A CHILLING CRIME NETWORK REARS ITS HEAD IN COLOMBIA

Latin America: Tactics Used By The Powerful Group La Terraza Recall The
Days Of The Medellin Cartel.

MEDELLIN, Colombia--Sen. Piedad Cordoba knew she was a target.

As chairwoman of the Senate Human Rights Committee in this country where
politicians are regularly kidnapped or assassinated, she had alienated
guerrillas, right-wing private armies and even members of the government.

Still, Colombians were shocked when she and her bodyguard were surrounded
by 15 armed people in uniforms of national investigative police at a clinic
in the fashionable El Poblado district of this violent city. With so many
powerful enemies, who had pulled off the audacious midday kidnapping?

Nine months after the senator was released unharmed by paramilitary leader
Carlos Castano, prosecutors think they have the answer. They believe that
Castano had hired the job out to La Terraza, the most powerful criminal
organization operating in Colombia since drug baron Pablo Escobar was
gunned down by police in 1993.

The kidnapping was the first firm link between urban organized crime
related to drug trafficking and Castano's rural federation of seven
right-wing anti-insurgency forces, which have an estimated strength of
11,000 troops and their own narcotics ties.

Witnesses to the abduction identified one of the gunmen as Alexander "Green
Eyes" Londono, who has six arrest warrants pending in cases involving 15
alleged murders, including the killings of two human rights workers.
Londono, police believe, is among the leaders of La Terraza.

"They are the heirs of Pablo Escobar," said Pedro Diaz, who heads the
attorney general's human rights unit. Investigators say La Terraza hires
Medellin's desperate and hostile young street urchins to guard drug
laboratories and shipments and to carry out a campaign of terror,
assassinating human rights and peace advocates throughout the country.

Recruits are drawn from impoverished neighborhoods that encircle Medellin's
brick high-rises. Over the past decade, 172,000 people have fled to the
urban squalor in this city of 2 million, escaping the violence of the
countryside that is the battleground of Colombia's various armed groups.

The young men steal to survive, and must join the crime rings that rule
their neighborhoods in order to steal. Most of that time, gang members say,
they are numbed by marijuana, the prescription drug Rohypnol, cocaine and
bazuco--a byproduct left when coca paste is processed into cocaine powder.
These are downed with the cheap, licorice-flavored alcohol known as agua
ardiente--firewater.

Criminal groups have made Medellin one of the most violent cities in the
world. Nearly a third of the people who die here each year are murdered.
The homicide rate of 175 per 100,000 inhabitants compares with 79 for the
rest of Colombia and an average of 12 throughout Latin America.

Now the contract criminals of La Terraza are increasing the brutality of
Colombia's drug-cum-civil war at a time when the government is seeking $1.3
billion in U.S. anti-narcotics aid.

"I don't think that there are more than 15 to 20" members of La Terraza,
Diaz said. "But they control 600 to 700 armed thugs." They also operate a
taxi fleet that doubles as an intelligence network that tracks targets,
according to the group Human Rights Watch.

"They are what is left over from Escobar's cartel, combined with the people
who helped capture him," mainly rivals from other drug cartels, said Gen.
Luis Alfredo Rodriguez, police commander in Medellin. "La Terraza controls
the rest of the criminals."

The reemergence of such a powerful criminal network chills Colombians who
remember how Escobar's cartel assassinated presidential candidates and
bombed public buildings to drive home its objections to extradition. Even
the organization's name recalls the now-defunct La Terraza bar in the
violent Manrique neighborhood that was patronized by Escobar cronies until
the manager, two waiters and several patrons died in a drug-related
shooting nearly a decade ago.

Several killings that prosecutors blame on the Castano-La Terraza alliance
also recall the tactics of those days.

Satirist and peace advocate Jaime Garzon was assassinated in a style that
became familiar during the Escobar era: A youth shot him as he walked
toward his Bogota office Aug. 13, then jumped on the back of a motorcycle
driven by a companion and sped away.

In January, police arrested Juan Pablo Ortiz for the slaying and said he is
tied to La Terraza.

Although La Terraza members will work for anyone who pays them, police and
prosecutors say, these officials believe that one of the group's principal
clients is Castano, who has publicly accepted responsibility for scores of
massacres and admitted taking money from drug traffickers. Police say
Castano uses La Terraza to silence critics of his tactics in combating the
rebels who have fought the government for 35 years.

Rodriguez, the police chief, ticked off the list of advantages that La
Terraza offers: "They know the targets, they can find them easily, they
have strategic alliances with other criminals, they know the city's
movements."

Further, he said, its alliance with the paramilitary leader has made La
Terraza more powerful, increasing the number of crime rings under its control.

