A Chilling Crime Network Rears Its Head in Colombia

Sen. Piedad Cordoba knew she was a target.

As chairwoman of the Senate Human Rights Committee in this country where politicians are regularly kidnapped or assassinated, she had alienated guerrillas, right-wing private armies and even members of the government.

Still, Colombians were shocked when she and her bodyguard were surrounded by 15 armed people in uniforms of national investigative police at a clinic in the fashionable El Poblado district of this violent city. With so many powerful enemies, who had pulled off the audacious midday kidnapping?

Nine months after the senator was released unharmed by paramilitary leader Carlos Castano, prosecutors think they have the answer. They believe that Castano had hired the job out to La Terraza, the most powerful criminal organization operating in Colombia since drug baron Pablo Escobar was gunned down by police in 1993.

The kidnapping was the first firm link between urban organized crime related to drug trafficking and Castano’s rural federation of seven right-wing anti-insurgency forces, which have an estimated strength of 11,000 troops and their own narcotics ties.

Witnesses to the abduction identified one of the gunmen as Alexander “Green Eyes” Londono, who has six arrest warrants pending in cases involving 15 alleged murders, including the killings of two human rights workers. Londono, police believe, is among the leaders of La Terraza.

“They are the heirs of Pablo Escobar,” said Pedro Diaz, who heads the attorney general’s human rights unit.

Investigators say La Terraza hires Medellin’s desperate and hostile young street urchins to guard drug laboratories and shipments and to carry out a campaign of terror, assassinating human rights and peace advocates throughout the country.

Recruits are drawn from impoverished neighborhoods that encircle Medellin’s brick high-rises. Over the past decade, 172,000 people have fled to the urban squalor in this city of 2 million, escaping the violence of the countryside that is the battleground of Colombia’s various armed groups.

The young men steal to survive, and must join the crime rings that rule their neighborhoods in order to steal. Most of that time, gang members say, they are numbed by marijuana, the prescription drug Rohypnol, cocaine and bazuco--a byproduct left when coca paste is processed into cocaine powder. These are downed with the cheap, licorice-flavored alcohol known as agua ardiente--firewater.

Criminal groups have made Medellin one of the most violent cities in the world. Nearly a third of the people who die here each year are murdered. The homicide rate of 175 per 100,000 inhabitants compares with 79 for the rest of Colombia and an average of 12 throughout Latin America.

Now the contract criminals of La Terraza are increasing the brutality of Colombia’s drug-cum-civil war at a time when the government is seeking $1.3 billion in U.S. anti-narcotics aid.

“I don’t think that there are more than 15 to 20” members of La Terraza, Diaz said. “But they control 600 to 700 armed thugs.” They also operate a taxi fleet that doubles as an intelligence network that tracks targets, according to the group Human Rights Watch.

“They are what is left over from Escobar’s cartel, combined with the people who helped capture him,” mainly rivals from other drug cartels, said Gen. Luis Alfredo Rodriguez, police commander in Medellin. “La Terraza controls the rest of the criminals.”

The reemergence of such a powerful criminal network chills Colombians who remember how Escobar’s cartel assassinated presidential candidates and bombed public buildings to drive home its objections to extradition. Even the organization’s name recalls the now-defunct La Terraza bar in the violent Manrique neighborhood that was patronized by Escobar cronies until the manager, two waiters and several patrons died in a drug-related shooting nearly a decade ago.

Several killings that prosecutors blame on the Castano-La Terraza alliance also recall the tactics of those days.

Satirist and peace advocate Jaime Garzon was assassinated in a style that became familiar during the Escobar era: A youth shot him as he walked toward his Bogota office Aug. 13, then jumped on the back of a motorcycle driven by a companion and sped away.

In January, police arrested Juan Pablo Ortiz for the slaying and said he is tied to La Terraza.

Although La Terraza members will work for anyone who pays them, police and prosecutors say, these officials believe that one of the group’s principal clients is Castano, who has publicly accepted responsibility for scores of massacres and admitted taking money from drug traffickers. Police say Castano uses La Terraza to silence critics of his tactics in combating the rebels who have fought the government for 35 years.

Rodriguez, the police chief, ticked off the list of advantages that La Terraza offers: “They know the targets, they can find them easily, they have strategic alliances with other criminals, they know the city’s movements.”

Further, he said, its alliance with the paramilitary leader has made La Terraza more powerful, increasing the number of crime rings under its control.

“The status of being hand in hand with Castano tends to make everyone else subordinate,” Rodriguez said.

