Reputed Cocaine Boss Arrested in Colombia

BOGOTA, Colombia, Sept. 10 -- A reputed cocaine kingpin who is on the FBI's Most Wanted list was captured Monday in an army operation that government officials hailed as a major blow against drug trafficking in this Andean country.

A special forces unit, working with federal prosecutors, arrested Diego Montoya at a farm in the Norte del Valle, a region of mountains and hamlets that is home to the drug cartel of the same name. Montoya, who American officials say has trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States and Europe, will be extradited to Miami, according to Colombian and U.S. officials.

"It's a big blow," Vice President Francisco Santos told reporters. "It's a blow that demonstrates the commitment of our armed forces in the fight against narco-trafficking."

Montoya's reach was long, Colombian officials said, and his organization has had a penchant for gratuitous violence.

For years, the Norte del Valle cartel used death squads operated by right-wing paramilitary groups to protect cocaine shipments and liquidate opponents. Officials said Montoya was responsible for 1,500 killings. His cartel also used its vast resources to infiltrate the highest reaches of the army and navy, buying classified information and hiring high-ranking army officers to help traffickers elude capture. Last year, the cartel obtained information about the positioning of U.S. and British warships in the Caribbean.

But in recent weeks, the Defense Ministry purged the armed forces, particularly the army, of high-ranking officers charged with having worked closely with Montoya's group. "That was fundamental to this capture, because we took out all of the people who were informing him of the operations," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said in an interview.

U.S. officials had been building cases against Montoya for nearly a decade, with federal courts indicting him in Miami in 1999 and in Washington in 2004.

"He's been a very difficult target for us," Hank Twehues, an FBI agent who has been tracking Montoya, said by phone from Miami. "This is what I've worked on full time since 1999."

The capture of Montoya, Twehues said, comes after other operations that led to the arrests of his brothers. One, Juan Carlos Montoya, has been convicted on drug-related charges in Miami, and the other, Eugenio Montoya, was arrested in January and is awaiting extradition to the United States. A former cartel leader, Luis Hernando Gomez Bustamante, was extradited to the United States in July, and Brazilian authorities arrested another top leader, Juan Carlos Ram?rez Abad?a, known as "Lollipop," last month.

Twehues said the cartel is now "on the verge of extinction," but not just as a result of the arrests. "A great deal of the damage has been caused by the cartel itself, its own infighting," he said, referring to a bloody war between Montoya and another trafficker, Wilber Varela, who remains at large.

Monday's operation began with a large-scale attack in an isolated canyon used to traffic cocaine, a move designed to distract Montoya and his guards, officials said. Then, a 12-man team swooped down on a farm in the town of Zarzal. Soldiers discovered Montoya's wallet in a farm house and followed footprints into a nearby gully. They found him in his underwear and a T-shirt, hiding under a bed of leaves.

Adam Isacson, a Washington analyst with the Center for International Policy who tracks Colombia's drug war and military, said that the arrest would amount to a "pretty big disruption" in the way Colombia's cocaine trade is structured. In the Colombian underworld, the elimination of Montoya ranks with the 1995 arrests of brothers Gilberto and Manuel Rodr?guez Orejuela from Cali and the 1993 rooftop killing in Medellin of Pablo Escobar, the most flamboyant of the cocaine kingpins.

"Everything that Diego Montoya controlled will be up for grabs -- all of the routes, all of the labs, all of the people in his pay who are now free agents," Isacson said. "We're seeing an older generation of traffickers leaving the stage but we don't know who's going to replace them. That usually means violence."

Military officials here say there is no shortage of traffickers eager to take over Montoya's operations, including Varela. "There were no lieutenants who had much power; he had the power," said Santos, the defense minister. "We think there'll be a fight among many to fill that vacuum."

Still, the arrest of Montoya was celebrated here and in the United States, which has spent billions backing President ?lvaro Uribe's government in its battle against traffickers.

"There's a tendency to think that these major traffickers can buy or intimidate their way out of anything," John P. Walters, White House drug policy chief, said in a statement. "Not so. Colombia's capture of cocaine kingpin Diego Montoya shows what can be accomplished by a government that is relentless."

Staff writer Dan Eggen in Washington contributed to this report.