He was supposed to be Mr. Untouchable - one of the world's 50 biggest drug traffickers, responsible for pumping tons of cocaine into New York City for more than a decade.

Colombian warlord Diego Murillo was so cruel that one of his nation's largest newspapers dubbed him "The Exterminator."

He was said to have gotten a kickback from every kilo that left Colombia by sea, and was allegedly responsible for hundreds of political killings as leader of a drug-financed, right-wing paramilitary organization.

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Colombia extradited 14 jailed paramilitary leaders to the United States on Tuesday, in an effort by President Alvaro Uribe to take a hard line against the warlords and defuse a scandal that has tied them to senior lawmakers in the Colombian Congress and members of his own family.

The extraditions of so many paramilitary leaders at once was unprecedented in Colombia's long history of trying to dismantle the hydra-headed syndicates that export cocaine to the United States. They come at a delicate moment for Colombia's government, which is trying to win approval of a trade agreement with the United States.

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Move Could Help Free-Trade Deal Advance in Congress

Colombia extradited 14 top paramilitary warlords to face drug-trafficking charges in the U.S., a dramatic move that could help the country secure a free-trade deal with Washington but endangers Colombia's fragile peace process.

Colombian President Alvaro Uribe said the 14 bosses of the paramilitary, a group believed responsible for shipping tons of cocaine to the U.S. as well as having participated in or ordered thousands of murders during Colombia's long-running civil war, violated the terms of their 2005 peace deal by continuing to run criminal groups and traffic drugs from prison. "We have greatly reduced the incidence of violence in Colombia. Therefore, we cannot afford to react weakly to the recidivists who return to their murders and their other crimes," Mr. Uribe said in a nationally televised address. On Capitol Hill, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat, doesn't appear ready to free the trade deal for a vote. But allies of the Andean nation seized on the extraditions Tuesday as fresh evidence of the need for action on the deal, which would tighten economic ties between the U.S. and Colombia.

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The Killing of a Farm Leader Who Opposed Growing Coca Suggests the Emergence of Former Right-Wing Paramilitary Fighters.

SANTA ROSA, COLOMBIA -- In the end, getting his picture taken with President Bush and attaining a modicum of local fame was no help to Miguel Daza. In fact, his high profile may have been the death of him.

The young farmer was killed in a roadside ambush in February near this mining and drug trafficking hub in north-central Colombia, apparently by one of a new generation of criminal gangs that have emerged in the two years since right-wing paramilitary fighters officially disbanded.

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Environmental Pollution and Encroaching Narcos Have Taken Their Toll on Narino State's Afro-Colombians. The Community's Unique, Altruistic Culture Is in Peril.

TUMACO, COLOMBIA -- After a lifetime spent digging for black clams in the swamps that line the coast here, Clojilda Velasco remembers when she could count on finding 400 a day. Now she's lucky if she gets 100. But she still shares when one of the other women comes up salado, or unlucky.

Oil spills, industrial pollution, drug traffickers and over-harvesting are quickly reducing the clam population in the mangroves of Tumaco and snuffing out the livelihoods of Velasco and other extremely poor families who depend on the mollusks for their subsistence.

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Soldiers, Under Pressure to Show Progress in a U.S.-Funded War, Allegedly Are Killing Civilians and Passing Them Off As Rebels.

GRANADA, COLOMBIA -- Street vendor Israel Rodriguez went fishing last month and never came back. Two days later, his family found his body buried in a plastic bag, classified by the Colombian army as a guerrilla fighter killed in battle.

Human rights activists say the Feb. 17 death is part of a deadly phenomenon called "false positives" in which the armed forces allegedly kill civilians, usually peasants or unemployed youths, and brand them as leftist guerrillas.

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Editor's note: This article was written earlier this month when the author was in Colombia.

Bogota, Colombia -- Well, yet another fine setting I have managed to find my way into.

I arrived in Colombia concomitantly with a raid by Colombian Commandos backed as always by U.S. military forces (Plan Colombia).

The raid killed Raul Reyes and 16 other drug operatives and suspected revolutionary affiliate members. So what? That is good right? The world really does not need drug smuggling revolutionaries, do we?

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CARACAS, Venezuela -- Colombia's Defense Ministry announced Saturday that security forces had killed a senior commander of the country's largest guerrilla group in combat along the southern border with Ecuador.

The death of Raul Reyes, one of the rebels' highest-ranking commanders, was a severe blow for the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, which has been waging an insurgency against the government for the last four decades.

"This is the most important strike yet delivered against this terrorist group," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos said to reporters at a news conference in Bogota.

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In Colombia, Coca Growers Seeking a Safe Haven From Authorities Are Cultivating in National Parks, Causing Incalculable Ecological Damage.

SAN JOSE DEL GUAVIARE, COLOMBIA -- Nature photographer Aldo Brando saw a horrible beauty in the destruction visited upon Colombia's national parks by outlaw coca growers.

As his helicopter slalomed through a dozen sky-high columns of smoke from fires set by poachers clearing Macarena National Park, Brando saw endless "craters" of lime-green coca. He likened the park's once unbroken carpet of dark green primeval forest, now scarred by roads, fires and illegal chemicals, to "the black-and-white palette of war."

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They're Found to Have Slaughtered 10 Police Officers on the Orders of Drug Traffickers in May 2006.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- A Colombian army colonel and 14 soldiers were convicted Monday of killing members of an elite, U.S.-trained counter- narcotics police squad on the orders of drug traffickers, one of the most sordid of several recent cases of alleged corruption in the armed forces.

