Major Heroin Ring Busted, Colombia Says

Anti-narcotics police dismantled a major heroin smuggling ring Wednesday in a predawn sweep that spanned four cities and led to the capture of 46 alleged drug traffickers, law enforcement authorities said.

The raid netted Nicolas Urquijo Gaviria, the suspected leader of the ring and a cousin of the late drug lord Pablo Escobar, police said. Authorities said that Urquijo’s ring exported up to 110 pounds of heroin a month and had established routes to the United States, Spain, the Netherlands and Italy.

Well known as the major source of the world’s cocaine, Colombia has expanded into the heroin market in recent years, according to law enforcement authorities. In total, police estimate that Colombian drug cartels export about 6 tons of heroin a year.

“These arrests practically remove the backbone from what I consider the most important heroin trafficking organization in our country,” National Police Commander Rosso Jose Serrano said at a news conference in Cali after the arrests.

No extradition requests are anticipated for those arrested Wednesday, a U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration spokeswoman said by telephone from Washington. Nevertheless, the 3 a.m. sweep was a dramatic show of Colombian commitment to cooperate in the war against drugs.

It coincides with President Andres Pastrana’s meeting in Washington with U.S. lawmakers to rally support for a huge aid package to help Colombia fight an increasingly sophisticated narcotics trade. The aid proposal has been stalled in the U.S. Senate.

The suspects, whom police lined up before reporters, included several women. Urquijo kept his head bowed and turned his back to reporters who tried to question him.

Stressing the grand scale of the sweep, Serrano said 60 prosecutors participated in the yearlong investigation that led to the raids, while a team of 1,300 police officers carried them out. Arrests were made in the western cities of Cali, Popayan and Medellin and in Cucuta near the Venezuelan border.

Serrano called the crackdown “Operation Millennium II,” a reference to the October 1999 arrests of 30 alleged traffickers, including convicted former cartel boss Fabio Ochoa, for extradition to the United States.

U.S. counter-narcotics agents also lent support to Wednesday’s operation, a police spokesman said, a fact underscored by the presence at the news conference of the DEA attache in Colombia, Leo Arreguin.

The raid, Serrano said, snared people allegedly responsible for all aspects of heroin production and export, from buyers of precursor chemicals used to refine the drug to people charged with recruiting “mules”--travelers paid to carry small quantities of drugs to distributors in other countries.

Commonly, the mules swallow compact capsules of drugs covered in latex, but customs officials also have found drugs packed into special compartments in women’s bras, in backpacks and even in a wig.

Large-scale narcotics organizations such as the one police said they destroyed Wednesday are increasingly rare in Colombia. Since police killed Escobar in a 1993 shootout and then dismantled the rival Cali cartel, investigators say, drug operations have been taken over by a broad network of smaller traffickers who maintain a low profile, making them difficult to catch.