JAILED COLOMBIA DRUG LORDS SAID PREPARING FOR WAR

BOGOTA - Jailed Colombian drug lords are preparing to launch
a campaign of terror against their possible extradition to the United
States and have earmarked millions of dollars to finance it, police
sources said Monday.

The drug kingpins had agreed -- after clandestine negotiations
conducted from their cells inside maximum-security prisons -- to pool
resources for the campaign, which could begin immediately, the sources
said.

A fund, comprised of at least $9.6 million, has already been collected
by the jailed traffickers for attacks that would include car bombings
in leading cities and assassination attempts against Colombia's
National Police chief and prosecutor-general, said police sources who
requested anonymity.

The sources declined to say who controlled the fund, or exactly when
it had been created. They also declined to comment on whether brothers
Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuelas, the billionaire Cali cartel
cocaine merchants jailed in Bogota since 1995, were suspected of
involvement in organizing the attacks.

But they confirmed the outline of a report in Bogota's leading daily
El Tiempo, which spoke of the terror campaign and so-called ``narco
fund'' for the first time over the weekend.

The newspaper report raised the specter of drug-related violence
similar to what Colombia suffered in the 1980s and early 1990s when
thousands of people -- including three presidential candidates, an
attorney general, judges and a top newspaper editor -- died in attacks
carried out in the name of a shadowy group known as ``The
Extraditables.''

The group was headed by late and notoriously violent Medellin cartel
drug boss Pablo Escobar, whose strongarm tactics prompted lawmakers to
clamp a constitutional ban on extradition in 1991.

That concession came a year after Escobar's hired assassins killed 500
policemen in the northwest city of Medellin alone, collecting $2,000
for every hit.

The ban on extradition was lifted in a politically charged vote by
Colombia's Congress in December 1997, and President Andres Pastrana
has said he would have no qualms about turning over any Colombian
wanted abroad.

The new extradition law was passed but was not retroactive, however,
meaning that it cannot apply to crimes committed prior to December
1997.

In theory, that bars the Rodriguez Orejuelas from having to face
extradition. But they could still be handed over to United States, if
they are found to have continued running their drug empire from inside
Bogota's La Picota prison.

The Cali cartel was once considered the world's biggest criminal drug
syndicate, and the Rodriguez Orejuelas controlled up to 80 percent of
its cocaine, according to U.S. drug experts.

U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, who fought unsuccessfully to win the
brothers' extradition in 1996, has declined to say whether she will
try again. But she brought the entire extradition issue back to the
forefront, with a high-profile visit to Colombia last week.

Reno also stirred controversy with remarks in an interview in
Colombia's Cambio news magazine, where she said she would like to see
the death penalty imposed in some drug cases tried before U.S. courts.

Judicial officials say at least 14 Colombian traffickers now face
possible extradition to the United States, four of whom could be
handed over to U.S. drug agents within a matter of weeks or even days.