In Extradition Case, Colombia Says Turnabout Is Fair Play

In Colombia, a country of fallen heroes, Victor Tafur’s case normally might not have caused more than a flutter.

Sure, he is the son of an assassinated anti-drug crusader, and he is still recovering from injuries he sustained in a near-fatal plane crash while working on an anti-narcotics project. But Colombia is a nation where former guerrillas now in Congress are routinely accused of ties to drug cartels, where a daring police pilot was charged with embezzling anti-narcotics funds and where more than a dozen politicians have gone to jail for accepting drug money.

The difference is that Tafur was in the United States when Colombian police found checks written by him in the account of a company linked to the largest shipment of cocaine ever confiscated in Colombia. Now, for the first time, Colombian authorities are asking that a suspect in a drug case be extradited to their country from the U.S.

Tafur’s case puts pressure on U.S. officials to cooperate. In 1997, after six years of insistence by the American government, Colombia agreed to resume extraditing its citizens to the United States. The first Colombian was sent north in November, and 30 more cases are pending.

Tafur’s case also brings Colombia’s justice system--particularly the U.S.-nurtured unit that investigates money laundering--under the scrutiny of American courts, which must decide whether there is enough evidence to send him home for trial. The unit is part of a multi-pronged attack on Colombian drug traffickers, who supply an estimated three-fourths of the world’s cocaine and a growing share of the heroin consumed in the United States.

Police discourage production by eradicating drug crops and providing alternative development programs, such as the one Tafur was working for when his small plane crashed in March 1999. Police also intercept drug cargoes.

The money-laundering unit goes after profits. Its investigators include some of the country’s most respected lawyers and most capable accountants because money laundering is a difficult crime to prove.

As Tafur is learning, it may be even harder to disprove.

“There have been a lot of high-profile people in Colombia that are caught in money laundering,” said Robin Kirk, who follows the South American nation for New York-based Human Rights Watch. “Drug trafficking is so ubiquitous, how do you know that the people you are buying from are in the drug trade?”

Anyone buying an imported item, from a discount appliance to a new suit, could be an unwitting participant in laundering drug money. Changing currency is even more risky. So, while U.S. banks are implementing “know your client” policies to avoid being used by launderers, Colombians must “know their bankers.”

Tafur, a 37-year-old lawyer, thought he knew the two import-export executives who agreed to cash 13 checks for him worth a total of nearly $350,000, enabling him to avoid exchange commissions.

As Tafur tells the story, he changed a lump-sum settlement of his late father’s pension from pesos into dollars in September 1998, intent on depositing the money in a family account in Switzerland. That money now has been posted as his bail while he awaits a May 4 extradition hearing, he said.

The checks ended up in the account of a company called E. I. Caribe. “I have no idea how they got there,” Tafur said in a telephone interview from his mother’s home in New Hope, Pa. Three months after Tafur wrote the checks, 7.2 tons of cocaine was seized in the Caribbean port of Cartagena in E. I. Caribe containers.

In September, authorities issued a warrant for Tafur’s arrest on suspicion of bankrolling drug shipments. By that time, he had survived the plane crash, as well as a three-day wait until rescue workers found him, and was at his mother’s home recovering.

The U.S. judge hearing the case was convinced enough by Tafur’s version of events to release him on bail this month.

Colombia’s attorney general replied with a veiled threat: “The fact that the basic validity of the evidence provided by Colombian authorities is being questioned in the United States could affect the principle of reciprocity that defines and characterizes extradition.”

Tafur fears that he will not be safe in Colombia because of his anti-narcotics record and because several people associated with the case have been killed. Next week, his attorneys will ask Colombia to take his statement in the U.S.

“I will abide by whatever the courts decide,” Tafur pledged.