THE NEXT ESCOBAR?

Why Washington And Bogota Should Be Worried About Hernan Giraldo

In the foothills of the snow-capped Sierra Nevadas in northeastern
Colombia, the Kogi Indians whisper his name in fear. And along the
docks of the Caribbean port city of Santa Marta, gangsters speak with
awe of his 400-man private army. But everyone knows that when it comes
to Hernan Giraldo Serna, it's usually best not to know too much. The
gangsters quietly recall, for instance, that Giraldo once ordered the
brutal murders of four construction workers, and then had their bodies
cut to bits with a chain saw. Their offense?

They had built a special basement to store his multimillion-dollar
cache of cocaine, and they knew where it was.

Giraldo personifies a disturbing new trend in Colombia's huge
narcotics industry: right-wing paramilitary leaders fighting to take
control of the country's coca fields.

In the past two years Giraldo and his Los Chamizos (Charred Tree)
militiamen have joined fiercely anti-communist leaders of the United
Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a loose-knit coalition of
private right-wing armies, to force 20,000 Marxist guerrillas out of
many key cocaine- and heroin-producing regions. "In areas once
dominated by the guerrillas," says Col. German Gustavo Jaramillo of
the Department of Administrative Security, "there is an extremely
close alliance between the paramilitary groups and drug
traffickers."

Colombian intelligence sources now estimate that 40 percent of the
country's total cocaine exports are controlled by these right-wing
warlords and their allies in the narcotics underworld. Giraldo alone
is believed to be the head of a burgeoning drug syndicate that
accounts for $1.2 billion in annual shipments to the United States and
Europe. That puts him among the country's top five cocaine
traffickers. Some Colombian intelligence sources believe that Giraldo,
the son of a dirt-poor cattle rancher, may one day rival the late
Medellin-cartel kingpin Pablo Escobar in both wealth and power.

Knowing Too Much?

Yet when it comes to right-wing drug lords, American policymakers-and
even some counternarcotics officials-will never be accused of knowing
too much. In a recent interview, two of Washington's top drug warriors
in Bogota said that they'd never even heard of Giraldo. That oversight
goes to the core of a key problem with Washington's
multibillion-dollar program to staunch the export of heroin and
cocaine from Colombia. For political reasons, U.S. officials have been
largely content to focus on drug trafficking by Marxist guerrillas,
who have been fighting an insurgency since 1964. (That, after all, is
the central aim of Colombian President Andres Pastrana's $7.5 billion
Plan Colombia to cut drug production in half.) But as the leftists
retreat, right-wing drug lords like Giraldo are prospering, and the
Colombian government may be looking the other way.

The Bush administration is just beginning to grapple with these
issues. Last week Bush nominated hard-line conservative John Walters
as his new drug czar. Walters helped design drug-interdiction efforts
in the Andean region for the first Bush administration, and has long
been a strong advocate of the drug war in Latin America. But NEWSWEEK
has learned that even Walters has expressed some skepticism about Plan
Colombia, and that the White House has ordered a policy review.

One of Walters's concerns: too much U.S. aid is going to the Colombian
military, which has long been tied to the right-wing paramilitaries.
"It looks like we're heavily invested in a country where the situation
is destabilizing rapidly," says a senior Bush administration official.
"It's enough to give everybody pause."

In recent weeks, the State Department has seemed to shift tack on the
paramilitaries. At the end of April it included Carlos Castano, head
of the AUC paramilitary movement, on its updated terrorist-watch list
for the first time. The significance of the decision was diminished
somewhat because the AUC was placed in a second-tier category of
"other terrorist organizations" that are deemed not to be direct
threats to U.S. citizens or companies.

(By contrast, Colombia's two leading leftist militias-the
17,000-strong FARC and the 3,000-member National Liberation Army-are
"first-tier" terror group that are subject to specific sanctions.)
But some Colombian officials suspect that Castano and his cohorts
could care less either way. "I don't think the paramilitaries are any
more worried about the [State Department list] than atheists are of
excommunication," quipped Prosecutor General Alfonso Gomez Mendez.
"The important thing is arresting the paramilitary
leadership."

Back To The Foothills

Giraldo has already been arrested once-to no avail.

That was in 1989, when he was still trafficking in
marijuana.

Giraldo had been convicted for the massacres of 20 unionized
banana-plantation workers, a crime for which he got a 20-year prison
sentence.

Undercover police agents snatched him from outside Santa Marta and
brought him to Bogota to face charges. But apparently the case was
never followed up, and before long Giraldo was back in the foothills
of the Sierra Nevadas.

