LA JULIA, Colombia - Colombia's defense minister helicoptered into this leftist rebel stronghold with a clutch of U.S. Embassy officials and heavily armed U.S. soldiers to assert emphatically that Latin America's most enduring guerrilla army is on the run.

"The state has arrived to stay, and never again will the guerrillas control this territory," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos proclaimed in October while inaugurating the first police post ever in this former hub of the cocaine trade.

But just weeks later, an Associated Press news team had to talk its way past testy rebels just to reach the dirt-street town, from which hundreds of people have fled since police and soldiers moved in.

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It's Been 1,750 Days Since Their Mayday Call, and Three Members of a Flight Crew Contracted by the State Department Are Still Awaiting Rescue. While the U.S. and Colombian Governments Refuse to Bargain With Terrorists, the Hostage Crisis Threatens to Become the Longest in U.S. History.

The tropical prison lies in a muddy clearing deep in the southern Colombian jungle, surrounded by a barrier of rough-hewn logs and close to a wide, swift river.

Scattered around the compound are a dozen simple tents-plastic tarpaulins supported by bamboo poles, with hard wooden pallets on which the prisoners and their guards sleep.

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Submersibles Are Used to Ferry Narcotics. Some in U.S. Fear the Tactic May Inspire Terrorists.

CALI, COLOMBIA -- It was on a routine patrol that the Colombian coast guard stumbled upon an eerie outpost amid the mangroves: a mini-shipyard where suspected drug traffickers were building submarines.

Perched on a makeshift wooden dry dock late last month were two 55-foot-long fiberglass vessels, one ready for launch, the other about 70% complete. Each was outfitted with a 350-horsepower Cummins diesel engine and enough fuel capacity to reach the coast of Central America or Mexico, hundreds of miles to the north.

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BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia lashed out on Tuesday at claims in a new book that he had close ties to the cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. He said he never aided Mr. Escobar's drug dealings or benefited from his political patronage.

Mr. Uribe's comments were in response to the book, "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar," by Virginia Vallejo, Mr. Escobar's former mistress. Ms. Vallejo repeats claims that Mr. Uribe, as head of the civil aviation authority in the early 1980s, helped Mr. Escobar's cartel secure licenses for landing strips used to transport cocaine.

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Pablo Escobar was the world's most infamous drug lord, responsible for kidnappings, bombings and murder on an industrial scale. How did he get away with it for so long?

I met "Popeye" - Pablo Escobar's head of security and one of the few survivors of the Medellin cartel - by chance when I visited Colombia's new state-of-the-art prison, Valledupar. I found him reading Homer's Iliad in the high-security wing. He was my introduction to the myth of Escobar, "cocaine king", sometime politician and wholesale murderer.

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The Colombian police said they had dismantled the private army of Carlos Mario Jimenez, a paramilitary warlord who is awaiting extradition to the United States, by arresting 147 people believed to be protecting a major cocaine smuggling ring. Gen. Orlando Paez, who carried out the weekend raid on three jungle camps where the arrests took place, said the armed group was under the command of Mr. Jimenez, who is being held on a navy frigate off Colombia's Atlantic coast while awaiting extradition.

[end]

Anti-Corruption Drive Paves Way For Biggest Scalp Since Escobar In Never-Ending War

When Colombia's most notorious drug lord, Diego Montoya, was cornered by a special army commando unit on a remote coastal ranch last week, he did what came naturally: he offered the soldiers $5m each if they would let him go free.

The move wasn't quite as desperate as it sounds. As an ever-growing scandal in Colombia has revealed in recent weeks, Montoya has successfully bribed a large number of military and police personnel for years, to facilitate his cocaine shipments to the United States. To date, 26 officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, have been arrested, two generals have resigned and the spotlight has now turned on an admiral in the Colombian navy.

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BOGOTA -- One of the world's most-wanted drug lords was captured hiding under a pile of leaves Monday in a major strike against a powerful and violent cocaine cartel that had managed to infiltrate the top ranks of Colombia's security forces.

Diego Leon Montoya Sanchez, who goes by the name "Don Diego," was the leader of the Norte del Valle cartel, believed to be responsible for nearly two-thirds of the 500 tons of cocaine exported from Colombia every year and at least 1,500 murders. Among the FBI's top 10 most wanted criminals, he has been indicted in the United States, including in South Florida.

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BOGOTA, Colombia - (AP) -- Soldiers swarmed onto a farm on Monday and captured one of the world's most wanted drug lords hiding in bushes in his underwear. Colombian officials called it their biggest drug war victory since the killing of the Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar in 1993.

Diego Montoya, who sits with Osama bin Laden on the F.B.I.'s 10 most wanted list and has a $5 million bounty on his head, is accused of leading the Norte del Valle cartel. It is deemed Colombia's most dangerous drug gang and is accused of shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States since the 1990s.

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Officers Provided Secret Information on U.S. Navy Ships

BOGOTA, Colombia -- An investigation by the Colombian Defense Ministry has found that drug traffickers and rebels from the country's largest guerrilla group infiltrated the U.S.-backed military here, paying high-ranking officers for classified information to help elude capture and continue smuggling cocaine.

The information obtained by the powerful Norte del Valle drug cartel included the secret positioning of U.S. naval vessels and aircraft in the Caribbean early last year, part of a carefully coordinated web designed to stop cocaine from reaching the United States, according to high-ranking Colombian military officials. The cartel is headed by Diego Montoya, who is on the FBI's list of most wanted fugitives.

