9 ~,~i - National Criminal Justice Reference Service

340 R. Filippone
The most infamous assassinations are well known, such as the 1984 murder
of Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the 1986 murder of Colonel Jaime
Ramirez Gomez, a former head of Colombia's Anti-Narcotics Police, and the
assassination of Guillermo Cano, editor and owner of the Bogota daily El Espectador,
later that same year. These were all political statements that sought to prevent
implementation of the 1979 extradition treaty with the United States. The cartel
would pay more than $1 million for each of these hits, and there were many
others too numerous to mention [66].
The assassinations were not confined to Colombia. The cartel had put out a
$1 million contract on Manuel Noriega that required the intervention of Fidel
Castro to have withdrawn. In 1988 Gacha hired three hit men to kill New York
mayor Ed Koch and the DEA chief there, Robert Stutman [67]. In 1987 the cartel
carded out an assassination attempt on a former Minister of Justice in Budapest,
Hungary, demonstrating that their power knows no bounds.
In some cases assassination squads were not sufficient, so the cartel also
built and financed private armies to carry out paramilitary operations of greater
magnitude. These groups were well trained and supplied, otten with the most
advanced weapons and equipment. They operated under the direct control of the
cartel bosses in missions that ranged from lab security to military attacks against
left-wing groups.
The first group of this type was Muerte a Los Secuestradores (MAS), or
Death to the Kidnappers. They raised a 2,000-man army that destroyed the M- 19.
They killed brutally, disembowelling and hanging the bodies from trees in order
to discourage the population from cooperating with the M-19 [68].
In 1985 the paramilitary group was organized under the cover of a cattlemen's
association named ACDEGAM. This group was trained in two camps
Gacha had set up on large ranches in the Middle Magdalena Valley, one in
Puerto Boyaca called "Escuela Almagher Cincuenta," and the other in Putamayo,
named "Rescate" [69]. Advanced courses were set up by 1988 that employed
British and Israeli mercenaries, as well as retired Colombian military and police
instructors. They ran these schools like boot camps, training 150 men each year
in combat patrol techniques, martial arts, weapons, intelligence, C-4 explosives
and other subversive activities [70].
The Israeli trainers were led by Yair Klein, a former IDF colonel. This may
account for the fact that the paramilitary group was able to get shipments of
Israeli-made weapons. These included rockets, explosives, night vision goggles,
and hundreds of Uzis and Galii assault rifles [71]. The cartel always has been
able to procure advanced weapons, including surface-to-air missiles. In 1988 it
planned to build a munitions factory, and it has weapons shops to fabricate special
weapons. The cartel possesses capabilities at least equal to the state, according
to Diego Viafra: "The combatants, the patrol people who work for the paramilitary
narco organization, are more disciplined than any Army soldier in Colombia
and they are smarter and they have more competent indoctrination than
any Colombian soldier" [72].
The intelligence capabilities of the cartels rival those of most countries. The
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