DRUGS AND POLITICS FIGURE IN EXTRADITION CASE

WHITE PLAINS, April 6 -- On March 6, 1992, Victor Manuel Tafur-Dominguez
heard gunfire outside his home in Cali,Colombia, and dashed out in time to
see his father, a former senator who had helped draft a treaty allowing for
the
extradition of drug dealers, slump mortally wounded to the pavement by his
car. During the ambulance ride to the hospital, the young man later told
friends and family members, he felt his father's final shivers.

Now, eight years later, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, a student at Pace
University Law School here, is accused of financing a
multimillion-dollar shipment of cocaine seized at a Colombian port.
The Drug Enforcement Administration, which arrested him on March 4,
said he would be the first Colombian extradited home under the treaty
that his father, Donald Rodrigo Tafur, helped write and, people in
Colombia believe, died for.

Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, 36, and his family say that the charges stem from
a legal financial transaction that went awry. His extradition hearing
is scheduled for Thursday before Magistrate Judge Charles B. Smith.
Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's lawyers in Colombia have appealed to prosecutors
there to drop the charges, so far to no avail.

"This is a serious investigation," Alfonso Gomez Mendez, Colombia's
chief prosecutor, told the Colombian magazine Semana last month. "We
worked for several months on the case, and when the decision was made
to implicate him, we had solid evidence."

The case has attracted strong interest, not just from his family, but
from his supporters at Pace, where Mr. Tafur-Dominguez had studied
environmental law since August. Professors and students have rallied
to his defense, saying the evidence is flimsy and must have been
planted by drug traffickers. They have filed a supporting brief
calling his detention illegal.

Friends and relatives pointed out that Mr. Tafur-Dominguez had fought
the drug trade as assistant director of a Colombian government
program, Plante. The program encourages farmers to grow crops other
than coca, which is processed into cocaine. He suffered for it too,
they say, nearly dying in a plane crash in a storm in the Andes in
March 1999.

"I have never been a fugitive," said Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, whose
visitors at a Philadelphia jail are restricted to family and his lawyer.

He responded to written questions by The New York Times that were
submitted through a relative. "Second, the drug trafficking charges
are a legal error that will soon be explained in the extradition
hearing before a U.S. magistrate."

The United States and Colombia, the main source of cocaine and heroin
entering this country, signed the extradition treaty in 1979, and it
was ratified in 1982. Colombia halted extraditions in 1991, during a
wave of violence by drug traffickers, but allowed them to resume in
1997.

In November, for the first time since extraditions were permitted
again, two Colombians were sent to Miami to stand trial on drug
charges. But no one has ever been extradited to Colombia under the
treaty, said Mary Vaira, a drug agency spokeswoman.

According to the complaint filed by Virgil B. Walker, an assistant
United States attorney, in Federal District Court in Philadelphia,
Colombia issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Tafur-Dominguez on Sept.
27 charging him with drug trafficking. On Dec. 31, the complaint says,
the Colombian authorities ordered him detained. There was no
explanation for the delay in requesting the arrest of Mr.
Tafur-Dominguez, who had visited his homeland during the end of December.

A D.E.A. affidavit shows that the agency had Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's
mother's house near New Hope, Pa., under surveillance from January
through March 4.

On that day, as he rode in a van with his mother, her husband and
friends to the Philadelphia Flower Show, federal drug agents stopped
the group on an expressway near Philadelphia and arrested Mr.
Tafur-Dominguez.

The complaint centers on the seizure of seven tons of cocaine on Dec.
3, 1998, at Cartagena, Colombia, from a container ship bound for Cuba,
Jamaica and Spain. The Colombian authorities, according to the
complaint, said Mr. Tafur-Dominguez deposited 560 million Colombian
pesos ($350,000) in several checks into the accounts of E. I. Caribe,
a "front company," to buy the containers in which the cocaine was concealed.

Mr. Tafur-Dominguez faces 12 to 40 years in prison if convicted, the
complaint says.

D.E.A. agents searched his dormitory room at Pace as well as his
mother's home and seized several financial documents and e-mail
messages as part of an investigation to see if he violated any United
States laws, according to an agency affidavit, but he was not charged
here.

