The Narco-Candidate?

By Michael S. Serrill

The electronic eavesdropper was taping an explosive conversation. "What a funny thing, the presidency is in your hands," journalist Alberto Giraldo Lopez is heard to say to Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, a leader of the Cali cartel, which controls 80% of the world's cocaine trade.

The conversation, recorded sometime during the run-up to last week's presidential election in Colombia, moves on to a casual discussion of providing candidate Ernesto Samper Pizano with 3 billion pesos, or $3.7 million, in campaign funds. "We've already talked to Medina," Rodriguez says, apparently referring to Samper's campaign manager, Santiago Medina. "We'll send around some money on Wednesday, and then the rest about Monday of next week."

Samper, the candidate of the ruling Liberal Party, went on to win the election by a bare 2.2% margin over the Conservative Party's Andres Pastrana. The day after the vote, three audiotapes containing the Giraldo-Rodriguez conversations surfaced in Bogota, casting doubt on the legitimacy of Samper's victory and throwing Colombia into political turmoil. "If it is proved that the President-elect's campaign received drug-trafficking money," said Pastrana, "he should resign because his mandate would be invalid."

Samper, 43, a former economics minister in the government of President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo, quickly denied that he had taken money from drug lords. His contention was supported by Giraldo, a longtime go-between for the Cali cartel, who said the Cali bosses had offered funds to both the Samper and Pastrana campaigns but were turned down. Colombians were not only skeptical, but angry that the tapes, which had come into President Gaviria's hands several days before the election, were not released earlier.

Copies of the tapes also came into the possession of U.S. officials before the vote, and their decision to take no action ignited a behind-the-scenes flap in Washington. While the State Department went along with Gaviria's decision to withhold the recordings from the public -- "We can't interfere with elections," explained a State Department member -- some officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration were furious. "No one did anything," said one. "They allowed this travesty to take place. Everybody, including the U.S. government, is participating in this cover-up."

Assertions that the campaign was tainted by drug money had been circulating in U.S. government circles for months and added to a yearlong chill in Washington-Bogota relations. Last week's news from Bogota, said Robert Gelbard, Assistant Secretary of State for International Narcotics Matters, was "the worst kind of information we could receive." He added that "if these accusations are true, it will definitely affect bilateral relations."

The tapes surfaced June 15, four days before the election, when an unidentified man handed them to Pastrana during a campaign stop in Cali. Exactly who recorded the telephone conversations remains unclear. Pastrana presented them to Gaviria on June 17. The President in turn gave them to Prosecutor-General Gustavo de Greiff, the controversial director of Colombia's antinarcotics effort, to check their authenticity. After his election loss, Pastrana made them public. "Let's bring them out in the open and get to the bottom of it," he said at a news conference. That exercise required some explanation from Pastrana, whose campaign is alleged on one of the tapes to have received $2 million from cocaine traffickers in the north of the country. He denied the allegation.

Samper said he would welcome a federal investigation. "These charges will not stand up," he said, asserting that he is a victim, not a collaborator, of the drug lords. In 1989 he was shot 14 times by hitmen for drug lords in a Bogota airport ambush, but miraculously survived. For all that, allegations he and his party were accepting money from the narco-barons were so persistent that last October Gelbard traveled to Bogota to warn Samper to stay clear of their money or risk damaging U.S.-Colombia relations should he be elected.

Ties had already been strained by a battle of wills between Clinton Administration officials and Prosecutor-General De Greiff, who had pursued plea-bargain deals with major traffickers, offering them as little as three years in prison in exchange for guilty pleas. U.S. officials denounced the program, and in response cut off a scheme in which they shared evidence with Colombian prosecutors. More recently, the Clinton Administration suspended an operation in which AWACS surveillance aircraft identified for Colombian law enforcement small planes thought to be carrying drugs; in what was seen as a conciliatory move, the U.S. last week announced the program would be reinstated.

That and other cooperative efforts could be shut down again, however, if Washington proves the claim that Samper is in league with the dealers. "This guy has a long history of trafficking connections," says a senior policymaker, who suggests that while the tapes do not make for a "smoking gun," they provide "very compelling evidence" that Samper owes his victory to the narco-mafia.

With reporting by Tom Quinn/Bogota and Elaine Shannon/Washington