Colombia Day of the Assassins

By Michael S. Serrill

The killers chose their moment well. Attorney General Carlos Hoyos Jimenez had just spent the week in Medellin, drug capital of Colombia, investigating the suspicious release from jail of Cocaine Cowboy Jorge Ochoa Vasquez. Hoyos was headed for the airport to return to Bogota. Suddenly, three jeeps and a car forced Hoyos' Mercedes off the road. Several men jumped out and sprayed the Attorney General's car with machine-gun fire, apparently wounding Hoyos and instantly killing his bodyguard and driver. Hoyos, his head bowed and bloody, was dragged from the vehicle and kidnaped. Hours later his bullet-riddled body was found in a nearby farmhouse.

Colombia's chief prosecutor thus became the latest victim in a vicious battle between the government and a group of billionaire drug traffickers known as the Medellin cartel. Hoyos had advocated the reinstatement of a 1979 extradition treaty with the U.S. that had resulted in the deportation of 16 alleged drug traffickers before Colombia's Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional last year.

After Hoyos was kidnaped, a man claiming to represent the "extraditable ones" told a Medellin radio station that the Attorney General had been executed for "betraying his country" by favoring the treaty. President Virgilio Barco Vargas responded by announcing plans to hire thousands of new policemen and judges and sharply increase sentences for drug-related crimes.

But few expected Barco's measures to cripple a criminal enterprise that has used bribery, threats and murder to become a law unto itself. Over the past several years, a Justice Minister, scores of policemen, 21 judges and more than a dozen journalists who refused to be bought off have been murdered. In the case of Ochoa, a leader of the Medellin cartel who is wanted in the U.S., Hoyos was investigating a group of officials, including two judges, who are suspected of accepting bribes to help Ochoa walk out of prison. "Who's in control in Colombia?" asks Ann Wrobleski, head of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters. "It seems to me a fair question."

Despite the climate of fear, Justice Minister Enrique Low Murtra believes that the extradition treaty might still be revived. But first, he said, the U.S. has to increase the aid it provides to help fight Colombia's drug mafia from the current $15 million a year, which he called a "drop in the bucket." Low's remarks reflect a growing anti-U.S. sentiment among Colombians, who blame the violence on the American demand for cocaine. (Colombian drug lords supply 75% of the coke consumed in the U.S.)

Hoyos believed that the Medellin cartel could be broken, but he was realistic about the consequences of trying. A year before Hoyos' murder, a former Justice Minister who had been appointed Ambassador to Hungary was tracked down and seriously wounded in Budapest. Said Hoyos at the time: "No one is safe anywhere against the vengeance of the mafia."

With reporting by John Borrell/Bogota