Changing Lifestyles : Drug Bust Brings Tourist Boom Back to Cartagena : * The historic resort on the Caribbean has outlasted its latest enemy: Colombian cocaine warriors who scared foreigners, and their money, away.

Just over a year ago, this walled bastion of colonial architecture was playing out its historical role as a city under siege.

During past centuries, the foes outside Cartagena’s fortress walls were English pirates and other foreigners seeking to sack the city’s riches. The more recent enemies--drug traffickers and their terrorist allies--attacked from positions within Cartagena’s walls.

Using bombs to scare away foreign tourists in 1989 and much of 1990, the home-grown marauders poisoned a main fountain of Cartagena’s present-day wealth and Colombia’s pride.

Now Cartagena is once again celebrating an enemy repelled, at least for the time being. A government offer of judicial leniency is keeping drug traffickers quiet enough to allow the return of free-spending tourists from Canada and Europe.

Weekly charter flights, canceled during the wave of bombings, are once again bringing 300 Canadians a week to the city. Scores of U.S. and European cruise ships, which skipped their Cartagena stops in 1989 and 1990, are expected to return this high season, lasting from November to March.

Visitors to the city, as well as residents, agree that last year’s lifting of U.S. and Canadian travel warnings for Colombia cleared the way for new tourism.

“Two years ago, when the Canadian government was saying, ‘Don’t go to Cartagena,’ I wouldn’t have considered a vacation here,” said Rick Murdoch, a Toronto police officer, stirring a rum punch under a poolside palm tree. “I think my wife and I are perfectly safe now.”

Murdoch had taken advantage of one of many Cartagena budget vacations being offered by Canadian travel agencies. His plan included air travel, two weeks in a five-star hotel, two meals a day and a weekly liquor allowance--all for $1,800 Canadian (about $1,600 in U.S. currency).

“There is nowhere else in the world that Canadians can visit for that price,” said Angelo Sartor, the owner of a travel agency in Guelph, Canada, 30 miles north of Toronto.

Sartor, white-haired and bespectacled, had spent days and nights wandering the streets of “the old city,” Cartagena’s walled historical district lined with Spanish colonial houses, churches and other public buildings.

“I will have no problem promoting this beautiful place back home,” said the travel agent, who plans to bring 1,000 Canadians to the city this winter.

Cartagena’s residents are understandably cheered by such news.

“Everyone here feels relief over having survived two of the worst years in this city,” said Sara Bozzi, the government’s tourism director for Cartagena and the surrounding Bolivar state. “In terms of tourism, we’re just now getting back to the point where we were before August of ’89.”

That was the month when terrorists allegedly working for the Medellin cocaine cartel shot and killed a leading presidential candidate, Sen. Luis Carlos Galan, at a Bogota campaign rally.

Hours later, the government intensified a crackdown on traffickers by allowing their extradition and the confiscation of their property. The drug lords responded with a wave of bombings in several Colombian cities, including Cartagena.

On Sept. 25, 1989, a bomb placed in the Hilton hotel here killed two Colombian doctors attending a medical convention. Two other blasts in May and June, 1990, wounded 46 people.

Repercussions of the bombings affected thousands--not only the foreign tourists who scratched Cartagena off their lists of destinations in 1989 and the first half of 1990 but also the city’s residents, who had considered themselves at least partially immune from the country’s drug violence.

“Bombs in Medellin (a major center for drug trafficking) are usual occurrences. Here they are not,” said Patricia Restrepo, manager of the five-star Caribe Hotel, which lost half of its business as a result of the attacks. “Never before 1989 did Cartagena feel it shared the problems of the rest of the country.”

The number of foreign tourists visiting the city fell from 41,247 in 1988 to 33,011 in 1989. The national tourism board estimated losses to Cartagena’s economy at $50 million between August, 1989, and July, 1990. Hotel construction stopped, unemployment soared, and several restaurants and other businesses went broke.

“Cartagena is usually not identified with the rest of Colombia, but the Hilton bomb threw us into a tomb,” said Giovanni Guasta Fierro, the owner of an Italian restaurant in one of the city’s main tourist districts.

The bombs stopped last year as the Medellin cartel turned to other methods, such as kidnaping, to pressure the government into concessions. Finally, in June, cartel leader Pablo Escobar surrendered under a government plan promising him a reduced sentence in Colombia.

Unlike in Canada, there are no weekly charter flights bringing American tourists to Cartagena, partly because several U.S. travel agencies that did so went out of business and partly because of lingering fear.

“U.S. travel agents are afraid to offer Cartagena as a destination, and tourists are equally afraid to accept it because of Colombia’s bad image,” said Maria Yacaman, the manager of the city’s municipal tourist board. “It’s a shame because Cartagena is the city of peace.”

Well, not exactly. Leftist guerrillas based in Bolivar state still occasionally cut off Cartagena’s power by blowing up an energy pylon outside the city. In July, the rebels brought the campaign closer to the tourists by blowing a hole in the runway of the international airport.

Nor has drug violence disappeared entirely. On Oct. 12, gunmen shot to death a pedestrian on one of the city’s main tourist avenues. Police identified the victim as a member of the Medellin cartel and said the murder was apparently the result of a turf battle among traffickers.

Such incidents, however, seem minor to people who lived in desperation for over two years without the tourist dollars.

“One time in 1989, my family went three days without food,” said 17-year-old Patricia Gomez, who has nine brothers and sisters. Gomez makes her living by braiding the hair of two or three tourists each day on Cartagena’s beaches. “Now at least I can earn enough to eat. Before, there was nobody here.”

Under Siege for Centuries Cartagena was once a major storage port for the treasure-laden galleons of the Spanish Main. An extensive network of fortresses was built by Spain to protect its gold and jewels from pirates and privateers. Sir Francis Drake captured Cartagena in 1586 but did not burn it down. The French sacked it in 1697. But in 1741, its mightiest fortress, San Felipe, resisted a massive assault led by English buccaneers. Cartagena’s Old City today is one of the best-preserved colonial-era districts in South America. It has been a tourist mecca and an often-used location for films, including 1986’s “The Mission,” starring Robert De Niro. Chart shows free fall in Cartagena’s tourism profits. Officials hope decline in terrorism will bring upturn in tourism. In 1988, $25.0 million In 1989, $15.1 million In 1990, $5.7 million Sources: Los Angeles Times, Colombia Tourism Office