The World - Drug suspect's arrest hailed - U.S. officials say Colombia's capture of an alleged cartel chief will disrupt trafficking, but concede it isn't likely to slow the trade.
U.S. officials hailed the capture this week of a man alleged to be Colombia's most powerful drug lord, saying the arrest will at least disrupt trafficking and could set off a divisive power struggle among cartel leaders.
The officials and some experts hastened to add that the arrest Monday of Diego Montoya wasn't likely to significantly reduce the flow of drugs to North America, given U.S. demand for cocaine and the willingness of lesser capos to fill the leadership vacuum. As Bogota's newspaper El Tiempo editorialized Wednesday, the lesson of past arrests and killings of capos is akin to the durability of the English monarchy: "The King is Dead. Long Live the King."
Still, top U.S. military and law enforcement officials were clearly pleased by the Colombian army's arrest of Montoya, saying it was the most powerful blow to the cartels' leadership since Medellin trafficker Pablo Escobar was killed in 1993 and the Cali-based Rodriguez Orejuela brothers were captured in 1995.
"It was like getting Al Capone at the height of Prohibition," Adm. James Stavridis, commander of the U.S. military's Southern Command based here, said in an interview Tuesday. As chief of U.S. military activities in the Southern Hemisphere, Stavridis helps direct the U.S. multibillion-dollar anti-drug and anti-terrorism aid package known as Plan Colombia.
Montoya, 49, was believed responsible for the shipment of as much as 70% of Colombia's cocaine to the United States as head of the Norte del Valle cartel, which controls Colombia's Pacific coastline. Starting out as a lowly collector of cocaine paste in Colombia's Putumayo region in the 1980s, "Don Diego" used murder and extortion to rise to the top, according to an indictment filed in U.S. federal court.
"Clearly the major flow of drugs over the past four or five years has shifted from the Caribbean to the Pacific, and [the Norte del Valle] cartel has been at the heart of that traffic," said Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, commanding officer of the Joint Interagency Task Force South. The Key West, Fla.-based task force coordinates U.S. Navy and Coast Guard interdiction of drug shipments from South America to the United States.
More than a symbolic victory, the capture and probable extradition of Montoya to the U.S. will lead to confusion among the major traffickers, a decentralization of the cartels' command, increased interception of communications and thus an increased number of captures, officials and experts said.
