Sweet, Sweet Surrender

By DAVID VAN BIEMA

The don served flan. Luncheon had been arranged with a caution befitting one of the world's richest fugitives. Nine weeks ago, TIME's reporter in Bogota, Tom Quinn, received a call from a go-between: "The Cali guys have an announcement to make. Do you want to talk to them?" A week later, after an introductory phone chat and a roundabout journey to the rendezvous, Quinn found himself dining in a modest apartment in downtown Cali, a tidy industrial city in the Cauca Valley currently under occupation by 4,000 Colombian antidrug commandos and a CIA anti-crime task force. His genial host was the chief quarry of all those G-men: Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, supposedly one of the world's leading cocaine traffickers.

Rodriguez Orejuela is a soft-spoken 56-year-old who complains of migraines and an expanding waistline. Since the bloody demise of Pablo Escobar of the competing Medellin cartel last year, Gilberto, in partnership with his brother Miguel and other members of the Cali cartel, has achieved a virtual monopoly on the world cocaine trade. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that along with smaller groups, Rodriguez exports 700 tons of the drug annually. Thus he is a major contributor to America's drug plague and its attendant tragedies: the crack babies, the drive-by deaths, the myriad other lives left in ruins. Now, as he offered Quinn sirloin tips, fried shrimp and flan, he explained how he wanted to give all that up.

"My brother and I intend to surrender to the Colombian justice system and ) face trial," he said. "We have a plan that we think will significantly reduce narcotics trafficking out of Colombia." He was doing it for his family, he said: his seven children, all professionals or legitimate businessmen, wanted him to lead a normal life.

But, said Rodriguez, there were qualifications to any deal. "My brother and I want to surrender to justice, but by no means to injustice." They would submit only to a set of Colombian laws passed last year offering extreme leniency to drug kingpins who give up. They expected protection under a 1988 Colombian Supreme Court ruling making extradition unconstitutional, especially to the U.S. where Gilberto faces charges of drug dealing and threatening a DEA employee with death. To assure such immunity, Gilberto, whose nickname is "the Chess Player," insisted that any deal "would have to be endorsed by the U.S."

In return, he said, he could guarantee that a "large percentage" of Colombian drug dealers would be willing to surrender too. "They'd get out of the business and stay out, and dismantle their infrastructure, their labs and their routes," he promised, all "without tricks, without ratting on each other and without violence." The net effect, he estimated, would be a 60% reduction in the drug supply to the U.S. alone.

Some time later, a man appeared at Rodriguez's side with a briefcase. Inside were copies of the Colombian penal code and a letter detailing his surrender proposal, which he suggested Quinn read over.

For nearly a year, the Rodriguez brothers have been trying to cut a deal with the Colombian government in exchange for slap-on-the-wrist punishment. For just as long, impatient drug fighters in Washington have been pressing Bogota to make the narcobosses pay a stiff penalty for their crimes. When Ernesto Samper Pizano was elected President nearly five months ago, the Clinton Administration thought it had assurances that the Rodriguez brothers would not get the deal they wanted.

This week, two months after Quinn's luncheon interview, the Colombian government appears to be willing to reopen discussions of surrender. In a written statement to TIME, Samper said he had concluded that merely chasing after traffickers was not effective. "It is no good to have the cartel bosses in jail if they continue narcotrafficking," he wrote. "We know from experience that it is more important to dismantle the cartels than to incarcerate their leaders. Jailing them is necessary, but it is just not enough." An aide amplified that "the door is open on the surrender program again. It is verifiable, manageable ((and)) politically salable."

Such generalized responses immediately raised questions of exactly how onerous such a surrender might be. The drug lords were optimistic. Samper's statement, said a spokesman for Rodriguez, "is the answer we've been waiting for." U.S. officials, however, preferred to think otherwise. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gelbard said that Bogota had previously "told us their strong preference is to capture them rather than to go for the kind of surrender program the previous government was so enthusiastic about." If a deal was struck, he said, U.S. ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette "doesn't believe they will be lenient with them."

Such debates have their roots in the tenure of the previous Colombian President, Cesar Gaviria Trujillo. His credentials as a drug fighter are undisputed: he ordered the bloody and ultimately successful 17-month campaign against the Medellin cartel. Yet few would deny the vast, perhaps controlling influence of surviving drug lords. While the Medellin cowboys attempted reign by Uzi, shooting four presidential candidates in 1989, the Rodriguezes and fellow members of their cartel are known as the gentle dons. They rely on the quiet clout that a profit estimated by DEA at $7 billion a year can buy. The money saturates the Colombian economy: the narcobosses are thought to own 30% of the country's best farmland and a substantial share of the Colombian stock market.

Some U.S. analysts claim they have purchased at least as big a chunk of the government. Recently retired Bogota DEA chief Joe Toft says narcodollars have influenced "from 50% to 75% of the Colombian Congress." The traffickers have also bought an unknown number of prosecutors, policemen and soldiers. But "their most significant victory," claims a U.S. diplomat, was the surrender program for retiring dons. "The Cali cartel dictated the penal-code reform," he says. Under the 1993 code revisions, drug traffickers who turn themselves in can have their sentences reduced by as much as two-thirds at the discretion of a judge or prosecutor. Any pending charges to which they do not plead are dismissed and cannot be revisited.

