United States Foreign Relations Colombia

A gunman killed the leading candidate in next year's presidential election Friday, prompting an angry President Virgilio Barco Vargas to revive an extradition treaty with the United States to combat a string of cocaine traffic-linked killings of public officials. The assassination came only hours after drug traffickers killed a provincial police chief in the city of Medellin. The gunman opened fire on Sen.

The Bush administration will seek legislative changes to give it more flexibility in helping the Colombian government fight rebels, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said Tuesday. Congress has put limits on U.S. security assistance to Colombia in the campaign against the drug trade, but the Colombian military's new priority is an offensive against the leftist Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.

In their single biggest victory in the drug war, Colombian police Friday shot and killed notorious narcotics trafficker Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, who as a leader of the Medellin cartel waged a campaign of terror to maintain the world's biggest cocaine empire.

Colombian guerrillas are using a new generation of complex explosives, including suspected poison gas on at least one occasion, to mount a more aggressive style of urban warfare that they hope will allow them to influence approaching elections, U.S. officials say. With training from members of the Irish Republican Army, the rebels have learned to lob gas-filled mortar shells, the officials say.

A convicted Colombian cocaine trafficker released by mistake before his 1984 federal trial was extradited to the United States on Sunday for sentencing, U.S. marshals said. Victor Eduardo Mera-Mosquera, 36, was handed over to marshals by the Colombian government on Saturday and flown from Bogota to New York.

Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh on Sunday praised Colombia's new willingness to extradite drug criminals to the United States and said that the Bush Administration has not ruled out sending U.S. troops to that country to assist in its war on narcotics traffickers, if such help is requested. "I think we have to look at any request that we get for either law enforcement or military assistance seriously," he said, adding that recent acts of terrorism in Colombia, including Friday's assassination of Sen.

President Bush on Saturday angrily condemned the assassination of the leading Colombian presidential candidate and said "the narco-traffickers who again have robbed Colombia of a courageous leader must be defeated." The President, saluting the decision by Colombian President Virgilio Barco Vargas to reinstate a suspended extradition treaty with the United States, pledged that "the U.S. is ready to coordinate the extradition of these criminals as expeditiously as possible."

On a bustling Saturday afternoon in this river town cut from the jungle, music blares from the open-air bars where men in straw cowboy hats flirt with waitresses. Pickup trucks honk at cruising motor scooters that block the dirt streets. Lately, a new sound has been added to the mix: the thump of helicopters overhead. Townsfolk believe the flights signal that the 2,000-soldier Cazadores (Hunters) Battalion, based four miles away, has begun to evacuate.

The United States and the three Andean nations have agreed on the outlines of an anti-drug plan to be unveiled at next week's summit in Colombia, but the plan may not provide the immediate economic assistance that the South American countries had hoped for, Bush Administration officials said Wednesday. A communique to be signed by President Bush and the Andean leaders would express their common determination to replace cocaine commerce in the region with a legitimate economy.

The Colombian Congress voted late Thursday to remove a 6-year-old ban on extraditing its citizens for trial in foreign countries, reversing a stance that has been a major point of conflict with the United States. U.S. criminal charges are pending against several alleged Colombian drug traffickers, including some already jailed here. Among the jailed are the notorious Rodriguez Orejuela brothers, the convicted heads of the Cali drug cartel.

Alarmed by signs of weapons traffic between Colombian rebels and the Middle East, the Bush administration is weighing a proposal to declare the destruction of leftist guerrillas in the South American country an explicit goal of U.S. policy. Some senior officials are also pushing for the administration to assert, for the first time, that the Colombian rebels are a specific target of the worldwide U.S. war on terrorism, administration officials said.

The first high-level Bush administration visit to Colombia wrapped up Friday amid the most serious crisis in the peace process here since the effort started anew nearly three years ago. U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman headed a who's who delegation of government Andean specialists for three days of meetings with top Colombian officials and a look at U.S.-backed drug-eradication efforts.

The State Department has directed its largest private contractor in Colombia to hire foreign pilots to fight the drug war, an order that helps get around Congress' attempt to keep the U.S. from slipping further into this country's messy civil war. Last year, Congress limited to 300 the number of civilian contract workers participating in U.S.-financed drug-eradication efforts in Colombia. But in a little-noticed decision, the State Department only counts U.S. citizens toward that limit.

The United States is planning to expand its training role in Colombia, instructing military units to fight drugs in parts of the country where leftist guerrillas are becoming increasingly involved in narcotics trafficking, the top U.S. official in the country said Wednesday. So far, the U.S. has focused its training efforts on three special counter-narcotics battalions that operate in southern Colombia, the source of nearly half the cocaine sold in the United States.

There are plenty of ways to interpret "Traffic," the labyrinthine drug war docudrama with five Oscar nominations. But in Colombia, where the film was just released, one stands out: vindication. Few countries have done as much to fight drugs, with less recognition for the effort, than Colombia. Three presidential candidates, dozens of judges and hundreds of police officers have been killed in the largely U.S.-backed war on drugs.

President Bush declared Wednesday that Mexico, Colombia and 18 other drug-producing countries are cooperating fully with the United States in the war on narcotics, despite increases in the worldwide cultivation of marijuana and the crops that are made into heroin and cocaine. It was Bush's first venture into the diplomatically sensitive subject of drug certification.

The No. 2 man in the Medellin cocaine cartel surrendered Tuesday in exchange for the government's promise not to extradite him to the United States, where he is wanted on drug charges. Jorge Luis Ochoa, 41, turned himself in at Caldas, 10 miles south of Medellin, and was jailed in the Medellin suburb of Itagui, court officials said. He could face up to 30 years in prison, but authorities have promised to be lenient with dealers who turn themselves in.

Soldiers and police raided the estates of cocaine barons Monday, seizing aircraft, cars and cattle and bringing the number of people arrested in three days to more than 11,000, authorities reported. One of those arrested Monday was identified as a finance chief of the Medellin drug cartel. The cartel bosses have so far eluded the emergency-rule crackdown, but new raids were being reported hourly across the nation.

President Bush on Tuesday rejected a plea from Colombian President Andres Pastrana for the United States to join the peace talks that his government is holding with Marxist guerrillas. But in their 45-minute meeting, Bush also vowed to work with Congress to expand trade with Colombia as a way to stimulate lawful commerce in that beleaguered nation. A spokesman for Pastrana said afterward that the Colombian president was thrilled by Bush's offer to increase trade.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana urged the Bush administration Monday to send an envoy to peace talks with the South American country's largest and most dangerous rebel organization despite a long-standing U.S. policy of refusing to deal with the insurgents. "It is important that the United States be there to directly exchange points of view," Pastrana told a small group of reporters at breakfast before meetings on Capitol Hill and at the White House.