IN COLOMBIA, DEATH AWAITS

Ex-Judge Wants To Remain In U.S. Haven

WASHINGTON -- The woman regarded by many as an international symbol of
courage, who dared to confront the most powerful drug lord of the modern
age, is sitting in the living room of a small apartment in a vast
cookie-cutter suburban complex and being force-fed cheese.

"Take it!" the 2-year-old on her lap says, thrusting a yellow cube on a
toothpick in the woman's face. This has been going on all evening, and the
woman has a handful of cheese hidden behind her back.

Consuelo Sanchez-Duran is trying to talk about her life as a judge in
Colombia, her 13 years on the run in Detroit and the East Coast from Pablo
Escobar and the Medellin drug cartel. And she's trying to discuss her
feelings about the Colombian government, which is trying to send her home
to face what she feels is certain death.

Friends from metro Detroit are due to show up any minute now at her door.
They have come this week to help her win political asylum in the United
States. She is trying to explain what her friends have meant to her all
these years, how they give her hope. She is trying to explain why she wants
to move back to Michigan if her asylum application is approved.

And she is trying to dodge cheese. She kisses the chubby cheek of her
little girl and begs her to stop.

The woman stops talking about assassins and bodyguards, Detroit and
Colombia, lets out a long sigh, and opens her mouth to another offering.

Sanchez-Duran Is Defeated

It is a rare sight. This is a woman Escobar -- Colombia's infamously
violent leader of the world's largest cocaine cartel -- could not beat.

Escobar put a $1-million price tag on Sanchez-Duran's head after she signed
a warrant for his arrest in 1988 when she was a judge in Colombia.

At the time she signed the papers, she knew what she was up against.
Escobar was a man who once offered $2,100 for each body of a dead police
officer. A man who once ordered his troops to bomb Bogota's courthouse,
killing several judges at once. A man who had a newspaper editor gunned
down on his way home from work.

In 1988, he wanted Sanchez-Duran dead.

Since then, Sanchez-Duran and her family have been hiding from Escobar and
his remaining family and loyalists. First in Southfield, then in Detroit in
a Riverfront Towers apartment. After local news media revealed her
location, she fled to the East Coast. But their closest friends and
advisers remain in Michigan.

So late last year, when the Colombian government took away her position in
their Washington consulate and told Sanchez-Duran it was safe for her to
return home, she did two things: immediately applied for political asylum
in the United States, and "called my Detroit friends."

"We have been abandoned by our own government," she said through an
interpreter. "If we go home, it is a death sentence."

Six months later, she is still waiting for the U.S. Immigration and
Naturalization Service to make a decision. INS officials, who have
recommended she receive asylum, said Thursday they could not comment.
Colombian government officials did not return repeated calls from the Free
Press.

This week, desperate for an answer, Sanchez-Duran summoned her Detroit
friends to Washington to help her plead her case with the Michigan
congressional delegation.

Human rights workers and experts on Colombia think Sanchez-Duran is one of
the few judges to have gone after Escobar and live. Escobar died in a 1993
shoot-out with Colombian police.

"It's not just the Escobar forces that put her in danger," said Michael
Maggio, her Washington lawyer and an asylum specialist. "She's a symbol, a
powerful symbol, of those who are willing to stand up to the drug lords
...And anybody that takes her out, whether that person is associated with
Escobar or any of the other drug lords, is going to have a feather in their
hat."

Human Rights Watch, an international advocacy group, has said publicly it
supports her belief that she can never live safely in Colombia. In another
letter of support to the INS, U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., has called her
heroic. This week, U.S. Rep. David Bonior, D-Mich., has added his support.

What A Hero Looks Like

At 45, Sanchez-Duran is barely 5 feet tall in heels. Her face and body are
soft and round. Her dark hair is clipped short, her face framed by small
glasses. She wears no makeup except light pink lipstick. Even in the middle
of summer, she dresses in a high-collared blouse, skirt and sensible navy
pumps. Librarian, you might think, passing her on the street.

When she speaks, she often looks to her husband, an outspoken man 16 years
her senior who served as a high-ranking government official in Colombia
before they fled the country. She dotes on her daughters, ages 2 and 11.

"She might not look like this big hero, but for her, there is always right
or wrong," said her friend Marcela Vergara, who lives in suburban
Washington. She is the kind of person, she said, who will insist on paying
the full bill if she's been undercharged at a restaurant. "She will always
do the right thing."

And so, 13 years ago when the Escobar file landed on her desk, she knew
what she had to do.

Pursue it, and she might be killed. Ignore it, and she wouldn't be able to
live with herself. Sanchez-Duran could not let it go.