A judge in Cali found Col. Bayron Carvajal and the soldiers guilty of aggravated homicide in the slaughter of 10 police officers and an informant in a May 2006 ambush outside a rural nursing home near Cali. Sentences will be imposed in two weeks.

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Sophisticated Submersibles Are Raising New Challenges for Colombian Navy

BAHIA MALAGA, Colombia -- In the annals of the drug trade, traffickers have swallowed cocaine pellets, dissolved the powder into ceramics and flown the drug as far as Africa on flimsy planes -- anything to elude detection and get a lucrative product to market. Now, the cartels seem to be increasingly going beneath the waves, relying on submarines built in clandestine jungle shipyards to move tons of cocaine.

Last year, 13 of the vessels were seized on dry land or stopped at sea by Colombian or U.S. patrol boats -- more than in the previous 14 years combined, according to the Pacific fleet of the Colombian navy, which is responsible for interdiction efforts across 130,000 square miles.

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BOGOTA, Colombia -- Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators marched here and in other cities around Colombia on Monday to protest the abductions and killings carried out by the country's largest rebel group.

The marches, which also took place on a smaller scale in foreign cities from New York to Tokyo, were a vivid display of growing outrage in relation to the rebel group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as the FARC. Demonstrators also criticized President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela for his plea to remove the FARC from lists of terrorist groups.

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LA JULIA, Colombia - Colombia's defense minister helicoptered into this leftist rebel stronghold with a clutch of U.S. Embassy officials and heavily armed U.S. soldiers to assert emphatically that Latin America's most enduring guerrilla army is on the run.

"The state has arrived to stay, and never again will the guerrillas control this territory," Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos proclaimed in October while inaugurating the first police post ever in this former hub of the cocaine trade.

But just weeks later, an Associated Press news team had to talk its way past testy rebels just to reach the dirt-street town, from which hundreds of people have fled since police and soldiers moved in.

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It's Been 1,750 Days Since Their Mayday Call, and Three Members of a Flight Crew Contracted by the State Department Are Still Awaiting Rescue. While the U.S. and Colombian Governments Refuse to Bargain With Terrorists, the Hostage Crisis Threatens to Become the Longest in U.S. History.

The tropical prison lies in a muddy clearing deep in the southern Colombian jungle, surrounded by a barrier of rough-hewn logs and close to a wide, swift river.

Scattered around the compound are a dozen simple tents-plastic tarpaulins supported by bamboo poles, with hard wooden pallets on which the prisoners and their guards sleep.

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Submersibles Are Used to Ferry Narcotics. Some in U.S. Fear the Tactic May Inspire Terrorists.

CALI, COLOMBIA -- It was on a routine patrol that the Colombian coast guard stumbled upon an eerie outpost amid the mangroves: a mini-shipyard where suspected drug traffickers were building submarines.

Perched on a makeshift wooden dry dock late last month were two 55-foot-long fiberglass vessels, one ready for launch, the other about 70% complete. Each was outfitted with a 350-horsepower Cummins diesel engine and enough fuel capacity to reach the coast of Central America or Mexico, hundreds of miles to the north.

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BOGOTA, Colombia -- President Alvaro Uribe of Colombia lashed out on Tuesday at claims in a new book that he had close ties to the cocaine kingpin Pablo Escobar. He said he never aided Mr. Escobar's drug dealings or benefited from his political patronage.

Mr. Uribe's comments were in response to the book, "Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar," by Virginia Vallejo, Mr. Escobar's former mistress. Ms. Vallejo repeats claims that Mr. Uribe, as head of the civil aviation authority in the early 1980s, helped Mr. Escobar's cartel secure licenses for landing strips used to transport cocaine.

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Pablo Escobar was the world's most infamous drug lord, responsible for kidnappings, bombings and murder on an industrial scale. How did he get away with it for so long?

I met "Popeye" - Pablo Escobar's head of security and one of the few survivors of the Medellin cartel - by chance when I visited Colombia's new state-of-the-art prison, Valledupar. I found him reading Homer's Iliad in the high-security wing. He was my introduction to the myth of Escobar, "cocaine king", sometime politician and wholesale murderer.

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The Colombian police said they had dismantled the private army of Carlos Mario Jimenez, a paramilitary warlord who is awaiting extradition to the United States, by arresting 147 people believed to be protecting a major cocaine smuggling ring. Gen. Orlando Paez, who carried out the weekend raid on three jungle camps where the arrests took place, said the armed group was under the command of Mr. Jimenez, who is being held on a navy frigate off Colombia's Atlantic coast while awaiting extradition.

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Anti-Corruption Drive Paves Way For Biggest Scalp Since Escobar In Never-Ending War

When Colombia's most notorious drug lord, Diego Montoya, was cornered by a special army commando unit on a remote coastal ranch last week, he did what came naturally: he offered the soldiers $5m each if they would let him go free.

The move wasn't quite as desperate as it sounds. As an ever-growing scandal in Colombia has revealed in recent weeks, Montoya has successfully bribed a large number of military and police personnel for years, to facilitate his cocaine shipments to the United States. To date, 26 officers, both commissioned and non-commissioned, have been arrested, two generals have resigned and the spotlight has now turned on an admiral in the Colombian navy.

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BOGOTA -- One of the world's most-wanted drug lords was captured hiding under a pile of leaves Monday in a major strike against a powerful and violent cocaine cartel that had managed to infiltrate the top ranks of Colombia's security forces.

Diego Leon Montoya Sanchez, who goes by the name "Don Diego," was the leader of the Norte del Valle cartel, believed to be responsible for nearly two-thirds of the 500 tons of cocaine exported from Colombia every year and at least 1,500 murders. Among the FBI's top 10 most wanted criminals, he has been indicted in the United States, including in South Florida.

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