U.S.Colombian unit arrests top suspect in heroin traffic

Reuters News Service

BOGOTA One of Colombia's top alleged heroin traffickers was captured in
Bogota, police said 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 neighboring 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
Center in central Bogota with his Peruvianborn wife and three children
late Saturday. He was carrying false Peruvian identification papers, but
police said he was from the emerald mining province of Boyaca in central
Colombia.

"This wellknown drug trafficker is one of the capos of the heroin trade in
Colombia," Serrano said. "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 Anti Heroin Unit,
which is made up of Colombian counternarcotics police and members of the
U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. The unit was set up last week. No
U.S. agents were thought to have been involved in the arrest of Vargas.

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
herointrafficking organization 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, officials said.

Largescale heroin production and smuggling began in Colombia at the start
of this decade, and traffickers now produce and export about 6.5 tons a
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 keeps a much lower profile. Because the
heroin barons are trafficking smaller quantities of drugs for higher
profits, they have not needed to develop huge criminal empires like those
of the Medellin and Cali cartels, police sources said.