"I believe drugs are a scourge on my country," she said.

She was 32 and a rising star -- her country's youngest judge. When Escobar
first started making headlines in the '70s, Sanchez-Duran was still in law
school. Only a few months before the case, she had married and gotten her
judgeship. Sanchez-Duran asked that her husband Augusto's last name not be
published because his family still lives in Colombia. Her family no longer
lives there.

Sanchez-Duran and her husband lived in a fashionable Bogota neighborhood.
On weeknights, they ate out and walked arm in arm in the park. On weekends,
they took country drives to their favorite farm to buy a special yogurt
they both loved.

In Colombia, judges also act as prosecutors. They investigate a crime,
gather evidence and make arrests. Those who dared to investigate Escobar
were killed, or silenced with money or threats. For months, the file
implicating Escobar in the death of a Colombian newspaper editor who
criticized him passed from judge to judge. Finally, on the one-year
anniversary of the editor's death, Colombia's minister of justice gave the
file to Sanchez-Duran.

At a memorial on the anniversary of the editor's death, the justice
minister vowed to bring Escobar to justice. When he left the podium, he
walked to Augusto. "He said to me, 'By the way, this is going to be your
wife's case.' "

Augusto said he felt the blood drain from his head. "I knew right at that
moment," he said. "Our life as we knew it was over."

A New Life

Four days after Sanchez-Duran signed the warrant, Escobar put a $1- million
price tag on her head and mailed her a promise: "We are capable of
executing you anywhere on this planet."

The couple fled first to Panama, then to Florida, then to a place they had
never heard of: Detroit. The Colombian government had a job for
Sanchez-Duran in its consular office in Southfield, and U.S. officials
thought Michigan was a good place to hide. Armed guards lived with them day
and night. "It was a strange way to live," she said.

Then Iris and Mark Diaz came into their lives.

Iris Diaz is a woman with blond hair, stacks of ankle bracelets, gold
chains and long, pink fingernails with tiny glittering studs on them. She
is an open, friendly woman who laughs a lot.

The fall of 1988, Diaz -- a Spanish interpreter for Wayne County courts --
received a cryptic call at home from an official at the U.S. State
Department. They told her to drive to a parking lot on 13 Mile Road in
Southfield at 9 p.m. and wait.

She made her husband, Mark Diaz, then a Detroit police officer, come with
her. "I thought, 'What have I gotten myself into?' "

The men from the State Department said they wanted her to interpret for a
Colombian judge on the run from Escobar. She had to keep it a secret. A few
days later, Mark Diaz was put in charge of Sanchez- Duran's security. When
they finally met Sanchez-Duran, they were stunned.

"Here was this woman who had done this big, amazing thing," said Iris Diaz.
"And when they opened the door, there was this little pee-wee sitting
there. I couldn't believe it."

Mark Diaz trained Sanchez-Duran and her husband to drive a getaway car. She
can make a hair-pin turn at 60 miles an hour, he says. She can fire an
automatic weapon. She is trained to take guns off of the dead bodies of her
guards and use them.

The two couples became close.

On Tuesday, Sanchez-Duran, her husband, the Diazes and Southfield attorney
Cyril Weiner walked the halls of the Capitol, meeting first with U.S. Rep.
Joe Knollenberg, then with Bonior.

Before leaving the Capitol, Sanchez-Duran made her friends see one special
place: the old Supreme Court room. In her burgundy suit, clutching a
tourists' pamphlet, she gazed at the red velvet room. She will never be a
judge again, and she knows that. All she wants now, she says, is to come
home to her friends in Michigan, buy a house with a yard, a puppy for her
children and live a normal life.

"Ah, but it's beautiful here, isn't it?" she said, looking around the
courtroom. "Isn't it beautiful?"

(SIDEBAR)

Drug Lord Lived, Died Violently

As head of the Medellin drug cartel, Pablo Escobar gained notoriety in the
1980s for his operation's extreme wealth and ruthless violence. At one
time, the cartel was believed responsible for supplying 80 percent of the
United States' cocaine.

Born to a farmer and schoolteacher in 1949, Escobar was revered by many for
building soccer fields in impoverished Colombian villages. He is believed
to be responsible for the assassinations of hundreds of police, journalists
and politicians who opposed him. In 1991, when he turned himself in to
Colombian authorities, Forbes magazine estimated his worth at $2.5 billion.

Escobar was jailed in a luxurious prison home he built at his own expense.
In 1992 he escaped. Escobar died in 1993 at the age of 44 in a shoot-out
with Colombian police after a 16-month manhunt.

The Medellin cartel disbanded after his death. But other cartels remain.