BOGOTA, Aug 10 (Reuter) One of Colombia's top alleged heroin traffickers
was captured in Bogota, police said on Sunday, in the first arrest by a newly
created joint U.S.Colombian drug unit.

Waldo Simeon Vargas has three outstanding arrest warrants against him in
Colombia and seven in neighbouring Peru on drugtrafficking and
illicitenrichment charges, National Police chief Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano
told reporters.

Vargas, alias ``The Minister,'' was seized as he left the National Exhibition
Centre in central Bogota with his Peruvianborn wife and three children late
on Saturday. He was carrying false Peruvian identity papers, but police said
he was from the emeraldmining province of Boyaca in central Colombia.

``This wellknown drug trafficker is one of the capos of the heroin trade in
Colombia,'' Serrano told a news conference. ``We are delighted with his
capture. He was one of the last major capos we still had to capture,'' he
said.

Vargas' arrest is the first success for the specialist AntiHeroin Unit,
which is made up of Colombian counternarcotics police and members of the U.S.
Drug Enforcement Administration and was set up last week. No U.S. agents were
thought to have been involved in the arrest.

Serrano said Vargas was a former henchman of Pablo Escobar, kingpin of the
notorious Medellin cartel. He switched to the rival Cali mob after Escobar
was shot to death by police in 1993. He created his own independent heroin
trafficking organisation after the Cali capos were arrested in 1995.

Vargas had close ties with Peruvian drug traffickers and oversaw massive
cocaine processing operations in clandestine jungle laboratories in Peru's
Upper Huallaga region on behalf of Escobar, beginning in 1982.

Largescale heroin production and smuggling began in Colombia at the start of
this decade, and traffickers now produce and export about 6.5 tonnes per
year, according to the National Police.

The DEA estimates that Colombia supplies about twothirds of the heroin
consumed in the United States.

Unlike Colombia's former cocaine kings, with their ostentatious lifestyles,
the new breed of heroin traffickers keep a much lower profile.

And because the heroin barons are trafficking smaller quantities of drugs for
higher profits, they have not needed so far to develop huge criminal empires
like those of the Medellin and Cali cartels, police sources say.

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