Joseph A. Tate, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's lawyer in Philadelphia, called
the charges baseless and said they stemmed from a misunderstanding
rooted in a legitimate financial transaction his client had undertaken
on behalf of his mother, Solita Dominguez. Mrs. Dominguez had moved to
the United States in 1993, remarried and now helps run her second
husband's bonsai studio north of Philadelphia.

In 1998, Mrs. Dominguez received a back payment of 560 million pesos
owed to her by the Colombian government from the pension of her
deceased husband, Mr. Tate said. The family decided to convert the
money into American dollars and put it in a Swiss bank account, he
said.

Angela Maria Tafur de Barco, Mrs. Dominguez's daughter, who is a
lawyer for the family in Colombia, said the family converted the money
into dollars to avoid the fluctuation of the peso, and because they
feared that such a large sum could make family members subject to
kidnapping, a common crime in Colombia.

"If you have more than 50 million pesos in an account here they kidnap
you," Mrs. Barco said in a telephone interview from Bogota. "Right now
my life is in complete risk, because I had to tell the prosecutors we
have that money in Switzerland."

Mrs. Dominguez, who was a resident alien at the time but is now an
American citizen, also said she was unsure if she would be allowed to
have that much money in the United States. (The Immigration and
Naturalization Service says there are no restrictions.)

Acting on behalf of his mother, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez sought a money
trader, a popular, legal method of converting pesos in Colombia, his
lawyers said. Traders typically offer better exchange rates than
commercial banks, but some have been linked to drug
traffickers.

Mr. Tafur-Dominguez went to a trader recommended by a friend, who
vouched for the man's honesty, Mr. Tate said.

The trader told him the transaction would move more rapidly if he
divided the sum into 13 checks and wrote them out to the trader
himself, the lawyer said. The next day, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez received a
receipt from a bank in Zurich confirming the deposit. The money
remains in that account, Mr. Tate said.

The checks, however, turned up in the accounts of E. I. Caribe, Mr.
Tate said, and had been improperly re-endorsed to the company by the
trader, who remains at large.

"It's as if you give a plumber a check for fixing your sink and then
the sink is fine, and the plumber is gone, but a year later the checks
turn up in the hands of a drug dealer," Mrs. Dominguez said in an
interview at the bonsai studio.

United States officials say they play little role in assessing the
merits of extradition charges, so long as Colombia's warrants and
paperwork are in order and comply with the treaty. The State
Department does not comment on such cases as a matter of policy.

"We are not supposed to be trying the Colombian case here," said Mike
Levy, the deputy United States attorney in Philadelphia. "Colombia has
a different legal system than here. I don't think any of us know what
constitutes a violation of a law down there."

At Pace, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's defenders see something sinister behind
the charges.

"There are too many unclear coincidences," said Prof. Nicholas
Robinson, who had invited Mr. Tafur-Dominguez to accompany him to a
United Nations conference scheduled for the Monday after his arrest.
Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's plane crash and his arrest both occurred near
the anniversary of his father's murder, the professor said. "You can
say it's a nice set of coincidences, but it's pretty orchestrated.
This creates a concern if nothing else that there is a message being
sent."

After the crash, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez went to the United States last
summer for treatment and recuperation at his mother's home. He told
friends he decided to rebuild his mind and spirit by enrolling in
Pace's environmental law program, among the highest rated in the
country. He got a reputation for earnest study.

"If he was a big-time drug dealer, he was a most unusual one," said
Ann Powers, one of his professors. "He never drank, he went to church,
he drove around in this little loaner Volkswagen from his mom's friend."

He spoke passionately about the environment, about deforestation in
the rain forest and urban sprawl, and once wrote a research paper on
the uses of pesticides to eradicate drug crops, friends said.

"I used the logical thinking of Latin Americans, and said this must be
a setup," said Hernan Lopez, an Argentine lawyer and Pace alumnus who
befriended Mr. Tafur-Dominguez. "His father signed the law, his father
was shot down. The rule of law in Latin America is not that strong."

From jail, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez wrote that he tries to keep his spirits
up.

"I talk to other inmates, listen to their stories and learn about 'the
system,' " he wrote. "I go to the law library and read every single
case on extradition and study the Bible."