COLOMBIAN LEADER LINKED TO COCAINE TRAFFICKERS

BOGOTÁ A recently declassified U.S. intelligence report from 1991
says that President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia, now a staunch supporter
of Washington's war against drug trafficking, was at that time a close
associate of Colombia's most powerful drug lord and an ardent ally of
the cocaine traffickers then engulfing this country.

A spokesman for Uribe denounced the findings in the Defense
Intelligence Agency's 13-year-old report on Colombia's biggest drug
traffickers as "the same information" presented in a campaign by
political opponents in the 2002 presidential election. And senior U.S.
intelligence officials and diplomats cautioned that such reports might
not be accurate. However, the statement issued by the presidential
spokesman did not directly address the report's most damaging
assertion: that Uribe had been linked to the top drug trafficker of
the era, Pablo Escobar.

The report, dated Sept. 23, 1991, and obtained through the U.S.
Freedom of Information Act by the National Security Archive, a
private, nonpartisan research group based in Washington, says that
Uribe, at the time a senator from the northern state of Antioquia, was
"dedicated to collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high
government levels."

The report, which the archive made public on Monday, calls Uribe a
"close personal friend" of Escobar, who led the cartel, and says Uribe
took part in the drug lord's successful efforts to secure a seat as an
auxiliary congressman. It says that Uribe was linked to an
unidentified business involved in narcotics activities in the United
States, that as a senator he opposed extraditing traffickers to the
United States and that his father, Alberto Uribe, was killed because
of his drug ties.

The report is labeled "not finally evaluated." Diplomats and
intelligence officers, told about the report, noted that this
indicates that its author relied on raw information that had not been
confirmed.

In response to inquiries by The New York Times, Ricardo Galan, a
spokesman for President Uribe, issued an eight-point response on
Friday that said the Defense Intelligence Agency report had been of a
preliminary nature. The statement said that in 1991 Uribe had been
studying at Harvard and that he had never had business dealings in the
United States.

The statement also said Uribe's father had been killed while trying to
resist Marxist rebels who intended to kidnap him. It affirmed Uribe's
commitment to extradition, though it explained only loosely Uribe's
opposition as a senator to a proposed referendum on extradition. It
did not address the report's allegation that Uribe participated in the
campaign that took Escobar to Congress.

Robert Zimmerman, a State Department spokesman, was more emphatic in
denying the report's findings. "We completely disavow these
allegations about President Uribe," he said. "We have no credible
information that substantiates or corroborates the allegations in an
unevaluated 1991 report."

Still, the report is certain to raise new questions about allegations
made in 2001 and 2002, when Uribe was campaigning for the presidency,
about possible ties to drug dealers, including the powerful Ochoa clan
in Medellin, Colombia's drug-trafficking center. Solid evidence was
never presented, though, and Uribe won in a landslide based on his
pledge that he would fight Marxist rebels and drug
traffickers.

The United States has strongly supported Uribe since then, and he is
considered among the Bush administration's closest allies in its
effort to curb drug trafficking.

During his two years in office, a U.S.-$ financed fumigation effort
has eradicated much of Colombia's vast drug crop. About 150 Colombians
accused of drug trafficking have been extradited to the United States,
more than double the number extradited by Uribe's predecessor during
his four-year term.

Senior diplomats and intelligence officials involved in the drug war
in Colombia in the early 1990s cautioned against drawing conclusions
from the report, noting that such documents were routinely produced
with little vetting or oversight.

The New York Times