-Caveat Lector- http://www.herald.com/content/archive/news/lospepes2000/docs/04 0263.htm Published Friday, October 20, 2000, in the Miami Herald DEA implicated in deal with terrorists BY GERARDO REYES El Nuevo Herald In a desperate effort to trap Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar, the governments of the United States and Colombia allied themselves to a fearful criminal organization that was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Escobar's associates and friends in 1993, according to testimony and documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald. A former member of the organization -- known as Los Pepes, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar -- said the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration turned a blind eye to the group's activities. He also asserted that some of the group's members kept in direct contact with DEA agent Javier Peña, who worked in Medellín. Peña was the DEA's liaison with the National Police's Search Bloc, a unit whose sole mission was to track down Escobar. Today he is deputy director of the DEA's bureau in Colombia. Until his death in December 1993 at the age of 44, Escobar led Colombia's notorious Medellín Cartel. ``The Americans covered their eyes to keep from seeing what Los Pepes did, but they knew exactly what was happening,'' said the source, who asked to be identified only as ``Rubén.'' ``In the end, we had a common enemy,'' he said. United States law forbids government agencies to work hand-in- hand with illegal groups, much less if they are involved in the commission of violent crimes. Organized in February 1993, Los Pepes were funded by the Cali Cartel, paramilitary groups, a legion of relatives and friends of Escobar's victims -- even associates of Escobar who turned against their boss to save their own skins. ``The DEA has never compromised itself deliberately and does not condone the actions of paramilitary or terrorist organizations,'' said DEA spokesman Michael Chapman in a written statement from Washington. ``However, the gathering of information about the activities of drug- trafficking organizations such as Los Pepes is one of the DEA's key roles,'' he wrote. According to official documents and contemporary testimony, Los Pepes were responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people, among them Escobar's relatives, lawyers and lieutenants. ``Nobody has finished counting the dead, but I believe that they numbered -- on the average -- six a day, for almost one year,'' Rubén said. Los Pepes were under the command of brothers Fidel and Carlos Castaño Gil, founders of the paramilitary movement in Colombia. They declared war on Escobar in response to the persecution he unleashed on them and their friends from La Catedral prison. Escobar, who surrendered to the government in June 1991, had continued to direct the cartel's activities from La Catedral, a minimum-security institution in the city of Envigado. He escaped in July 1992, after the authorities announced they would transfer him to a more secure prison. Fidel died in a gunfight in September 1994. Carlos today is the leader of Colombia's paramilitary groups, which have been vigorously condemned by Washington because of the massacres committed during their private war against the leftist guerrillas. According to one of Escobar's lawyers, the Castaño brothers and other members of Los Pepes had unrestricted access to the Carlos Holguín School in Medellín, headquarters of the National Police's Search Bloc. ``It was as if they were members of the Search Bloc,'' the lawyer said. ``Right there, in the same bunker, slept Peña, the DEA agent.'' As a token of appreciation, the American Embassy gave a visa to ``Don Berna,'' one of the most active members of Los Pepes, to come to the United States in 1994 and watch the World Cup Soccer games being played in Los Angeles, Ruben said. Don Berna had worked as a bodyguard for Fernando Galeano, an Escobar associate who was kidnapped, tortured and killed in July 1992 on orders from Escobar. In its written statement to El Nuevo Herald, the DEA made no reference to the visa granted to Don Berna, who is accused of leading a band of mercenaries calling itself Las Terrazas (The Terraces), based in Medellín. The DEA's spokesman said that, from the mid-1980s to the mid- 1990s, agents of that agency and other U.S. government agencies ``worked proudly with the Colombian police to combat the powerful cartels.'' Col. Oscar Naranjo, who directed the Colombian police's intelligence services during the search for Escobar, said that ``a direct channel of communications existed between the police and Los Pepes'' and that the American antidrug agencies knew of its existence and took advantage of it. However, Naranjo denied being in complicity with Los Pepes. For almost all of 1993, none of the leaders of Los Pepes was arrested, even though the government offered a rich reward for information leading to their capture. At least on one occasion, the then Attorney General, Gustavo de Greiff, voiced puzzlement over the impunity with which the mercenaries operated. ``It seems to me something odd is going on,'' De Greiff said in October 1993. His office offered protection to Escobar's relatives. Before Los Pepes came onto the scene, the Cali Cartel worked with the intelligence services of the administrations of presidents Virgilio Barco (1986-1990) and César Gaviria (1990-1994) in the search for Escobar. Their collaboration was so close that the cartel would ask the president's brother, Jorge Barco, to deliver information to the intelligence services, according to prosecution documents obtained by El Nuevo Herald. In a sworn statement, the head of the Cali Cartel, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, identified the president's brother as an intermediary betwen the cartel and the government. In the statement, Rodríguez told how his organization would warn the authorities about Escobar's attempts on the lives of politicians, journalists and police officers. Escobar was killed by police while trying to escape over the rooftops in the Los Olivos neighborhood of Medellín, on Dec. 2, 1993. 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