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In Wake of Colombia's U.S.-Backed Disarmament Process, Ex-Paramilitary Fighters Regroup Into Criminal Gangs

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombia's cocaine trade has never been controlled by a single cast of characters.

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar and other flamboyant cocaine cowboys, wielding billions of dollars and armies of hit men, nearly brought the state to its knees. Their deaths ushered in more discreet groups, so-called baby cartels, that outsourced trafficking and murder to gangs. Then came a paramilitary force that relied on cocaine to fund a war against Marxist rebels, a bloody phase the government says ended with the disarmament of militias last year.

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EL PENOL, Colombia -- With a machete and a long-handled spade, Colombian farmers like Claudio Gualtero are trying to succeed where seven years of aerial coca fumigation struggled in the battle to slash the country's drug exports.

After receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid to spray coca crops from the air, Colombia is shifting strategy to intensify manual eradication on the ground to attack the leaves used to make cocaine that ends up on U.S. and European streets.

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A Joint Force Including U.S. Officials Is Working to Stem Cocaine Exports and Related Violence Along the Pacific Shore.

BUENAVENTURA, COLOMBIA -- At the sound of approaching patrol boats, the drug smugglers hurriedly fled their camp hidden among the mangroves, leaving behind a wealth of evidence.

The Colombian Coast Guard's raiding party arrived to find a still-warm makeshift stove, short-wave radios, satellite phones, enough AK-47 assault rifles to arm a platoon, and, buried under freshly turned mud, 8 tons of cocaine.

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Colombia Announced It Will Favor Manual Eradication of Coca Crops Over the Current System, Which Focuses Heavily on Aerial Spraying

BOGOTA -- In a major policy shift likely to get both praise and close examination in Washington, Colombia has announced it will favor manual eradication of coca crops over the current system that focuses heavily on aerial fumigation.

The iconic image of Colombia's largely U.S.-funded war on drugs may well be a single-engine airplane spraying bright green fields of coca bushes with chemical defoliants -- the country's key strategy since the 1980s.

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The Colombian Government Agreed to Provide an Alternative Base for Counter-Drug Efforts if the United States Loses Access to the Manta Airfield in Ecuador

The U.S. accord with Ecuador for use of the base in Manta expires in 2009. Ecuador's president has pledged not to renew the accord.

Colombia has offered the U.S. government an alternative base for counter-drug surveillance flights if Ecuador evicts it from its largest South American military outpost, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

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Government Bringing Social Programs to Long-Neglected Regions in Bid to Establish a State Presence

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia -- Marxist rebels once ran a visitors center in this town in southern Colombia, the office staffed by a young, amiable female guerrilla and the walls decorated with huge posters of famed fighters. Rebels ran a court, built bridges and taxed locals, including the farmers who grew coca in such abundance that the region became ground zero for the war on drugs.

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Uprooting Bushes by Hand Preferred Over U.S.-Funded Aerial Spraying

EL MIRADOR, Colombia -- The latest shift in Colombia's war on drugs is evident on a green hilltop in this town, as weather-beaten men in gray jumpsuits -- government-paid eradicators -- use hoes and muscle to rip out bushes of coca. Policemen carrying M-16 assault rifles and land-mine detectors stand sentry, while a radio operator listens in on the crackling conversation between two Marxist guerrilla units.

The operation here in the southern state of Caqueta is tedious, hard and dangerous, since destroying coca is a financial blow to the guerrillas, who draw much of their funding from the crop that is used to make cocaine. But Colombian officials say uprooting by hand is the future -- a strategy at odds with U.S. reliance on aerial fumigation.

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Critics And Farmers Say Old Approaches Aren't Working In Colombia.

TENCHE, Colombia -- Numar Tirado used to make money on the side growing coca bushes, the notorious plant whose leaves make cocaine.

But the dairy farmer stopped two years ago after a U.S.-financed aerial spraying campaign reached this remote corner of the Andean foothills, turning hillsides into withered gray-brown dead zones.

Tirado went back to legal, but less profitable, farming. He invested in some more cattle and planted new pasture.

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Despite widespread spraying of defoliants financed by the U.S., total acreage of coca cultivated in Colombia rose 19% in 2006 compared with 2005, according to an annual survey by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The report stresses that much of the gain may be attributed to an expansion of the area included in the survey, which is done by satellite, airplane and on the ground.

The White House said the increase was due partly to "rapid crop reconstitution," the use of smaller plots in more remote areas and farmers' increasing use of national parks, where aerial spraying is forbidden.

[end]

Uribe Administration, Seeking U.S. Trade Pact, Lobbies Hard to Overcome Scandal Allegations

WASHINGTON -- To win approval of a new trade pact, Colombia is putting together a richly financed lobbying campaign piloted by ex-Clinton White House officials, complete with advertisements, a rapid-response media team and regular visits by Colombian bigwigs to Congress. The necessity and breadth of such a campaign demonstrates just how far Colombia has fallen politically in Washington. For years, the Andean nation was considered a model ally that battled guerillas and narcotraffickers and embraced free-market policies, unlike Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who mocked President Bush and boasted of creating "21st-century socialism." But since Democrats took control of Congress this year, the focus has shifted to a deepening scandal in Colombia, where government officials have been accused of working with right-wing paramilitary leaders who have murdered hundreds of union members and other political foes.

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