POLITICS -- AND DRUG BUSINESS -- AS USUAL IN COLOMBIA

Investigation yields arrests but not change. Current prosecutor insists he
is getting results.

BOGOTA, Colombia--The lukewarm U.S. endorsement of Colombia's drug-fighting
efforts, announced Thursday, is another sign that neither international
shame nor domestic angst can change an entrenched political system tainted
by narcotics money, skeptics said.

After two years of being classified as a pariah in the war against
drugs--along with Iran and Myanmar (formerly Burma)--Colombia was
categorized by the U.S. administration last week as not fully cooperating
but too important in the anti-narcotics effort to be penalized.

That is exactly the status this country had three years ago, leaving many
Colombians feeling that, after years of internationally embarrassing
squabbling with the United States, they are back where they started.

In fact, that is also the general feeling here about efforts to purge a
political system that most observers agree has been severely compromised by
drug money.

An ongoing, highly publicized investigation into corruption has put a
dozen members of Congress and several high-ranking government officials in
jail for accepting drug money.

But how much has really changed?

President Ernesto Samper--elected with the help of $6 million in drug
money, according to his own aides--is going to finish his four-year term
this summer.

His handpicked successor, also implicated in the corruption scandal, is
the leading candidate to replace him. Many of the politicians jailed in
the drug-money scandal have already finished their sentences. And Colombia
is still the world's leading cocaine producer.

In fact, cocaine production is up 18% compared with 1996, according to a
report released last week by the U.S. State Department. Colombia is also
gaining market share in heroin production.

"The results [of the investigation] have been minimal," said Maria Isabel
Rueda, a columnist for the Semana newsmagazine and a candidate for
Colombia's Congress in elections next Sunday. "Money from drug traffickers
is still financing campaigns. . . . Corruption is worse than ever."

In addition, many observers believe that those who investigated and
publicized the narco-politics scandals are being punished.

The army colonel who found the documents that served as the basis for the
investigation has been fired, along with two prosecutors on the case. The
newscasts that most aggressively followed the developments have lost their
government broadcasting licenses.

The most acrimonious debate now is over how aggressively the current
prosecutor general is continuing the investigation.

"There is a dynamic that cannot be stopped," said Adolfo Salamanca, former
deputy prosecutor general and a candidate for Congress. "But the
government's intention is to halt" the investigation.

Samper had a perfect opportunity to stop the investigation when Alfonso
Valdivieso, Salamanca's old boss, resigned last year to run for president.

"By abandoning his work, Valdivieso caused the country tremendous harm,"
Salamanca said.

But Enrique Santos Calderon, an influential columnist with El Tiempo
newspaper, said that, while Samper might have wanted to thwart the
investigation, he picked the wrong man to replace Valdivieso: Alfonso Gomez
Mendez, a former Bogota district attorney and ex-ambassador to Austria.

Gomez Mendez "is a very proud man," Santos Calderon said.

When critics alleged that Gomez Mendez was being made prosecutor general
as a dupe, he decided to prove them wrong, Santos Calderon said.

Indeed, sitting in his office inside the $50-million, modern fortress
where Colombia's top prosecutors work, Gomez Mendez said he has tripled the
number of investigators and support staff assigned to the case. "The
investigation is expanding," he said. "We have done more in seven months
than they did in three years."

Prosecutors last week arrested Comptroller General David Turbay for
allegedly accepting money from the Cali drug cartel. Prosecutors based the
arrest on the same evidence that Valdivieso and Salamanca had a year ago
when they decided to shut down the investigation against Turbay, Gomez
Mendez said.

Valdivieso agreed that his successor has expanded the investigation, but
Salamanca insisted that the few high-profile arrests are a smoke screen to
hide all the cases being closed without arrests.

But observers insist that the real impact of the political scandal that has
strained relations with the United States will not be measured in arrests
but at the polls, when Congress is elected next week and a new president
is chosen in May.

Copyright Los Angeles Times