JUSTICE : Colombian Officials Play Blame Game Over Drug Kingpin’s Escape From Jail

BOGOTA, Colombia — More than a month after cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar escaped from a luxurious jail where he spent a year rebuilding his drug trafficking organization, Colombian officials still are playing a bitter blame game over the fiasco.

Senior officials close to President Cesar Gaviria claim that their subordinates failed to inform them that Escobar was taking over his prison outside Medellin. But Gaviria’s critics assert that the president and his men knew all about conditions at the jail and bear responsibility.

Gaviria continues to enjoy the Bush Administration’s support. Rather than harp on the Colombians’ mistakes, the Administration has used the Escobar hunt to significantly increase the presence of American law enforcement personnel here.

U.S. officials decline to discuss the search for Escobar. They will only say they are here at the Colombians’ request and are not directly involved in military operations.

Colombian officials, however, say at least 100 U.S. special agents are helping, mainly with aerial surveillance, and that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration has increased the number of its agents in Colombia from about 20 before the July 22 escape to 70 now.

“The level of U.S. cooperation is 400% greater than what we had before (Escobar’s escape),” a senior Colombian official said. “The circumstances have made the U.S. presence peak in a way. It’s not very different from what happened when the last Administration intensified its campaign against traffickers.”

He referred to former President Virgilio Barco Vargas’ 1989 crackdown on the Medellin cartel after the criminals allegedly ordered Sen. Luis Carlos Galan, a leading presidential candidate, assassinated in August, 1989. The Bush Administration then poured in $65 million in emergency anti-narcotics aid. Colombian police and military received $84 million in U.S. aid in 1990, up from the $10 million or so allocated just two years before.

But Gaviria’s critics say that, despite the increasing U.S. involvement now, it is ludicrous to compare the current efforts to capture Escobar to Barco’s fight. They maintain that Gaviria is just trying to weather a scandal far worse than any faced by his predecessor.

Shortly after taking office in August, 1990, Gaviria made concessions to cartel leaders, offering them leniency in exchange for their surrender. The president’s popularity soared after Escobar and other suspected traffickers surrendered under the plan.

Escobar spent more than a year in a special jail before authorities, suspecting he was ordering killings from the facility, sought to transfer him. Though surrounded by 400 soldiers, he escaped into the night with nine other criminals. Within days, Gaviria fired several officials in charge of jail security and military officers who bungled the prison transfer. A judge this week indicted 15 jail guards.

Gaviria’s advisers insist that they did not approve Escobar’s deluxe jail accommodations, which included a Jacuzzi, water beds, cellular telephones and other electronic equipment. They insist that they are blameless in the escape, which they say Escobar engineered by bribing lower-level officials. “We are talking about a major case of corruption at the level of penitentiary oversight,” one Colombian official said.

But some officials now facing criminal charges in the case have criticized Gaviria in recent testimony before Congress. They make the case that the president’s closest advisers knew Escobar controlled the jail for months but did not act. Army Gen. Gustavo Pardo, who was fired for allowing Escobar to escape through his troops’ lines, produced memos showing that as early as last year, he had alerted his superiors in Bogota to jail problems.

Enrique Parejo, a former justice minister and one of Gaviria’s staunchest critics, observed: “We don’t need any more investigations into all of this. It’s clear that, above all, the president was responsible, because it was he who gave the cartel concessions that led necessarily to Escobar’s control of the jail and subsequent escape.”