FEDS CHARGE FORMER COLOMBIAN DRUG BOSS

MIAMI -- His peaceful bid to avoid extradition ended, Colombian drug
kingpin Fabio Ochoa was delivered to the United States on Saturday to face
charges that he belonged to a gang that smuggled in 30 tons of cocaine a month.

Ochoa, a former top leader of the notorious Medellin cartel, is the
highest-profile Colombian sent to face charges in the United States since
Colombia revived extraditions in 1997.

"It sends a message that everybody's held accountable," Drug Enforcement
Administration spokesman Joe Kilmer said Saturday.

Kilmer said Ochoa faces a bail hearing Monday in U.S. Magistrate Court and
the government will ask for pretrial detention.

"Everything will boil down to the fairness of the American justice system
in how it treats someone who has been labeled a Colombian drug lord,"
Ochoa's attorney, Jose Quinon, told The Miami Herald. "The question is
whether we can get past the label and get a fair trial."

Despite years of U.S.-backed drug-fighting efforts, Colombia remains the
world's leading cocaine exporting nation and an increasingly important
source of the heroin sold in this country.

The State Department warned Americans in Colombia to take extra security
precautions, noting "the past history of narcotics traffickers conducting
bombings in public areas as a reprisal for or deterrent to extradition."

Ochoa fought extradition peacefully with legal appeals and an Internet page
outlining his defense, and by erecting billboards in Bogota and Medellin
proclaiming: "Yesterday I made a mistake. Today I am innocent."

That struggle ended Friday, when he was put on a DEA plane in Bogota after
a Colombian judge lifted an order he had granted earlier suspending the
handover.

"Justice did not triumph, and all Colombians have lost," Martha Nieves
Ochoa, Fabio Ochoa's sister, told reporters from the family's home in Medellin.

In 1990, Ochoa was the first major Colombian trafficker to surrender in
return for a promise that he would not be extradited.

When he and two older brothers were released from jail in 1996, they
promised never to get involved in the drug business again.

The U.S. extradition request, based largely on bugged conversations, says
Ochoa broke that pledge, contributing his know-how to the exporting ring
and helping provide cocaine, airplanes and smuggling routes.

Ochoa was arrested in October 1999 along with dozens of other suspected
traffickers.

The last major cartel figure extradited was Carlos Lehder, delivered to
U.S. authorities in 1987. He was sentenced in Jacksonville to life without
parole, plus 135 years.

Another Medellin cartel leader, Pablo Escobar, was killed by police in
1993. He had waged a war of bombings and assassinations in the 1980s and
early 1990s to avoid trial and imprisonment in the United States.

Former Panamanian ruler Gen. Manuel Noriega was convicted in Miami in 1992
on charges he took money from the Medellin drug cartel to make Panama a
safe haven for cocaine smuggling. He was sentenced to 40 years in jail, but
a judge reduced the sentence and Noriega could be eligible for release by 2007.

Under the Medellin cartel's pressure, extradition was declared
unconstitutional in 1991. Colombia reinstated extradition in December 1997
at the request of the United States. Since then, three dozen Colombians
have been extradited to the United States.

If convicted, Ochoa could face up to life in prison. The minimum on two
charges -- conspiracy to import cocaine into the United States and
conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute cocaine -- is 10 years, and
the least he could serve on a charge of money laundering conspiracy is 20
years, Kilmer said.