By Constanza Vieira
BOGOTA, May 19 2005 (IPS)

Judicial authorities in Colombia decided Wednesday not to release on bail former justice minister Alberto Santofimio, who is accused of "inciting" the 1989 murder of his fellow Liberal Party member, Luis Carlos Galán, the front-runner for the 1990 presidential elections.

Santofimio, who was arrested May 12, is suspected of suggesting to Pablo Escobar, the late head of the powerful Medellín drug cartel, that he assassinate Galán.

"Pablo, kill him. If he becomes president, he will extradite you," Santofimio told Escobar, according to one of the drug kingpin’s former hitmen and personal secretaries, John Jairo Velásquez, alias "Popeye", who has been serving a 20-year sentence since 1991 for murdering Galán.

Last Friday, Santofimio declared that he was innocent of all charges.

The former minister, senator, president of the lower house of Congress and member of the Liberal Party leadership already spent four years in prison starting in December 1995 for accepting bribes from the Cali cartel, in a campaign financing scandal that also smeared former president Ernesto Samper (1994-1998).

Galán was shot and killed on Aug. 18, 1989 in a public square in Soacha, a district on the south side of Bogotá, in the middle of a campaign rally.

One of the steps the charismatic candidate had promised to take if he was elected was to allow the extradition of drug traffickers wanted in the United States.

At the time, the country was being shaken by a wave of bombings and murders, part of a terror campaign against a Colombian-U.S. extradition treaty waged by the drug lords, who had formed the group "The Extraditables", under the slogan "We prefer a tomb in Colombia to a prison in the United States".

After Galán’s assassination, then president Virgilio Barco (1986-1990) used state of siege powers to legislate by decree the extradition of drug kingpins and the seizure of their assets.

The extradition treaty with the United States remains a heated political issue in this civil war-torn South American country.

The possible extradition on drug trafficking charges of several leaders of the right-wing paramilitary umbrella, the United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC), is hanging like a sword of Damocles over the negotiations that are taking place behind closed doors between the government of Alvaro Uribe and the paramilitaries.

As a result of the talks, members of the AUC have begun to lay down their arms.

On Tuesday, the Senate voted 58 to 18 in favour of reinserting, in a bill that is crawling its way through Congress, a clause that would in practice bar the extradition of paramilitaries. The bill in question will create a legal framework for the demobilisation process.

The Senate decision will now be reviewed by parliamentary commissions, which had rejected the clause on Apr. 11.

Sixteen years after Galán’s murder, Popeye told prosecutors on May 5 that he had decided to talk about Santofimio’s involvement because he was repentant, and because his main enemies are dead or in prison in the United States, like brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, former heads of the Cali cartel, who were extradited.

He also said he was speaking out because his wife and daughter are safe, having been granted political asylum in the United States.

Popeye formed part of the Cali cartel’s rival, Escobar’s Medellín cartel.

The two drug cartels, which set up death squads in 1982 that served as the seed for paramilitary groups, were involved in a bloody war over the lucrative U.S. market for cocaine.

The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, along with a splinter group of the Medellín cartel that later joined the AUC, collaborated with Colombian and U.S. authorities in the search for Escobar, who was killed in December 1993.

In 1979, Galán founded a dissident wing of the Liberal Party, the New Liberalism movement, which advocated a stronger moral stance in politics. In 1982, he blocked an attempt by Escobar to run as a New Liberalism candidate in the parliamentary elections.

But Santofimio guaranteed Escobar political backing from the main faction of the Liberal Party, and the drug lord was elected to the lower house of Congress as an alternate.

However, he was expelled from the legislature as the result of a debate sponsored by the New Liberalism lawmakers.

Between 1989 and 1990, 90 percent of the political murders committed in Colombia were perpetrated by paramilitaries or drug traffickers, according to Senator Rafael Pardo, the presidential peace adviser during that time.

Pardo, who withdrew his support for Uribe’s reelection campaign last week, said the paramilitary militias grew by leaps and bounds in the early 1980s, mainly due to the influence of the drug trade.

The AUC, blamed by United Nations agencies for 80 percent of the worst atrocities committed in Colombia’s armed conflict, admitted in 2002 that 70 percent of its income came from drugs.

One of the AUC chiefs is Diego Murillo. Known as ‘Don Berna’ in the world of drug trafficking, he was Escobar’s successor in Medellín.

His alias in AUC, where he holds the position of "inspector", is ‘Adolfo Paz’, the name he is using to take part in the current negotiations with the right-wing Uribe administration.

According to a Medellín paramilitary chief who is now dead, Paz negotiated the demobilisation of a group of around 900 "sicarios" or hitmen in that city.

Paz had previously organised the sicarios as the Cacique Nutibara Bloc, in order to join the AUC, when it began to look like the paramilitary umbrella and the government would begin to negotiate disarmament.

Other alleged drug traffickers are also reportedly using the AUC to avoid extradition by posing as paramilitary leaders and taking part in the negotiations.

In its Aug. 9, 2004 edition, the U.S. magazine Newsweek published an article that cited a September 1991 U.S. Department of Defence report that was declassified in 2002, which described Uribe as "a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to collaboration with the Medellín cartel at high government levels."

"Uribe has worked for the Medellín cartel and is a close personal friend of Pablo Escobar", the article added.

Uribe, who enjoys an unusually high popularity rating of 69 percent after three years in office, vehemently denies any such links.

Uribe has extradited more than 140 drug traffickers and two guerrillas who were facing drug charges.

Galán was not the only presidential candidate assassinated in Colombia in recent decades. Jaime Pardo Leal, the leftist Patriotic Union candidate, was killed in October 1987, and another candidate from that party, Bernardo Jaramillo, was shot down in March 1990.

A month later, Carlos Pizarro, the presidential candidate of the 19 de Abril Movement, a former urban guerrilla group that had signed a peace accord with the government, was murdered.

On Nov. 27, 1989, during the campaign for the 1990 elections, César Gaviria, who replaced Galán as the Liberal Party candidate and went on to become president from 1990 to 1994, was warned by his security chief not to board an Avianca airliner. The plane exploded in mid-flight, and all 107 people aboard were killed.

According to Popeye, after Galán’s assassination, Santofimio and Escobar spent days discussing what Gaviria’s candidacy would mean for them.

The airplane bomb was meant for Gaviria, said the convict.

Popeye also said Santofimio was involved in the 1984 murder of then justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, of the New Liberalism movement.

"I don’t recognise enemies within the Liberal Party…the only enemies are those who use terror and violence to silence or intimidate the Colombian people, or to kill its leaders," Galán said in a speech one month before he was murdered.

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