U.S. Indicts Colombian Guerrillas

The U.S. government announced charges in Washington on Wednesday against 50 leftist Colombian guerrilla leaders in connection with shipments of $25 billion in cocaine to the United States and other countries.

The guerrillas, all leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, were charged with managing the smuggling of 60% of all the cocaine consumed in the United States over the last decade or so, shipments that allegedly have totaled 2,750 tons.

The guerrillas and their enemies, Colombia’s right-wing paramilitary armies, have long been suspected of controlling Colombia’s billion-dollar illegal drug industry, including trading narcotics for arms to fuel that nation’s 40-year civil conflict.

The indictment “concretizes” those suspicions, said John Walsh of the Washington Office on Latin America, a policy monitoring group.

Three of the 50 suspects named in the indictments have been arrested in Colombia, and U.S. prosecutors said Wednesday that they had requested their extraditions.

The U.S. State Department is offering $75 million in rewards for the apprehension of the other 47 suspects, all of whom prosecutors want to try in U.S. courts.

“We’re hoping the amounts being offered, up to $5 million each for some of the suspects, result in some arrests and in us being able to request further extraditions,” U.S. Justice Department spokesman Bryan Sierra said.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe generally has acceded to U.S. extradition requests, granting more than 400 of them since he took office in 2002. Two captured FARC leaders are among those handed over to the United States. Nayibe Rojas Valderrama, also known as Sonia, and Ricardo Palmera, or Simon Trinidad, are awaiting trial in Washington this summer on drug and terrorism charges.

U.S. officials, including Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales and Drug Enforcement Administration chief Karen P. Tandy, announced the indictments at a Justice Department news conference.

Andres Pastrana, the former Colombian president who is ambassador to the United States, also participated.

“This is the largest narcotics-trafficking indictment ever filed in U.S. history and fuels our hope to reduce narco-violence in Colombia and stem the tide of illegal drugs entering our country,” Gonzales said.

The United States has been involved in Colombia’s war on drug traffickers since 1999, when it launched Plan Colombia, a military aid and drug eradication program.

Totaling $4 billion in subsidies since its inception, the program has made Colombia the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid outside the Middle East and Afghanistan.

Indictments and extraditions of Colombian drug trafficking suspects have been an integral part of U.S. policy.

But critics have accused Uribe of being more inclined to extradite leftist guerrillas than right-wing leaders of paramilitary groups, whom he is trying to demobilize.

FARC fighters have resisted peace negotiations.

The timing of the announcement of the indictments, which were filed in Washington on March 1 and unsealed Tuesday, raised questions among some U.S. and Colombian observers.

It comes shortly before the Bush administration is expected to release annual figures for coca cultivation in Colombia that show only slight reductions in 2003 and 2004 despite expanded spraying to reduce crops during that time.

The announcement could be timed to “shore up support and reassure supporters of Plan Colombia,” said Walsh of the Latin America policy monitoring group, which has been critical of aid to Colombia.

“I am wondering about the timing, the source of the evidence and what the consequences of the indictments are likely to be,” he said.

Sierra said the indictments were announced after settling details of the reward program and deciding to seek extradition of the three FARC members in Colombian custody.

Alfredo Rangel, a military analyst in Bogota, the Colombian capital, who studies the nation’s armed groups, said the indictment’s characterization of the FARC as a drug-trafficking group might make peace negotiations harder.

“You negotiate peace with a military organization that has a recognized political status,” Rangel said. “If you reduce the FARC to just a drug cartel, you make the possibility of negotiating a political settlement more difficult.”

The 54-page indictment details FARC drug-trafficking operations and names top- and mid-level leaders.

Colombia’s attorney general, Mario Iguaran, said in a statement that most of the suspects had been charged in Colombian courts for crimes including kidnapping and extortion, in addition to drug trafficking.

“This shows the harmony that exists in our investigative and prosecution work, in our efforts to combat this plague,” Iguaran said of the cooperation between the United States and Colombia on fighting drugs.

Times staff writer Richard B. Schmitt in Washington and special correspondent Jenny Carolina Gonzalez in Bogota contributed to this report.