Drugs, Politics and Family Ties Figure in Colombia Extradition Case
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
Published: Thursday, April 13, 2000
On March 6, 1992, Victor Manuel Tafur-Dominguez heard gunfire outside his home in Cali, Colombia, and dashed out in time to see his father, a former senator who had helped draft a treaty allowing for the extradition of drug dealers, slump mortally wounded to the pavement by his car. During the ambulance ride to the hospital, the young man later told friends and family members, he felt his father's final shivers.
Now, eight years later, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, a student at Pace University Law School here, is accused of financing a multimillion-dollar shipment of cocaine seized at a Colombian port. The Drug Enforcement Administration, which arrested him on March 4, said he would be the first Colombian extradited home under the treaty that his father, Donald Rodrigo Tafur, helped write and, people in Colombia believe, died for.
Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, 36, and his family say that the charges stem from a legal financial transaction that went awry. His extradition hearing is scheduled for Thursday before Magistrate Judge Charles B. Smith. Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's lawyers in Colombia have appealed to prosecutors there to drop the charges, so far to no avail.
''This is a serious investigation,'' Alfonso Gomez Mendez, Colombia's chief prosecutor, told the Colombian magazine Semana last month. ''We worked for several months on the case, and when the decision was made to implicate him, we had solid evidence.''
The case has attracted strong interest, not just from his family, but from his supporters at Pace, where Mr. Tafur-Dominguez had studied environmental law since August. Professors and students have rallied to his defense, saying the evidence is flimsy and must have been planted by drug traffickers. They have filed a supporting brief calling his detention illegal.
Friends and relatives pointed out that Mr. Tafur-Dominguez had fought the drug trade as assistant director of a Colombian government program, Plante. The program encourages farmers to grow crops other than coca, which is processed into cocaine. He suffered for it too, they say, nearly dying in a plane crash in a storm in the Andes in March 1999.
''I have never been a fugitive,'' said Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, whose visitors at a Philadelphia jail are restricted to family and his lawyer. He responded to written questions by The New York Times that were submitted through a relative. ''Second, the drug trafficking charges are a legal error that will soon be explained in the extradition hearing before a U.S. magistrate.''
The United States and Colombia, the main source of cocaine and heroin entering this country, signed the extradition treaty in 1979, and it was ratified in 1982. Colombia halted extraditions in 1991, during a wave of violence by drug traffickers, but allowed them to resume in 1997.
In November, for the first time since extraditions were permitted again, two Colombians were sent to Miami to stand trial on drug charges. But no one has ever been extradited to Colombia under the treaty, said Mary Vaira, a drug agency spokeswoman.
According to the complaint filed by Virgil B. Walker, an assistant United States attorney, in Federal District Court in Philadelphia, Colombia issued an arrest warrant against Mr. Tafur-Dominguez on Sept. 27 charging him with drug trafficking. On Dec. 31, the complaint says, the Colombian authorities ordered him detained. There was no explanation for the delay in requesting the arrest of Mr. Tafur-Dominguez, who had visited his homeland during the end of December.
A D.E.A. affidavit shows that the agency had Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's mother's house near New Hope, Pa., under surveillance from January through March 4. On that day, as he rode in a van with his mother, her husband and friends to the Philadelphia Flower Show, federal drug agents stopped the group on an expressway near Philadelphia and arrested Mr. Tafur-Dominguez.
The complaint centers on the seizure of seven tons of cocaine on Dec. 3, 1998, at Cartagena, Colombia, from a container ship bound for Cuba, Jamaica and Spain. The Colombian authorities, according to the complaint, said Mr. Tafur-Dominguez deposited 560 million Colombian pesos ($350,000) in several checks into the accounts of E. I. Caribe, a ''front company,'' to buy the containers in which the cocaine was concealed.
Mr. Tafur-Dominguez faces 12 to 40 years in prison if convicted, the complaint says.
D.E.A. agents searched his dormitory room at Pace as well as his mother's home and seized several financial documents and e-mail messages as part of an investigation to see if he violated any United States laws, according to an agency affidavit, but he was not charged here.
Joseph A. Tate, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's lawyer in Philadelphia, called the charges baseless and said they stemmed from a misunderstanding rooted in a legitimate financial transaction his client had undertaken on behalf of his mother, Solita Dominguez. Mrs. Dominguez had moved to the United States in 1993, remarried and now helps run her second husband's bonsai studio north of Philadelphia.
