COLOMBIA PRESIDENT PENS OCHOA ORDER

BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Andres Pastrana, who years ago was kidnapped
by the Medellin cocaine cartel, signed an order Monday authorizing the
extradition to the United States of one of the few surviving members of the
drug-trafficking gang.

Fabio Ochoa, who is in a prison in Bogota, faces trial in Florida for
allegedly helping provide cocaine, airplanes, smuggling routes and
expertise to a group of drug traffickers.

In Washington, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher called Ochoa's
extradition "very important."

In a paid advertisement published in Bogota's main newspaper, Ochoa
declared his innocence and asked Pastrana not to send him "chained hand and
foot for life" in a U.S. prison.

Ochoa vowed not to engage in any plea bargaining in the United States. "The
only thing I will accept before the American courts is my innocence, and I
will have nothing to negotiate," Ochoa said.

Ochoa's peaceful appeals stand in stark contrast to the terror campaign
waged by the Medellin cartel in the late 1980s, as the drug kingpins sought
to avoid U.S. prisons.

The cartel assassinated judges, journalists, policemen and even Colombia's
leading presidential candidate during the war of extradition.

In January 1988, cartel gunmen kidnapped Pastrana, then a candidate for
mayor of Bogota, and spirited him off to a farmhouse near Medellin,
Colombia's second-largest city 200 miles to the northwest. He was freed a
week later by police.

The terror campaign was directed by cartel leader Pablo Escobar. His
associates, the three Ochoa brothers, were considered more moderate and
were not directly linked to the killings, although they benefited from it.

Fabio Ochoa, the kid brother, surrendered in 1990 under an agreement that
those turning themselves in would not be extradited. The following year, a
constitutional assembly barred the extraditions of Colombians.

The Medellin cartel's heyday ended when Escobar was slain in a gunbattle
with police on a Medellin rooftop in 1993.

Upon his release in 1996, Ochoa pledged to never again become involved in
drug trafficking. Extradition was reinstated in Colombia in December 1997,
for crimes committed after that date.

U.S. authorities say Ochoa resorted to his former business after being freed.

U.S. officials allege he helped provide cocaine, airplanes, smuggling
routes and expertise to a group of drug traffickers. Ochoa was one of 31
people arrested in Colombia in an October 1999 crackdown on alleged members
of a new cocaine smuggling operation.

Ochoa, who has five business days to appeal Pastrana's extradition order,
insists he had gone straight after his release in 1996.

"I feel as if I have been kidnapped by errors in the justice system," Ochoa
told Pastrana in his advertisement in the newspaper El Tiempo. "I
surrendered to justice with the guarantee I would not be extradited. I have
complied. You must comply."

However, Leo Arreguin, Bogota chief of the U.S. Drug Enforcement
Administration, calls Ochoa "a major, major drug trafficker who is going to
face criminal justice."