The statutes lead to ridiculous abuse: one confessed murderer and drug trafficker persuaded a judge to reduce his sentence from 17 years to 17 months on grounds that he was giving up two alleged accomplices, a yacht and an apartment complex. The Justice Ministry finally quashed the deal when it turned out that the accomplices were dead and the defendant no longer owned either the boat or the apartments. The Rodriguez brothers almost beat the system last March with almost the same terms Gilberto put to Quinn -- in exchange for jail terms of only three to four years. The deal was about to go through until U.S. observers proclaimed loudly that it represented the Colombian authorities' capitulation to the Rodriguezes, not the reverse. Gaviria stepped in and killed it.

Then last summer the Colombian presidential election took a disturbing turn. The day after Samper's election, tape recordings surfaced in which the Rodriguez brothers appeared to be discussing a $3.6 million contribution to his campaign. Audits of Samper's books showed no irregularities, but some officials of the U.S. drug-fighting establishment called the election "a travesty," and many still remain unconvinced that his campaign did not take the money. To force the new President to pursue a tough antidrug agenda, State Department officials suggested that Colombia had become a "narcodemocracy." Said a senior policymaker: "We're trying to put them on the defensive so they will produce results."

The Colombians got the message. The country's Supreme Court refused to grant a delay of mandatory retirement to Prosecutor General Gustavo de Greiff, who had publicly concluded that his nation could not afford another pitched battle with the narcos and was ready to strike a bargain with the Rodriguez brothers. The President swore to increase sentences for convicted drug dealers, to work to reverse a Supreme Court decision decriminalizing possession of "personal doses" of narcotics, and to introduce new laws to combat money laundering. Most important, he pledged to stiffen the terms of the surrender program.

Yet if Colombian authorities were to accept the details of the offer Rodriguez displayed to Quinn, the drug lords would walk away with little jail time and their fortunes intact. The policymakers, who since the debacle of the tape recording have been talking tough about hunting down drug criminals, say they have made no such acceptance. What they do claim to be doing is reopening negotiations on the grounds that some of the Rodriguez offer shows promise as a means of dismantling much of the country's drug operation. To pursue only the American-backed hard line, says a senior Colombian official, would only "get us into another war with the narcos and leave us holding the bag." Washington, he complains, "only wants to punish narcotrafficking, not eradicate it." In any case, says one of the Samper aides who has seen the Rodriguez proposal, "we have not consulted with the U.S. embassy. They shouldn't be surprised, and if they are, they'll change their minds when they see the results."

Not necessarily. Washington's policy is watch, wait and hope for the best. If the best does not appear, however, it will not sit idle. Says a policymaker: "We don't oppose negotiated surrenders, but we feel very strongly they have to be done in a very serious way. And that's the only way we would continue to support the Colombian government." By "serious," he explained, he meant involving "significantly greater time to be served in prison." He also stressed the need for "full and serious and credible confession and full asset seizure." DEA chief Thomas Constantine, meanwhile, is extremely dubious of the Rodriguezes' ability and inclination to make good on their part of the proposed bargain. It is, he says, "like somebody from Hamas saying, 'If you'll forgive me for blowing up this bus in Israel, I'll reduce terrorism 59% next year.' ((That)) doesn't sound like a very realistic offer." If Colombia gives away the store to the villains without first consulting the U.S., notes a high-ranking government official pointedly, "we're a sovereign country too. And we can make our decisions without consulting them, too."

Even if the Rodriguezes actually have decided to walk away from a multibillion-dollar empire that stretches around the globe from Los Angeles to Vladivostok, many U.S. officials doubt they can persuade others to do the same. The Medellin group, some observers believe, was replaced by more than a hundred minicartels, some of whom show fealty to no one. Complains Rodriguez, perhaps disingenuously: "Nobody controls these kids. They have more power and money than they can handle." An Interpol agent based in Bogota reckons that any Rodriguez-inspired shutdown of the drug pipeline "would last a maximum of a year before other dealers filled in for the ones who leave the business." He wonders whether the surrender offer is not just a cynical attempt to jack up sagging U.S. cocaine prices by creating a temporary shortage.

The next step is for the Rodriguezes' offer to be taken up by the office of Colombian Prosecutor General Alfonso Valdivieso, an aggressive cartel opponent about whom U.S. drug authorities are very enthusiastic. It is possible that his office will be able to defuse the potentially explosive deal in a way that will make both his President and the Washington watchers happy. If this turns out not to be the case, and relations between the two countries worsen because of it, then Gilberto Rodriguez will have achieved a victory of sorts -- long before walking into a police station with his hands up.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: International Narcotics Control Strategy Report

CAPTION: COCAINE PRODUCTION

With reporting by Tom Quinn/Bogota and Elaine Shannon/Washington