CALI DRUG BOSS GUNNED DOWN

One of the world's most powerful drug-traffickers, a former leader of the
notorious Cali cartel, has been killed while playing football in his prison
yard - raising the prospect of a new round of bloodletting among Colombia's
drug gangs.

Helmer Pacho Herrera was killed by a well-dressed man who embraced him
warmly and shot him six times in the head.

Herrera - considered the most dangerous and ruthless of the Cali bosses -
had been at the centre of the country's drug-related violence for more than
20 years. He surrendered two years ago and had recently begun to rat on his
former associates in an effort to win lenient sentencing.

He began his career in the drugs business as an ally of Pablo Escobar's
Medellin cartel, but after a disagreement in the mid-1980s he began to
forge links with the newly emerging Cali mob. He is believed to have been
responsible for a car bomb attack on the Escobar family home in 1988.

Escobar took his revenge in 1990, when 17 of Herrera's bodyguards died in a
raid on one of his farms.

Herrera escaped and under the banner of "Los Pepes" formed a network of
thugs with the aim of hunting down Escobar.

After three years of gang warfare Escobar was gunned down on December 2
1993. When Herrera surrendered in 1996 he told authorities that he had
spent most of his fortune hunting his arch-enemy.

With Escobar out of the way the Cali cartel flourished, but its success was
short-lived. Within a year the newly elected president, Ernesto Samper, was
submerged in a scandal over the cartel's UKP4 million funding of his
campaign.

The government - its arm firmly twisted by the United States - declared war
on the cartel and within months the Cali bosses began to fall.

Herrera - also known as "the man of a thousand faces" - was the last of the
seven Cali leaders to be rounded up. Because of plastic surgery he could be
identified only by fingerprints.

Herrera's killing may have been the work of new, post-Cali groups trying to
consolidate their control of the cocaine business, or the settling of an
old grudge.

Herrera's assassin narrowly avoided being lynched by prisoners after the
shooting.