-Caveat Lector-
Colombian Connection
Welcome to Barranquilla, the port where residents are
trigger-happy-but even a drug lord has trouble taking out a
$500,000 contract on American narcotics agents
By Joe Contreras
NEWSWEEK WEB EXCLUSIVE
May 18 - Our late-model SUV was cruising through the
darkened streets of Barranquilla last Sunday when a garishly
painted city bus began to crowd our vehicle. My companions-two
veteran narcotics agents-took about two minutes to decide they
'd had enough. "Pass me my gun," barked the agent in the
driver's seat to his bearded colleague, Ricardo, as the bus
door sidled right up to his window. As Ricardo fumbled in the
darkness for his boss's .357 magnum, the bus driver gunned the
engine and sped off into the muggy night air of Colombia's
Atlantic coast. "It's a good thing that bastard didn't stick
around for much longer," muttered the agent afterward as I
tucked into a succulent fillet at his favorite steak house.
"In this town, we shoot first and ask questions later."
AFTER MY RECENT VISITS to Barranquilla, I can see why. As
the country's premier distribution channel on its Caribbean
shore, this oppressively noisy and humid city of 1.2 million
ranks as one of the major exit points for Colombia's
multibillion-dollar cocaine and heroin exports.
Almost no one is completely safe on the streets here.
Not the city's leading drug lords, at least a dozen of whom
have been gunned down over bad debts and turf battles in the
past two years. Certainly not the outmanned, undergunned
Colombian lawmen who fight a losing battle every day to bring
the city's top kingpins to book. And as NEWSWEEK has learned,
not even agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
(DEA) who work out of the American consulate in Barranquilla
can take their physical safety for granted.
It was on the evening of Feb. 18, 2000, that the DEA
office in Barranquilla heard that a ruthless right-wing
paramilitary chieftain named Hernan Giraldo had put out a
$500,000 contract on the U.S. special agents assigned to
investigate the top drug lords of northern Colombia. The son
of humble mixed-blood peasants, Giraldo had first made a name
for himself in the 1970s as an organizer of so-called
self-defense groups in the Andean highlands of central
Colombia. These armed vigilantes were paid by cattlemen,
wealthy merchants and even drug traffickers of that era to
fend off kidnapping attempts by left-wing guerrillas who
operated in the mountainous states-known here as
departments-of Caldas and Quindio.
In the mid-1980s, Giraldo moved to Colombia's eastern
Atlantic-coast region. When he wasn't purging the countryside
outside the colonial-era city of Santa Marta of guerrillas and
their peasant sympathizers, he was quietly building up a major
drug-trafficking syndicate.
Giraldo officially became a fugitive from Colombian
justice in 1994 after he was tried and convicted in absentia
for the 1988 massacres of 20 unionized banana plantation
workers in the northwestern part of the country. Sentenced to
20 years in prison, he managed to avoid arrest with the timely
help of corrupt army and police officers stationed in his
domain in northeastern Colombia. Despite a six-year-old
warrant for his arrest, Giraldo continued to ship narcotics
and eliminate political enemies with complete impunity from
his stronghold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain
range 70 miles east of Barranquilla.
This cozy state of affairs might have lasted
indefinitely had it not been for the pesky probing of DEA
personnel into Giraldo's sources of income. By the winter of
last year, say Colombian intelligence sources, the warlord
became convinced that DEA personnel based in Barranquilla were
working with U.S. government prosecutors to assemble a case
that could eventually threaten him with extradition to face
trial on drug-trafficking charges in a federal district
courtroom.
That prospect has always loomed as the ultimate
nightmare scenario for successive generations of Colombian dru
g lords who know they can't bribe themselves out of an
American prison cell with the same ease that they can escape
Colombian penitentiaries. Like the late Medellin cartel chief
Pablo Escobar and a host of other big-time drug-smuggling
predecessors, Giraldo wanted to avoid such a situation.
Giraldo's proposed solution to his quandary was typically
violent and reckless: blow away an American narc or two and
hope that Washington would take the hint.
Giraldo's proposed solution to his quandary was
typically violent and reckless: blow away an American narc or
two and hope that Washington would take the hint. But even by
the sanguine standards of Giraldo's partners in crime, the
mooted assassination of a DEA field agent sounded like
madness. One who felt that way was Adan Rojas, a boyhood
friend and longtime lieutenant of the 52-year-old Giraldo.
Rojas, who had accompanied the paramilitary leader on
his move from Colombia's central highlands to the rural
backroads of the Magdalena department in 1986, tried to talk
his boss out of the idea. His reasoning: that a dead DEA agent
would unleash a firestorm in Washington and finally force the
government of Colombian President Andres Pastrana to track
down and jail Giraldo.
Giraldo, however, was in no mood to brook dissension
within the ranks of his private army. According to Colombian
intelligence sources and knowledgeable U.S. officials, Giraldo
set up an ambush for Rojas and his son Rigoberto at one of the
kingpin's many farms in the environs of Santa Marta. The
resulting skirmish between Giraldo's gunmen and his formerly
trustworthy sidekick occurred in mid-February of last year,
around the same time that the DEA office in Barranquilla first
heard about Giraldo's half-million-dollar bounty for one of
its drug warriors. Adan and Rigoberto Rojas narrowly escaped
with their lives, but the father was captured on Feb. 23 when
he went to seek treatment for his gunshot wounds at a
prominent Barranquilla medical clinic. The younger Rojas was
picked up five days later.
As the intended objects of the assassination plot, the
DEA agents acted quickly against the threat. Support staff
members were immediately flown out of Colombia, and their
office was manned around the clock by special agents until the
arrest of Adan Rojas. In time, life returned to normal-or what
passes for normal for the DEA operation in Barranquilla-and
nothing more was ever heard about Giraldo's six-figure
contract.
All this gave me ample food for thought as I left the
two agents in their SUV late that Sunday evening. I retreated
to the air-conditioned privacy of my room at the Hotel El
Prado, a five-star hostelry housed in a neocolonial four-story
edifice replete with Spanish red tile roofing and an
Olympic-size swimming pool. Here, I thought, I could put the
subject of drug traffickers on hold and read myself to sleep.
But in this city, even elegant hotels are not
immune to the fallout from drug trafficking. I shouldn't have
been surprised-but I was-when a hotel taxi driver told me the
next morning about how the Hotel El Prado was once the
property of Julio David Nasser, a notorious money launderer
arrested by Colombian police in the mid-1990s. An estimated
$200 million in assets, bank accounts and real estate
belonging to Nasser and his immediate family were impounded by
authorities in the United States, Colombia and several other
countries.
One of the more prestigious acquisitions that Nasser
forfeited to the Colombian state was the 73-year-old El Prado
Hotel. (The last major trafficker to die on the streets of
Barranquilla was Julio David's brother Tito, shot to death
April 3 of this year.) The hotel's checkered history furnished
yet another reminder of just how ubiquitous the drug trade has
become in South American hellholes like Barranquilla. For my
part, it was a sign. Next time I visit Colombia's
fourth-largest city, I'll check into another hotel.
� 2001 Newsweek, Inc.News | Opinions | Weather | Comics
Information Center | Help | News Tools | Write Us | Terms &
Conditions & Privacy
<A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A>
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic
screeds are unwelcomed. Substance�not soap-boxing�please! These are
sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html
<A HREF="http://peach.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html";>Archives of
[EMAIL PROTECTED]</A>
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
<A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/";>ctrl</A>
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