"The status of being hand in hand with Castano tends to make everyone else
subordinate," Rodriguez said. The effects of the partnership have been
devastating.

Prosecutors believe that, since 1997, La Terraza has been responsible for
slaying at least five human rights advocates investigating massacres. It
also has made unraveling those killings virtually impossible, according to
Human Rights Watch.

Consider the case of Jesus Maria Valle, killed Feb. 27, 1998, during his
investigation of a five-day paramilitary occupation of the village of El
Aro, which left 11 residents dead and 30 missing.

The first police agent assigned to the case was killed soon afterward. The
prosecutor fled Colombia. Another investigator was killed last September.

Prosecutors believe that La Terraza was responsible for all three killings
and for the threats that sent the prosecutor into exile. La Terraza
ultimatums can be persuasive.

"I signed one case to authorize an indictment of paramilitaries before
lunch, and by the time I returned to my desk after eating, a death threat,
hand delivered, was there, with intimate details about the decor of my
apartment to let me know the killers had already been inside," a prosecutor
told Human Rights Watch.

Castano was indicted in September 1998, accused of being the mastermind who
ordered the killing of Valle, but he has not been detained.

Like Castano, the suspected leaders of La Terraza have generally dodged
arrest warrants. Besides Londono, prosecutors suspect that La Terraza
members include Diego Fernando Bejerano Murrillo, who is wanted on charges
of kidnapping and extortion, and Gustavo Upegui, who is in prison awaiting
trial on charges of kidnapping and forming illegal armed groups.

Londono and Bejerano Murrillo could not be reached for comment. Speaking by
telephone from the Itagui maximum-security prison in a Medellin suburb,
Upegui strenuously denied the indictment against him and any ties to La
Terraza. He also denied an accusation in a 1999 U.S. State Department human
rights report that he is a narcotics trafficker.

"I am a respectable businessman and community leader," he said. "I do not
know where these foolish charges come from. They are accusing me of
everything that has ever gone wrong in Medellin."

He is among the survivors of the internecine war that destroyed the
Medellin cartel in the early 1990s, according to intelligence sources.
Upegui allied himself with Castano against Escobar then, the sources said.

Upegui denies links to either Escobar or Castano. He described himself as a
47-year-old garment factory owner with three sons who devotes his spare
time to civic activities and sports in his hometown of Envigado. The
picturesque village in the mountains above Medellin is the site of
Escobar's luxury prison, built to his specifications after he surrendered
to authorities in 1990.

The area is also known to be a hub of paramilitary activity, but Upegui
denies any involvement in illegal armed groups.

"Let me tell you who I am," he said. "I am the sports attache of the
Envigado Soccer Club, the liaison with the municipal government, the
manager of an automobile-emissions testing center, the principal and
founder of the Envigado soccer school, a soccer referee, a third-year law
student and the chairman of the soccer committee."

Upegui was arrested 16 months ago by 20 investigative police in Envigado
T-shirts and baseball caps as he left a soccer game. The charges against
him are related to efforts to rescue his teenage sons from kidnappers.

Upegui insisted that he paid a ransom for one son in 1996 and that the
other was freed the same year in a police raid. However, investigators said
those police acted on information that Upegui obtained by kidnapping and
interrogating relatives of his son's abductors, an accusation he denied.
The main witness against him recanted in November, and Upegui's lawyer has
filed a petition for his client's release.

Meanwhile, prosecutors are trying to build a case against Upegui for
allegedly planning the 1997 slayings of two Bogota human rights activists
and another person. The State Department report named him as a suspect in
the killings; he has denied any involvement.

Arrest warrants in the case have been issued for Castano and Londono, as
mastermind and triggerman, respectively.

Londono represents the other side of an organization that, police chief
Rodriguez said, "stretches across all social classes." Londono grew up in
the Medellin streets, graduating from car theft to leading a band of
assassins, according to prosecutors, though he has never been convicted.

Londono's background is not much different from that of the 7,000
youngsters who have been drawn into what human rights activists estimate
are about 240 crime rings in Medellin.

Their rivalries brought the number of killings in Medellin to a peak of
6,300 in 1991. Since then, city officials have negotiated 55 "nonaggression
pacts" among 160 crime rings in return for social programs. The number of
slayings fell to 3,550 in 1998 before edging up last year to 3,650.

Social workers who deal with youths put the blame on the paramilitary and
guerrilla groups that are recruiting the youth crime rings, often through
intermediaries such as La Terraza.

"They offer them guns, a couple of motorcycles, maybe a car and $8,000 to
$10,000," said one social worker. "Then they call on them when they need
them. In the meantime, they are using the guns and motorcycles to kill each
other."