COLOMBIAN ANTI-DRUG ASSAULT AIMED AT EUROPE

Colombia's vice president is taking a hard-hitting anti-drug message
to Europe, complaining about cocaine-snorting celebrities who he says
are financing the drug-fueled civil conflict bleeding this South
American nation.

Vice President Francisco Santos spoke of supermodel Kate Moss,
although she doesn't appear in the ads that he planned to unveil today
in London along with 13 European anti-drug czars.

Santos called Moss a perfect example of liberal European attitudes
toward drug use because she is enjoying a career comeback after a
British tabloid last year published photos of her apparently snorting
cocaine.

"To me it's baffling that somebody who helps cause so much pain in
Colombia is doing better than ever and winning more contracts than
ever," the vice president told The Associated Press.

Moss lost contracts after the photos were published, but her career
resumed after she spent time at a clinic in Arizona. She apologized to
"all the people I have let down" over the incident but was never
charged with any drug offense.

"Cocaine not only destroys you, it also destroys a country" is the
theme of the advertising campaign designed to change attitudes among
Europeans about their booming cocaine habit.

Santos spoke of what cocaine consumption does to Colombia, where
drug-financed armed groups murder hundreds of people each year and
force thousands to abandon their homes.

"We need to tell Europeans that that line of coke they snort is
tainted in blood," Santos said.

Colombia, the world's largest producer of cocaine, hopes European
governments will fund placement of the ads on billboards, television
and even bathrooms of trendy dance clubs

It has also launched an English-language Web site,
www.sharedresponsibility.gov.co, to highlight its efforts in the
U.S.-sponsored war on drugs, including aerial eradication of more than
1.5 million acres of coca, the base ingredient of cocaine, since 2002.

According to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Drug
Addiction, cocaine use among young adults in Spain and Britain has
doubled over the past decade, reaching levels similar to those in the
United States, where 5 percent of people have reported recent usage.

Santos noted findings by the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy that cocaine consumption has declined 50 percent in the
United States over the past two decades.

Also

Trafficking suspect arrested: Spanish police said Tuesday they had
arrested Orlando Sabogal Zuluaga, 40, a leading member of one of
Colombia's most feared drug-trafficking cartels, the Norte del Valle
cartel, whose head, Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamente, was captured in
Cuba in 2004. Spanish police began searching for Sabogal after a
request from the U.S. Embassy in Spain.

Soccer connection: A Colombian soccer club was characterized by the
Bush administration Tuesday as a front for one of the South American
country's four most-wanted cocaine kingpins. The Treasury Department
announced it was freezing any U.S. assets of Cortulua, a
second-division soccer club based in Tulua, near Cali in southern Colombia.