Pubdate: Tue, 19 Mar 2002
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Copyright: 2002 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Karen DeYoung
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/colombia.htm (Colombia)

U.S. CHARGES COLOMBIAN INSURGENTS WITH DRUG TRAFFICKING

A federal grand jury in the District has indicted three members of 
the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and four other 
South Americans on charges of conspiring to import cocaine into the 
United States, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft said yesterday.

Ashcroft, who took the unusual step of holding a news conference to 
announce the unsealing of the 11-day-old indictment, said it 
demonstrated "more clearly than ever the evil interdependence between 
the terrorists that threaten American lives" and drug trafficking.

The FARC, a leftist insurgency that has been fighting a civil war 
against the Colombian government for nearly four decades, is listed 
by the State Department as a Foreign Terrorist Organization. Along 
with a similarly listed right-wing paramilitary organization, the 
Colombian Self-Defense Forces, or AUC, it has sharply increased its 
numbers and effectiveness in recent years through involvement in 
Colombia's lucrative drug trade.

The indictment, resulting from an 18-month investigation by the U.S. 
Drug Enforcement Administration and the Colombian military and 
national police, marked the first U.S. charges to be brought against 
FARC members. The guerrillas, Ashcroft said, were being charged "not 
as revolutionaries or freedom fighters, but as drug traffickers." He 
said the Justice Department would seek U.S. trials for the indictees, 
all but one of whom remain at large, presumably in Colombia.

The indictment follows the launch this year of a White House campaign 
to highlight ties between illegal drug use in this country and 
international terrorism. It also comes as the Bush administration is 
preparing to ask Congress to lift restrictions that bar direct U.S. 
military assistance to Colombia's counter-insurgency war against the 
FARC.

Asked whether the U.S. military could be used to try to apprehend the 
indictees, Ashcroft said, "We will use every appropriate means at our 
disposal, but I don't want to indicate in specific that we are going 
to be involving the military at this time."

The two leading names on the indictment are Tomas Molina Caracas, 
commander of the FARC's 16th Front in eastern Colombia near its 
borders with Venezuela and Brazil, and Luis Fernando da Costa, an 
alleged Brazilian arms smuggler and drug trafficker. Da Costa was 
arrested in April during a Colombian army raid in the area of 
Barrancominas, the center of Molina's operations. He was deported to 
Brazil, where he is being held on murder and drug charges.

The other indictees include two other alleged FARC members, three 
other Brazilians and a man of unknown nationality. Ashcroft and DEA 
Director Asa Hutchinson, who appeared with him at yesterday's news 
conference, provided few details of the charges. The indictment 
speaks generally of undated meetings and shipments of cocaine, money 
and arms involving the indictees between 1994 and the present.

According to last week's edition of Cambio, a respected Colombian 
weekly magazine, the main witnesses in the case are an unnamed man 
and woman, associates of da Costa who were detained at the time of 
the Brazilian's arrest and were subsequently transferred to the 
United States.

The names of Molina and da Costa surfaced two years ago amid 
allegations that Vladimiro Montesinos, then head of Peruvian 
intelligence, had arranged for at least 10,000 Soviet rifles 
purchased for the Peruvian military to be delivered instead to the 
FARC. The weapons were air-dropped over FARC territory controlled by 
Molina.
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