack of scruples.

The incredible price of cocaine depends only on the fact that it’s illegal.

“Cocaine is expensive not because it’s scarce, like caviar, or difficult to produce, like plutonium, or non-reproducible, like a Van Gogh painting,” wrote Antonio Caballero in the Colombian weekly Semana. “Despite the fact that it’s as easy and cheap to produce as sugar, it’s expensive because it’s illegal.”

As the most profitable business, it supports, directly and indirectly, millions of families in Latin America and permeates the economic infrastructure of the Andean nations. Even if Escobar gives up his business, as he has promised, there are many waiting in the wings to take his place.

That is the danger currently ignored in Colombia with the euphoria at his surrender. What guarantees that his replacement or replacements will forswear terrorism as the means to their ends? Escobar leaves a terrible legacy: Killing, kidnapping, and indiscriminate bombing can paralyze a nation.

He abandons an entire generation of young men from the poorest neighborhoods of Medellin, who served as his private soldiers of death and only learned about the power that comes from easy money and violence.

In making peace with the enemy, Colombia had no alternative. Let’s hope that Gaviria’s methods of peace don’t produce new Escobars.