The mustached, hard-drinking drug lord switched to cocaine as his
primary export commodity in 1992. Since then, Giraldo's hit men have
continued to kill suspected guerrilla sympathizers and trade-union
members with zeal. In 1996, members of Giraldo's private army
kidnapped a wealthy local businessman named Ambrosio Plata and
demanded $1 million in ransom for his release. According to Colombian
intelligence sources, Giraldo ordered Plata killed and the body carved
up with a chain saw after the ransom money was delivered.

He abducted the victim's widow, Pilar, three years later and summarily
executed her upon receipt of a $5 million ransom payment. A major in
the Colombian Army's antikidnapping squad met a similar fate in 1999
when he tried to collect a $150,000 fee from Giraldo for having
guarded a 3,000-kilo consignment of cocaine.

Over the years Giraldo has amassed a formidable network of properties
and money-laundering businesses in the Santa Marta area. He is said to
own dozens of homes and farms, a fish-exporting business and a posh
hotel on the southern outskirts of Santa Marta. Among his better-known
alleged investments is a U.S.-style supermarket staffed by wiry
teenagers sporting the distinctive crew cuts of paramilitary foot
soldiers. Generous donations to port authorities, police officials and
politicians ensure that Giraldo's narcotics shipments sail unhindered
from the sparsely populated coastline east of Santa Marta.

Colombian intelligence sources and one former provincial-government
official assert that Giraldo has cultivated close ties to the
entrenched economic and political elite of Magdalena Department. But
none of the movers and shakers in Santa Marta admits to ever having
met him, let alone to being a business associate.

The general manager of the Irotama beach-resort hotel and the
principal owner of the K-fir Supermarket denied any knowledge of or
connection to Giraldo, and the recently inaugurated governor of
Magdalena echoed those denials to NEWSWEEK. "Very little is really
known about him," says Jose Domingo Davila, a 51-year-old lawyer and
former Colombian congressman whose brother Eduardo recently completed
an extended prison sentence for marijuana smuggling in the mid-1990s.
"He has a group of armed men who have been fighting the guerrillas,
but he has never made any public statements."

Important Friends

Repeated efforts to obtain a comment from Giraldo through the
management of some of his alleged business properties failed to elicit
any response from the reclusive strongman.

In two e-mail replies, a spokesman for the national AUC paramilitary
leadership named Leonardo described Giraldo as "a friend" but stated
that he had no contact information on Giraldo because the fugitive was
not formally affiliated with Carlos Castano's coalition of
self-defense forces.

Prosecutor General Gomez argues that Giraldo and his pals in the
paramilitaries must have important friends within the Colombian
security services. "There must be complicity on the part of those
agencies that are supposed to carry out the orders for their arrest,"
says Gomez. (The Pastrana administration declined to comment.)

The Colombian government recently has tried to look tough by launching
some rare Army strikes against right-wing militias.

In late April government troops attacked a band of paramilitary gunmen
who were suspected of butchering as many as 40 villagers during an
Easter-week rampage in the southwestern Colombian state of Cauca.
Three right-wing militiamen died in the ensuing fire fight and an
additional 57 were captured. A similar encounter in Giraldo's adopted
home department of Magdalena two days later left three paramilitary
fighters dead and eight wounded.

For those who really want to hurt his organization, Giraldo may have
an Achilles' heel. Last year he tried to kill a trusted lieutenant and
childhood friend named Adan Rojas in an ambush.

But Rojas and his son Rigoberto escaped, and were later captured in
the port city of Barranquilla as they were seeking medical treatment
for wounds sustained in the shoot-out. Some Colombian intelligence
agents warn of dire consequences for Giraldo's more fashionable
friends if Rojas ever talks to Colombian prosecutors.

Says one well-placed intelligence official in Bogota: "The creme
de la creme of Magdalena society will tremble when Rojas speaks."

Still, no one expects Giraldo himself to be captured or killed any
time soon. Abetted by ranchers and police who advise him about the
arrival of outsiders, Giraldo can easily vanish into the remote
valleys of the Sierra Nevadas on foot or by mule, dressed in a felt
hat and woolen poncho used by the impoverished peasants who inhabit
his domain.

A 300-member task force consisting of Army troops and representatives
of the prosecutor general's office was dispatched to Giraldo's
territory last June and returned home empty-handed. "He has informants
working throughout the region who radio him when the authorities are
coming in," says one Colombian intelligence official. "That gives him
ample time to flee into the mountains and avoid capture." Then again,
that may just be a convenient excuse for letting Giraldo roam free.
And it may just give the Bush administration added justification to
retreat from Plan Colombia.