The effects of the partnership have been devastating.

Prosecutors believe that, since 1997, La Terraza has been responsible for slaying at least five human rights advocates investigating massacres. It also has made unraveling those killings virtually impossible, according to Human Rights Watch.

Consider the case of Jesus Maria Valle, killed Feb. 27, 1998, during his investigation of a five-day paramilitary occupation of the village of El Aro, which left 11 residents dead and 30 missing.

The first police agent assigned to the case was killed soon afterward. The prosecutor fled Colombia. Another investigator was killed last September.

Prosecutors believe that La Terraza was responsible for all three killings and for the threats that sent the prosecutor into exile. La Terraza ultimatums can be persuasive.

“I signed one case to authorize an indictment of paramilitaries before lunch, and by the time I returned to my desk after eating, a death threat, hand delivered, was there, with intimate details about the decor of my apartment to let me know the killers had already been inside,” a prosecutor told Human Rights Watch.

Castano was indicted in September 1998, accused of being the mastermind who ordered the killing of Valle, but he has not been detained.

Like Castano, the suspected leaders of La Terraza have generally dodged arrest warrants. Besides Londono, prosecutors suspect that La Terraza members include Diego Fernando Bejerano Murrillo, who is wanted on charges of kidnapping and extortion, and Gustavo Upegui, who is in prison awaiting trial on charges of kidnapping and forming illegal armed groups.

Londono and Bejerano Murrillo could not be reached for comment. Speaking by telephone from the Itagui maximum-security prison in a Medellin suburb, Upegui strenuously denied the indictment against him and any ties to La Terraza. He also denied an accusation in a 1999 U.S. State Department human rights report that he is a narcotics trafficker.

“I am a respectable businessman and community leader,” he said. “I do not know where these foolish charges come from. They are accusing me of everything that has ever gone wrong in Medellin.”

He is among the survivors of the internecine war that destroyed the Medellin cartel in the early 1990s, according to intelligence sources. Upegui allied himself with Castano against Escobar then, the sources said.

Upegui denies links to either Escobar or Castano. He described himself as a 47-year-old garment factory owner with three sons who devotes his spare time to civic activities and sports in his hometown of Envigado. The picturesque village in the mountains above Medellin is the site of Escobar’s luxury prison, built to his specifications after he surrendered to authorities in 1990.

The area is also known to be a hub of paramilitary activity, but Upegui denies any involvement in illegal armed groups.

“Let me tell you who I am,” he said. “I am the sports attache of the Envigado Soccer Club, the liaison with the municipal government, the manager of an automobile-emissions testing center, the principal and founder of the Envigado soccer school, a soccer referee, a third-year law student and the chairman of the soccer committee.”

Upegui was arrested 16 months ago by 20 investigative police in Envigado T-shirts and baseball caps as he left a soccer game. The charges against him are related to efforts to rescue his teenage sons from kidnappers.

Upegui insisted that he paid a ransom for one son in 1996 and that the other was freed the same year in a police raid. However, investigators said those police acted on information that Upegui obtained by kidnapping and interrogating relatives of his son’s abductors, an accusation he denied. The main witness against him recanted in November, and Upegui’s lawyer has filed a petition for his client’s release.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are trying to build a case against Upegui for allegedly planning the 1997 slayings of two Bogota human rights activists and another person. The State Department report named him as a suspect in the killings; he has denied any involvement.

Arrest warrants in the case have been issued for Castano and Londono, as mastermind and triggerman, respectively.

Londono represents the other side of an organization that, police chief Rodriguez said, “stretches across all social classes.” Londono grew up in the Medellin streets, graduating from car theft to leading a band of assassins, according to prosecutors, though he has never been convicted.

Londono’s background is not much different from that of the 7,000 youngsters who have been drawn into what human rights activists estimate are about 240 crime rings in Medellin.

Their rivalries brought the number of killings in Medellin to a peak of 6,300 in 1991. Since then, city officials have negotiated 55 “nonaggression pacts” among 160 crime rings in return for social programs. The number of slayings fell to 3,550 in 1998 before edging up last year to 3,650.

Social workers who deal with youths put the blame on the paramilitary and guerrilla groups that are recruiting the youth crime rings, often through intermediaries such as La Terraza.

“They offer them guns, a couple of motorcycles, maybe a car and $8,000 to $10,000,” said one social worker. “Then they call on them when they need them. In the meantime, they are using the guns and motorcycles to kill each other.”