Pubdate: Wed, 29 Nov 2000
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2000 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  1150 15th Street Northwest, Washington, DC 20071
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Website: http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Author: Karen DeYoung, Washington Post Staff Writer

COLOMBIAN ENVOY APPLIES FOR ASYLUM IN U.S.

Consuelo Sanchez was 32, the youngest judge in Colombia, when she signed a 
warrant for the arrest of Pablo Escobar, the country's most powerful and 
dangerous drug trafficker. Not surprisingly, Escobar's Medellin cartel 
threatened her life, and the Colombian government sent her to safety with a 
diplomatic post in the United States.

That was 12 years and four Colombian administrations ago. Pablo Escobar 
died in 1993, and the Medellin cartel has been disbanded. Contending that 
Sanchez is no longer in danger, the Colombian government has told her it is 
time to turn her plum diplomatic assignment over to someone else and come home.

But Sanchez, now 44, with two U.S.-born daughters and an established life 
in this country, has declined to go quietly. In fact, she is making as much 
noise as she can, suing her own government and enlisting support from this 
country's leading human rights group. Yesterday, her last day as consul in 
Colombia's embassy here, she applied for political asylum in the United States.

Drug traffickers still pose a clear threat to her life, Sanchez maintained 
in her asylum application, filed with the INS district office in Texas.

"The government of Colombia's order for me to return home to my country," 
she wrote, "is the signature on the death warrant prepared for me by the 
Colombian Drug Cartel in 1988 and remaining in force today."

"They want me back," she said in an interview, "but what I don't understand 
is why. What are they trying to prove?"

Her attorney, Washington immigration lawyer Michael Maggio, suggested that 
Sanchez is being used as a political pawn by Colombian President Andres 
Pastrana to demonstrate progress in the U.S.-backed war against Escobar's 
drug-trafficking successors.

"This insistence upon her going home to Colombia either says that they want 
to use her to make the point that things have improved to the extent it's 
now safe for someone who previously would have been dead meat," or the 
government simply does not care if she gets killed, Maggio said. "Needless 
to say, she's not very happy to serve as live bait."

In a letter last week to Pastrana, Human Rights Watch said Sanchez had 
received "credible information" as recently as 1997 that she and her family 
remained in danger. The U.S.-based human rights group called on the 
Colombian government to fulfill its responsibility to protect her.

The letter noted that some drug traffickers who were associated with 
Escobar and who were implicated in the 1988 case handled by Sanchez ­ which 
stemmed from the murder of a prominent Colombian journalist ­ remain alive, 
and at least one is still at large.

"We don't argue that they owe her a job," Robin Kirk, a researcher at Human 
Rights Watch, said yesterday. "What they do owe her is protection. In this 
kind of unusual case, it may be only way they can satisfactorily protect 
her is out of country."

There is little doubt that judges, prosecutors, human rights activists and 
journalists remain in danger in Colombia, both from drug traffickers and 
from rebel forces of the left and right who are at war with the government 
and each other. Many have been murdered, leading countless more to flee the 
country, along with tens of thousands of their countrymen who fear 
escalating violence and kidnappings.

But the Colombian government maintains there are degrees of risk, beginning 
at the level suffered by virtually all citizens. Those under more direct 
threat from criminals and combatants are provided security in accordance 
with the government's assessment of the danger they are in, and its ability 
to protect them.

The government, while noting that Colombian law limits all diplomatic 
appointments to four years, declined to address the subject of Sanchez on 
the record. Instead, it supplied copies of its response to her lawsuit 
demanding protection, which was dismissed last week by a judge in Bogota.

It noted that reviews by security forces in 1996 and 1998 indicated that 
Sanchez was no longer at high risk. The 1998 review put the level at 
"medium-low, taking into account that the problems that caused her 
departure from the country have disappeared."

According to one Colombian familiar with the case, "The problem she has is 
the same security problem that all Colombians have. . . . All judges in 
Colombia get lots of threats. You can't name all of them consuls."

The government, another informed Colombian said, is not forcing her back, 
but merely ending her lengthy diplomatic tenure. "This is basically to 
resolve her visa status," he said of Sanchez's asylum application.

Sanchez denied that she simply wants to keep her job here. "I don't want to 
stay forever in my job. The only thing I want is to protect myself and my 
children," she said. She added: "After all the brave things I did to 
promote justice, this will serve as a bad example" to other judges and 
prosecutors now struggling to do their work inside the country.

No one doubts Sanchez's bravery. Before she took on the 1986 murder case of 
Guillermo Cano, editor of the daily El Espectador, several other judges had 
dropped it like a hot potato. She received so many threats that the 
government moved her to a military base, and she traveled in armored cars.

The day before she signed a warrant for Escobar's arrest, on Aug. 26, 1988, 
the Medellin cartel warned her that she was about to commit "an error that 
would stain your life and would plague you until your dying day. You know 
perfectly well that we are capable of executing you anywhere in the world."

Within days, the government sped Sanchez and her husband out of the country 
without time even to pick up personal items. She was assigned as Colombia's 
consul in Detroit, under U.S.-government supplied 24-hour protection. But 
she left for the job in Washington six months later, after a local 
newspaper wrote a story about her. Neighbors in her apartment building 
complained that her presence put their lives in danger.
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