The timing of the blast pointed investigators in the direction of Colombia’s notorious narcotraficantes. The attack occurred less than 48 hours after the nation’s Supreme Court unanimously approved the first extradition of a Colombian drug trafficker to the United States in nine years. In the late 1980s Pablo Escobar and other narcotics kingpins unleashed a brutal campaign of bombings, kidnappings and assassinations that cowed the Colombian government into halting all extraditions of suspects wanted by U.S. officials. Last week’s bloodshed came just before alleged drug lord Jaime Lara Nausa was ordered to stand trial in New York on charges of heroin trafficking. The bombing also conjured up fears of a renewed drug war that Colombians hoped had ended when police killed Escobar in a 1993 shoot-out. “This could be revenge for extradition decisions,” warned former national-security adviser Alfredo Rangel Suarez, “or a warning from drug traffickers to stop the extradition process.”
A defiant President Andres Pastrana immediately indicated that he would not heed such warnings. On the night of the bomb blast, he signed decrees giving the final go-ahead for the extradition of Lara and two non-Colombian drug traffickers who are also wanted in the United States. “If it’s proven that this was drug terrorism, the president will keep his word and extradite all the drug traffickers,” declared Justice Minister Romulo Gonzalez. Pastrana, himself a former kidnap victim, has won high marks from Washington for his commitment to cracking down on the drug trade. More than 40 suspected drug lords are in Colombian prisons awaiting the outcome of requests for extradition. If Pastrana keeps his vow, last week’s explosion may prove to be the opening salvo of a new terror campaign to undermine support for his government’s antinarcotics crusade.
The bomb blast also shattered assumptions about a supposedly new breed of drug trafficker. The heads of the once feared Medellin and Cali cartels were mostly poorly educated thugs who cultivated an image of macho gunslingers. Their successors were described as low-key professionals who felt more at home with a satellite phone than a stick of dynamite. But in recent months the new mafiosi have resorted to tactics that would have made Escobar feel proud. In the western state of Valle, one group of narcos has hired chain-saw-wielding paramilitary groups to kill dozens of leftists after three of their colleagues found themselves among a group of churchgoers who were kidnapped by Colombia’s second largest guerrilla army in June.
Many Colombians hold the United States responsible for the epidemic of drug-related violence and corruption that has plagued their country for the past 20 years. The Clinton administration has tried to halt the torrent of hard drugs pouring out of Colombia by allocating $289 million in foreign aid for the Pastrana government earlier this year, and a new U.S.-trained Army counternarcotics battalion will go into the field next month. But if more Colombian drug lords are extradited in the coming months, the cartel chiefs may retaliate by targeting American officials stationed inside the country. “If they wanted to make a big hit on Americans it would be very easy,” admits one U.S. Embassy official in Bogota. “A lot of us go to the same bars.” Maybe not for long.
