U.S.-Colombia Raids Net 47 Drug-Trafficking Suspects

In a strike against the heirs of notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, police arrested 47 reputed narcotics traffickers Wednesday in simultaneous raids across this country and in three U.S. locations, law enforcement authorities said.

Police said they have destroyed a narcotics ring that smuggled more than $20 million worth of cocaine into the United States each month. One of the 40 suspects found in the northwestern city of Medellin--headquarters of the alleged ring and once Escobar’s base--jumped to his death from a window to avoid arrest, according to police.

“This is a far-reaching operation that has allowed us to deliver one of the most exact hits in recent history in the fight against illegal trafficking of drugs,” said Jaime Cordoba, spokesman for the national prosecutor’s office in Colombia.

During a news conference at which Cordoba spoke, 37 suspects were paraded in front of reporters. Most of the suspects kept their eyes downcast; some hid their faces with their jackets.

The alleged head of the suspected drug-smuggling ring is 40-year-old Carlos Mario Castro Arias, a virtually unknown Medellin resident whose low profile contrasted markedly with Escobar’s public activities as a senator and philanthropist.

“This new generation of educated businessmen applying sophisticated technology to mask their criminal behavior is just as dangerous as their forbearers,” said Donnie R. Marshall, administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration during a simultaneous news conference in Washington, according to a statement distributed here.

“They mistakenly believe that it was just visibility and violence that brought down the powerful Medellin cartel in the early 1990s,” Marshall said. Escobar was killed in 1993 during a shootout with police.

Wednesday’s raids, coordinated with a DEA operation that detained a total of seven suspects in New York, New Jersey and Miami, overshadowed Operation Millennium, in which 30 alleged traffickers were arrested in October 1999 in Miami and Colombia. The suspects detained in Colombia then are still awaiting extradition to the United States.

On Wednesday, Colombian police said they had confiscated $3.5 million and 11 tons of cocaine. Members of the smuggling ring are believed to have shipped about 2 tons of cocaine a month through Mexico to the United States, a police spokesman said. Colombia supplies an estimated three-quarters of the world’s cocaine and a growing share of the high-grade heroin consumed in the United States.

“International cooperation has functioned 100% in this operation,” said Colombian national Police Chief Gen. Ernesto Gilibert.

The coordinated raid is an indication of the continuing close relationship between U.S. and Colombian law enforcement authorities as the United States begins disbursing funds from a new, $1.3-billion package of mostly military anti-drug aid for this Andean country.

The funding is aimed largely at allowing the Colombian army to support police in fighting an alliance between drug traffickers and Marxist guerrillas who have been battling the government for more than three decades. Drug enforcement authorities largely blame that tacit partnership for the increase in Colombia’s cocaine production, which has occurred despite success in breaking up the Medellin and Cali cartels and the tripling of U.S. anti-drug aid in the years before the latest funding package.

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Times staff writer Darling reported from San Salvador and special correspondent Morris from Bogota.