BC-Drug Lord Captured,0437

Police say top Colombian cocaine kingpin captured in Cuba

By KIM HOUSEGO

Associated Press Writer

BOGOTA, Colombia (AP) – Luis Hernando Bustamante, a leader of Colombia’s largest drug cartel that is suspected of smuggling more than $10 billion worth of cocaine into the United States, has been captured in Cuba, Colombia’s police chief said Friday.

The Cuban government informed Colombian authorities that Bustamante, better known by his alias “Rasguno,” was detained July 2 after entering Cuba on a false Venezuelan passport, Gen. Jorge Daniel Castro told reporters.

“At this moment he is being held by the attorney general in Cuba and we are involved in discussions to bring him back to Colombia,” the police chief said. “He is one of the biggest Colombian narco-traffickers.”

There was no immediate confirmation from Cuba’s communist government, which has not reported on the arrest in its official media.

Bustamante is among the top leaders of the Norte del Valle cartel, which supplanted the Medellin and Cali drug organizations in the early 1990s and is the source of as much as 60 percent of the U.S. cocaine supply, according to the Drug Enforcement Administration.

U.S. officials have offered a $5 million reward for information leading to Bustamante’s capture. Colombian authorities, meanwhile, estimate that Bustamante is personally responsible for as much as half of the cocaine shipped from Colombia to the United States.

A U.S. grand jury indictment unsealed in Washington in May alleges that Norte del Valle cartel leaders sent more than 1 million pounds of cocaine from Colombia’s Pacific coast to the United States through Mexico since 1990. Acting in concert with a violent right-wing paramilitary organization called the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, or AUC, the DEA says the cartel is responsible for at least 500 killings in Colombia.

The cartel used bribery, kidnapping and murder in their operation and even had their own wiretaps in Colombia to monitor conversations of rival drug traffickers, the indictment said. The cartel has used trucks, aircraft, speedboats and fishing boats to smuggle cocaine.

The cartel’s founding leader, Diego Leon Montoya, appears on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Montoya, however, is locked in a bitter turf war in the southwestern city of Cali against a rival drug gang led by Wilber Varela, leaving some 230 dead in the past six months alone.

Colombian authorities, however, said Bustamante has largely stayed out of that fight.

AP-ES-07-09-04 1512EDT