Drug Bang

A bombing with a difference

Squat, gray and fortress-like, the twelve-year-old U.S. embassy in Bogota is designed to withstand the most withering of terrorist bomb attacks. The building was put to the test last week: a white Fiat, packed with 33 Ibs. of dynamite, exploded just outside the employee parking lot. The blast killed a Colombian woman standing near by, knocked down several 50-year-old eucalyptus trees and blew out windows in a 15-story office building a block away. But it did not crack a single pane of the shatterproof glass in the embassy or injure any of the 309 people inside. Said an embassy employee: "They'd have had to hit us with an atom bomb to shake this place."

That sort of security is useful nowadays in Bogota. U.S. and Colombian authorities believe the bombing was the work not of leftist, anti-U.S. terrorists, but of a powerful Colombian drug mafia intent on discouraging recent efforts by the two governments to curb the country's multibillion-dollar cocaine and marijuana industry. In response to a U.S.-Colombian move to extradite 78 Colombian dealers to face charges in the U.S., unnamed drug barons three weeks ago threatened to kill five Americans for every Colombian extradited. Colombian police believe that the prime target of last week's attack was U.S. Ambassador Lewis Tambs, who is in the habit of leaving the embassy each day at about the time the bomb exploded. Six months earlier, a car laden with explosives blew up prematurely outside his official residence.

"Nobody is going to run me out of this town," Tambs vowed. "I'm staying to continue the fight together with the Colombian government to get rid of the dope business." Nonetheless, State Department Spokesman Alan Romberg announced that the U.S. would temporarily be "reducing our official profile in Colombia." At least a dozen of the embassy's 187 U.S. employees left the country last week with their families. Americans are not the only ones at risk. Says Tambs: "I have information that all the Colombian Cabinet ministers and the President himself have received death threats ever since they launched their antinarcotics offensive."

The U.S.-Colombian drug crackdown began to pick up speed last April, when Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla was murdered in retaliation for his strenuous antidrug efforts. The assassination, the first ever of a Cabinet-level official in Colombia's history, shocked the nation and persuaded President Belisario Betancur Cuartas to abandon his reluctance to enforce an existing extradition treaty with the U.S. Since then, 78 alleged drug traffickers have been requested by the U.S., and Betancur has signed extradition papers for six of them. According to the treaty, however, the Colombians must first face charges and serve sentences in their own country before they can be extradited.

Meanwhile, Colombia confiscated 33.5 tons of cocaine in the first eight months of this year, an amount worth $7 billion at the retail level and representing nearly a third of estimated U.S. consumption of the drug. Authorities have also burned 1,953 tons of marijuana, arrested 2,648 presumed drug traffickers, closed down 147 cocaine laboratories and grounded 173 planes used to carry drugs.

Says General Victor Delgado Mallarino, director of the national police, with perhaps excessive optimism: "We have the narcotics crowd on the run now, especially the big bosses." -