Jailed Escobar Faces Security Crackdown : Colombia: Reports say the Medellin boss is running the cartel from prison--and that he has met with terrorists and other criminals.

The Colombian government has ordered a security crackdown at the facility holding Pablo Escobar amid continuing reports that the imprisoned boss of the Medellin cocaine cartel is running his criminal business through visits from subordinates, including wanted terrorists.

“The idea is to convert this facility into a true high-security prison,” Justice Minister Fernando Carrillo said in an interview last week, hours before announcing new security measures at the hillside jail near Medellin.

In coming weeks the government will begin building a high wall around the prison, rotating the facility’s guards and sending the attorney general on monthly visits to check on conditions there, Carrillo said.

“In 1992 we are going to be continually revising security measures at the jail,” he said.

The minister also ordered an investigation into a report that two of Colombia’s most wanted terrorists had visited Escobar at the jail last year.

The Colombian weekly newsmagazine Semana quoted unidentified government officials as saying they had irrefutable evidence that Dandenys Munoz, alias La Quica , and his brother Brance, alias Tayson, walked past the facility’s guards without being arrested.

The two are accused of perpetrating a string of terrorist bombings and assassinations of police in 1989 and 1990. Escobar and other cartel bosses allegedly ordered the terrorism, which left hundreds dead, as part of their war against the government during those years.

La Quica was later arrested in New York City, where he awaits sentencing after being convicted of illegally entering the United States and lying to federal agents about his identity.

A former Colombian justice minister and diplomat, Enrique Parejo, had demanded an investigation of the Munoz brothers’ reported visit, saying that Escobar was turning the jail into a headquarters for his criminal operations.

“What is happening at that so-called prison is another example of the absolute impunity in Colombia,” Parejo said in an interview last week. He went further, accusing Escobar of putting out a contract on his life.

“I have received information that because of my denunciations, the head of the Medellin cartel has given the order from jail to have me killed,” said Parejo, sitting in the small, well-guarded apartment of one of his relatives.

As justice minister from 1984 to 1986, Parejo helped lead Colombia’s anti-drug fight, ordering the extradition to the United States of several top drug figures. In 1987, while serving as ambassador to Hungary, he was critically wounded on the streets of Budapest in an assassination attempt carried out by a gunman presumably working for the cocaine bosses.

Last July, Parejo resigned as President Cesar Gaviria’s ambassador to Switzerland after publicly criticizing the government’s policy of offering traffickers leniency in exchange for their surrenders.

Escobar turned himself in last June under that plan, which promised reduced sentences in Colombia for drug lords confessing to their crimes. He arrived by helicopter at the specially built jail, which overlooks his hometown of Envigado. He is currently awaiting trial there.

In the weeks before his surrender, reports were widespread that Escobar had financed and supervised the jail’s construction and was choosing its security guards. Those reports resurfaced in December in the form of a book published by an army colonel in charge of overseeing visits to the jail.

The colonel, Augusto Bahamon, was sanctioned for signing a permission slip allowing a Colombian soccer star to visit Escobar in July. At that time, local newspapers reported that the cartel boss had been visited by hundreds of people, including several wanted felons.

Bahamon decided to retire and tell what he called the true story of the jail. His book, “My War in Medellin,” maintains that Escobar paid for the site of the hilltop prison and surrounding land, specified the prison’s features, including a soccer field, and chose many of his own guards, 11 of whom have criminal records.

Answering the criticism, Justice Minister Carrillo admitted that, while some of Bahamon’s story may be true, his book is “largely a work of fiction.”

The minister also denied that Escobar continues to operate his cocaine business, saying that security provided by the army around the jail has prevented any contact with cartel underlings. Carrillo added, however, that the government is planning to periodically change the jail’s civilian guards “to avoid intimidation and corruption” of them.

The minister insisted that he didn’t know and didn’t care how Escobar would take the new measures. But another senior official said the government would react to any hint that the cartel leader was planning a new round of terrorism by transferring him to another jail guarded by police.

Escobar specifically requested that police be kept away from his jail. He obviously fears retaliation since senior police officials accuse him of ordering the 1990 killings of hundreds of members of the force.