EXILE EMBRACES LIFE OF ACTIVISM AFTER ORDEAL OF FALSE ARREST

WHITE PLAINS, Dec. 22 - His office is a tableau of serenity. A ficus sits
next to a computer. Pictures of the Pennsylvania and Westchester
countryside dot the walls. Papers are piled here and there.

Victor Manuel Tafur-Dominguez offers coffee and a handshake and settles
into a chair in his Pace University Law School office, dressed in
corduroys, a tie and sweater. His voice is soft, his manner polite.

Nothing about Mr. Tafur (pronounced Ta-FOOR), 39, betrays the tumult of his
odyssey over the past two years through the Colombian and United States
justice systems, an ordeal that has finally ended.

"If he were a cat, he would be on like his third life now," says Fred
Zalcman, executive director of the Pace Energy Project, where Mr. Tafur has
worked since last year alongside other lawyers and economists working on
environmentally friendly solutions to energy problems.

Consider Mr. Tafur's recent plight.

He has recovered from a near-fatal plane crash in 1999 in Colombia while
working for that government's anticocaine program. After moving to the
United States to recuperate at his mother's home near Philadelphia, he was
jailed in 2000 on accusations by Colombia that he played a role in the
largest cocaine shipment ever seized in that country. He successfully
challenged Colombia's extradition request based on a treaty written two
decades ago by his father, who was subsequently assassinated, a crime that
was never solved.

But this year Mr. Tafur's fortunes turned brighter. Colombia dropped the
charges in June, finding no evidence that Mr. Tafur participated in drug
trafficking.

And last month, having earned a master's degree in law from Pace last year,
he was admitted to the New York State bar. "Because of this case," said Mr.
Tafur, a native of Cali, Colombia, "my life changed completely."

He is living in self-imposed exile but his words carry no trace of
bitterness, and associates say they have never heard him speak angrily
about his problems, which have roots in a financial transaction in Colombia
gone awry.

"It amazes me that through this whole ordeal, which was costly in both
dollars and emotion, I never saw bitterness," said Ann Powers, a Pace law
professor. "He always seemed controlled, even when things were bleak. Tense
and concerned, but quiet. I have tried to describe it to others, but don't
really know the right word. Stoic doesn't quite do it, but its something
like that. "

Mr. Tafur's troubles began in 1998, when he exchanged the equivalent of
$350,000 in Colombian pesos through a money trader, who deposited the sum
in a Swiss bank account for safekeeping, a common practice in Colombia. The
money was from a pension his mother had received after the 1992
assassination of Mr. Tafur's father, Donald, who was a Colombian congressman.

But the checks were later re-endorsed and ended up in the bank account of a
dummy company implicated in the December 1998 seizure of seven tons of cocaine.

Colombian authorities issued an arrest warrant for Mr. Tafur, who was then
living in Pennsylvania with his mother, recovering from the 1999 plane
crash. Mr. Tafur had been injured while on an assignment as the deputy
director of a Colombian government effort to encourage coca farmers to grow
other crops.

In the United States, he said, the matter probably would have been cleared
up quickly, as there was no evidence that he was aware of what happened to
his checks after he confirmed the money had arrived in Switzerland. But
Colombia, he said, is another story.

"You can't always understand things happening there because it gets very
blurry," Mr. Tafur said.

The Drug Enforcement Administration arrested Mr. Tafur in March 2000 on a
Colombian extradition warrant. Mr. Tafur's law professors and classmates
rallied to his cause, submitting briefs and letters of support to the
federal judge hearing the case. The judge rejected Colombia's request
because he said he could find no probable cause that Mr. Tafur had
committed a crime. He was freed from jail and resumed his studies at Pace,
where he had enrolled while recovering to pursue a master's degree in
environmental law.

Mr. Tafur would have been the first person extradited from the United
States to Colombia to face drug charges; since 1997, when Colombia resumed
extradition after a six-year hiatus, 65 people have been extradited to the
United States, according to the D.E.A.

In June, Colombia's attorney general's office closed its investigation of
Mr. Tafur, issuing a statement that said he "did not commit any crime."

But Mr. Tafur said he believed it would still be too dangerous to return to
Colombia. Shortly after Mr. Tafur was freed, his sister and her family fled
to Miami after receiving death threats that the family believes were
related to Mr. Tafur's case.

So Mr. Tafur said he had embraced a new life in the United States, having
won political asylum in the spring. He has adapted to suburban New York
life for the most part, living with his wife, Maria Francisca Rocha, a
magazine editor, in a house in Valhalla, but dashing out to Colombian
restaurants and groceries when he gets the chance.

And he is working on his lifelong passion, environmental issues.

His eyes brighten and he grows more animated as he discusses how the United
States "pioneered the environmental impact statement. The Clean Water Act
is the most incredible piece of legislation in the world."

Mr. Tafur spends most of his time these days representing community groups
in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, Brooklyn, fighting a proposed natural gas
plant on the East River.

"It's the right plan in the wrong neighborhood," Mr. Tafur said.

If he has any lingering resentments it is over the infringement on his
freedom, particularly the time he spent wrongfully jailed.

"The most important value is liberty," he said. "Being jailed is an extreme
situation even if we can cope with it. The false accusation attacked not
just honesty but what I stand for. "

But he said he preferred to dwell on the future, not the past. He invokes
the words of a compatriot, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the novelist and Nobel
laureate, saying, " `You should never try to go back to places where you
have found happiness.' I just hope to see the land where I was born before
I die and do something for it from exile."