In 1998, Mrs. Dominguez received a back payment of 560 million pesos owed to her by the Colombian government from the pension of her deceased husband, Mr. Tate said. The family decided to convert the money into American dollars and put it in a Swiss bank account, he said.
Angela Maria Tafur de Barco, Mrs. Dominguez's daughter, who is a lawyer for the family in Colombia, said the family converted the money into dollars to avoid the fluctuation of the peso, and because they feared that such a large sum could make family members subject to kidnapping, a common crime in Colombia.
''If you have more than 50 million pesos in an account here they kidnap you,'' Mrs. Barco said in a telephone interview from Bogota. ''Right now my life is in complete risk, because I had to tell the prosecutors we have that money in Switzerland.''Mrs. Dominguez, who was a resident alien at the time but is now an American citizen, also said she was unsure if she would be allowed to have that much money in the United States. (The Immigration and Naturalization Service says there are no restrictions.)
Acting on behalf of his mother, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez sought a money trader, a popular, legal method of converting pesos in Colombia, his lawyers said. Traders typically offer better exchange rates than commercial banks, but some have been linked to drug traffickers.
Mr. Tafur-Dominguez went to a trader recommended by a friend, who vouched for the man's honesty, Mr. Tate said. The trader told him the transaction would move more rapidly if he divided the sum into 13 checks and wrote them out to the trader himself, the lawyer said. The next day, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez received a receipt from a bank in Zurich confirming the deposit. The money remains in that account, Mr. Tate said.
The checks, however, turned up in the accounts of E. I. Caribe, Mr. Tate said, and had been improperly re-endorsed to the company by the trader, who remains at large.
''It's as if you give a plumber a check for fixing your sink and then the sink is fine, and the plumber is gone, but a year later the checks turn up in the hands of a drug dealer,'' Mrs. Dominguez said in an interview at the bonsai studio.
United States officials say they play little role in assessing the merits of extradition charges, so long as Colombia's warrants and paperwork are in order and comply with the treaty. The State Department does not comment on such cases as a matter of policy.
''We are not supposed to be trying the Colombian case here,'' said Mike Levy, the deputy United States attorney in Philadelphia. ''Colombia has a different legal system than here. I don't think any of us know what constitutes a violation of a law down there.''
At Pace, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's defenders see something sinister behind the charges.
''There are too many unclear coincidences,'' said Prof. Nicholas Robinson, who had invited Mr. Tafur-Dominguez to accompany him to a United Nations conference scheduled for the Monday after his arrest. Mr. Tafur-Dominguez's plane crash and his arrest both occurred near the anniversary of his father's murder, the professor said. ''You can say it's a nice set of coincidences, but it's pretty orchestrated. This creates a concern if nothing else that there is a message being sent.''
After the crash, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez went to the United States last summer for treatment and recuperation at his mother's home. He told friends he decided to rebuild his mind and spirit by enrolling in Pace's environmental law program, among the highest rated in the country. He got a reputation for earnest study.
''If he was a big-time drug dealer, he was a most unusual one,'' said Ann Powers, one of his professors. ''He never drank, he went to church, he drove around in this little loaner Volkswagen from his mom's friend.''
He spoke passionately about the environment, about deforestation in the rain forest and urban sprawl, and once wrote a research paper on the uses of pesticides to eradicate drug crops, friends said.
''I used the logical thinking of Latin Americans, and said this must be a setup,'' said Hernan Lopez, an Argentine lawyer and Pace alumnus who befriended Mr. Tafur-Dominguez. ''His father signed the law, his father was shot down. The rule of law in Latin America is not that strong.''
From jail, Mr. Tafur-Dominguez wrote that he tries to keep his spirits up.
''I talk to other inmates, listen to their stories and learn about 'the system,' '' he wrote. ''I go to the law library and read every single case on extradition and study the Bible.''
http://www.nytimes.com/2000/04/13/nyregion/drugs-politics-and-family-ties-figure-in-colombia-extradition-case.html?pagewanted=1Their office is in Coral Gables, a real Cuban American National Foundation infested area.
Our Contact details:
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Thanks for the great info. EFerrari. I want to look into this more late tonight when I get more time. This is interesting.
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