Sometime around the spring of 1989, the ATF assistant director for law enforcement met informally with the assistant director for the DEA overseeing their Colombia operation. (I like to think it was in an Irish Pub somewhere in the greater D. C. area.) Colombia’s most powerful drug trafficking organization, the Medellin cartel had entered into a bloody terror campaign against the Colombian government and the government turned to the DEA for assistance with the firearms they recovered from the cartel gunmen.
Since the seventies, drugs trafficking had become a major part of Colombia’s economy. By the eighties, cocaine had topped marijuana as the principal commodity and the traffickers formed drug cartels, challenging the government’s authority. They employed gunmen known as ‘sicarios’ to carry out political assassinations, murder policemen, journalists, or anyone that stood in their way. They even employed a private army to protect their families and assets from kidnappers and communist guerrillas. In 1989, the president of Colombia declared war on the drug traffickers, arresting thousands, seizing assets, and threatening extradition to the United States. The traffickers, led by Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cartel retaliated with a deadly wave of violence.
The Colombian National Police (CNP) responded by going after Escobar’s infrastructure, hunting down their gunmen, raiding stash houses, destroying cocaine processing laboratories, and interdicting drug loads, recovering guns in the process. The director of the national police had gone on record that most of the firearms recovered from the cartel gunmen originated in the United States. As a matter of practice, the CNP invited the DEA to help analyze the items they seized from the traffickers including the firearms. The agents concurred that many of the weapons being used by Escobar’s sicarios appeared to have originated from the United States. After some discussion, the two assistant directors agreed that ATF should send a team to Colombia to assess the firearms situation.
I was working undercover in McAllen trying to buy an explosive device from a bomb maker when I got called and asked if I would be interested in traveling to Colombia to assess the weapons trafficking problem there. After concluding the deal, I traveled to headquarters for a briefing by the director of law enforcement. When he learned that I had taken part in a successful, albeit diplomatically-charged cross-border incident in hot pursuit of a 30-gun shipment from El Paso to Juarez, he commented that perhaps an assignment to Colombia suited me.
Around June of 1989, ATF Senior Special Agent Tony Vargas and myself went to Bogota to study the issue. At the time of our arrival, there were other U.S. agencies collecting firearms seizure data from the Colombian military and National Police. They graciously provided us with the information. Unfortunately, the lists were all but useless for conducting traces. It was obvious that the soldiers and policemen recording the data needed identification training, so Tony and I went to work.
Over the next year and a half, we gathered tracing data, conducted weapons identification training, and established working relationships with the Colombian National Police and the Administrative Department of Security (DAS – Colombia’s version of the FBI) as well as the other U.S. law enforcement agencies with a presence in Colombia.
The Colombian police and military allowed us into their armories to collect the tracing data ourselves. We found that many of the guns did originate from the United States, as the national police director asserted. However, we found old World War Two-era M-1 carbines the Colombian government received from the U.S. after the war. We also found numerous Smith and Wesson revolvers that Colombia’s firearms authority, Indústria Militár had legally imported into Colombia prior to falling into the hands of the Medellin sicarios. Although this accounted for a large part of the director’s assertion, it was abundantly clear that the cartel had significantly accessed the U.S. commercial firearms market in a significant manner to purchase semiautomatic rifles, pistols, and revolvers.
During our fact-finding mission, Medellin assassins gunned down three Colombian presidential candidates using American-made pistols (converted to fire like machine pistols) purchased in the United States. The cartel brought down Avianca flight 203 using a bomb. The cartel also used a massive truck bomb in an attempt to kill the director of the DAS that brought down part of the headquarters building, killing scores of personnel.
These events, the suspected reverse flow of U.S. commercial market firearms to the Medellin cartel through its drug contacts in the United States, the initiation of a terror bombing campaign by the cartel targeting innocent Colombians, and the need for identification training, firearms trafficking investigation expertise, and ATF’s explosives and firearms technological assistance culminated in a decision to open a country office at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Colombia. On December 2, 1990, I reported to the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá as ATF’s first country attaché.
I will continue relating my experiences in Colombia in my next post.