COLOMBIA DEPORTS DRUG LORD WITH TIES TO REBELS

BOGOTA, Colombia (Reuters) - Colombia deported Brazil's most powerful drug
lord on Tuesday, ending a massive two-month hunt for a man whose alleged
links to leftist guerrillas threatens to muddle fragile peace talks.

Luis Fernando da Costa, the man who the Colombian army says paid FARC
rebels around $10 million a month as part of a cocaine-for-weapons
business, was put aboard a Brazilian (news - web sites) Air Force plane
bound for Brasilia amid tight security, police said..

Hours earlier, television images showed the 33-year-old convicted drug
baron, known by his Brazilian nickname of Fernandinho Beira-Mar (Freddy
Seashore) as he was being driven away by Colombian immigration officials
from a Bogota jail.

Army officials say Da Costa, who was arrested on Saturday near Colombia's
southern jungle border, bought 200 metric tons of cocaine every year from
the FARC -- a third of all the Andean nation's cocaine output. Such figures
could not be independently confirmed.

If proved, the revelations about the rebels' links with one of the world's
top drug barons could have damaging effects on President Andres Pastrana's
two-year-old peace talks with the FARC, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia.

The army, which has expressed misgiving about Pastrana's peace tactics, has
long accused Latin America's oldest and most powerful guerrilla army of
being involved in international drug trafficking to bankroll its
37-year-old uprising.

Colombia's war, which pits leftist rebels against the army and outlawed
right-wing paramilitary groups, has killed nearly 40,000 civilians in the
last decade.

Pastrana, in Europe to drum up support for his anti-cocaine Plan Colombia,
has in the past refused to brand the 17,000-member FARC a full-fledged drug
cartel but has admitted the rebels profit from vast coca plantations in
rebel-held areas in southern Colombia.

"Hot Potato" Now In Brazil

A spokeswoman for Colombia's public prosecutors office told Reuters Da
Costa was handed to immigration officials late on Tuesday after prosecutors
dropped drug trafficking charges against Da Costa.

The spokeswoman said the move was a "technicality" to allow an expedient
deportation of Da Costa, who was staying illegally in Colombia.

Da Costa, who rose from small time-dealer in a Rio de Janeiro slum to
master of a drug and arms trafficking empire that controlled up to 70
percent of the cocaine trade in Brazil, is wanted on drug trafficking
charges in Brazil.

Senior government officials had expressed in private their desire to deport
Da Costa as soon as possible, calling him a "hot potato" -- referring to
fears that the so-called "Pablo Escobar of Brazil" could flee Colombia's
notoriously corrupt prison system.