After my recent visits to Barranquilla, I can see why. As the country’s premier distribution channel on its Caribbean shore, this oppressively noisy and humid city of 1.2 million ranks as one of the major exit points for Colombia’s multibillion-dollar cocaine and heroin exports.
Almost no one is completely safe on the streets here. Not the city’s leading drug lords, at least a dozen of whom have been gunned down over bad debts and turf battles in the past two years. Certainly not the outmanned, undergunned Colombian lawmen who fight a losing battle every day to bring the city’s top kingpins to book. And as NEWSWEEK has learned, not even agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) who work out of the American consulate in Barranquilla can take their physical safety for granted.
It was on the evening of Feb. 18, 2000, that the DEA office in Barranquilla heard that a ruthless right-wing paramilitary chieftain named Hernan Giraldo had put out a $500,000 contract on the U.S. special agents assigned to investigate the top drug lords of northern Colombia. The son of humble mixed-blood peasants, Giraldo had first made a name for himself in the 1970s as an organizer of so-called self-defense groups in the Andean highlands of central Colombia. These armed vigilantes were paid by cattlemen, wealthy merchants and even drug traffickers of that era to fend off kidnapping attempts by left-wing guerrillas who operated in the mountainous states-known here as departments-of Caldas and Quindio.
In the mid-1980s, Giraldo moved to Colombia’s eastern Atlantic-coast region. When he wasn’t purging the countryside outside the colonial-era city of Santa Marta of guerrillas and their peasant sympathizers, he was quietly building up a major drug-trafficking syndicate.
Giraldo officially became a fugitive from Colombian justice in 1994 after he was tried and convicted in absentia for the 1988 massacres of 20 unionized banana plantation workers in the northwestern part of the country. Sentenced to 20 years in prison, he managed to avoid arrest with the timely help of corrupt army and police officers stationed in his domain in northeastern Colombia. Despite a six-year-old warrant for his arrest, Giraldo continued to ship narcotics and eliminate political enemies with complete impunity from his stronghold in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountain range 70 miles east of Barranquilla.
This cozy state of affairs might have lasted indefinitely had it not been for the pesky probing of DEA personnel into Giraldo’s sources of income. By the winter of last year, say Colombian intelligence sources, the warlord became convinced that DEA personnel based in Barranquilla were working with U.S. government prosecutors to assemble a case that could eventually threaten him with extradition to face trial on drug-trafficking charges in a federal district courtroom.
That prospect has always loomed as the ultimate nightmare scenario for successive generations of Colombian drug lords who know they can’t bribe themselves out of an American prison cell with the same ease that they can escape Colombian penitentiaries. Like the late Medellin cartel chief Pablo Escobar and a host of other big-time drug-smuggling predecessors, Giraldo wanted to avoid such a situation.
Giraldo’s proposed solution to his quandary was typically violent and reckless: blow away an American narc or two and hope that Washington would take the hint. But even by the sanguine standards of Giraldo’s partners in crime, the mooted assassination of a DEA field agent sounded like madness. One who felt that way was Adan Rojas, a boyhood friend and longtime lieutenant of the 52-year-old Giraldo.
Rojas, who had accompanied the paramilitary leader on his move from Colombia’s central highlands to the rural backroads of the Magdalena department in 1986, tried to talk his boss out of the idea. His reasoning: that a dead DEA agent would unleash a firestorm in Washington and finally force the government of Colombian President Andres Pastrana to track down and jail Giraldo.
Giraldo, however, was in no mood to brook dissension within the ranks of his private army. According to Colombian intelligence sources and knowledgeable U.S. officials, Giraldo set up an ambush for Rojas and his son Rigoberto at one of the kingpin’s many farms in the environs of Santa Marta. The resulting skirmish between Giraldo’s gunmen and his formerly trustworthy sidekick occurred in mid-February of last year, around the same time that the DEA office in Barranquilla first heard about Giraldo’s half-million-dollar bounty for one of its drug warriors. Adan and Rigoberto Rojas narrowly escaped with their lives, but the father was captured on Feb. 23 when he went to seek treatment for his gunshot wounds at a prominent Barranquilla medical clinic. The younger Rojas was picked up five days later.
As the intended objects of the assassination plot, the DEA agents acted quickly against the threat. Support staff members were immediately flown out of Colombia, and their office was manned around the clock by special agents until the arrest of Adan Rojas. In time, life returned to normal-or what passes for normal for the DEA operation in Barranquilla-and nothing more was ever heard about Giraldo’s six-figure contract.
All this gave me ample food for thought as I left the two agents in their SUV late that Sunday evening. I retreated to the air-conditioned privacy of my room at the Hotel El Prado, a five-star hostelry housed in a neocolonial four-story edifice replete with Spanish red tile roofing and an Olympic-size swimming pool. Here, I thought, I could put the subject of drug traffickers on hold and read myself to sleep.
But in this city, even elegant hotels are not immune to the fallout from drug trafficking. I shouldn’t have been surprised-but I was-when a hotel taxi driver told me the next morning about how the Hotel El Prado was once the property of Julio David Nasser, a notorious money launderer arrested by Colombian police in the mid-1990s. An estimated $200 million in assets, bank accounts and real estate belonging to Nasser and his immediate family were impounded by authorities in the United States, Colombia and several other countries.
One of the more prestigious acquisitions that Nasser forfeited to the Colombian state was the 73-year-old El Prado Hotel. (The last major trafficker to die on the streets of Barranquilla was Julio David’s brother Tito, shot to death April 3 of this year.) The hotel’s checkered history furnished yet another reminder of just how ubiquitous the drug trade has become in South American hellholes like Barranquilla. For my part, it was a sign. Next time I visit Colombia’s fourth-largest city, I’ll check into another hotel.
