BOGOTA, Colombia - (AP) -- Soldiers swarmed onto a farm on Monday and captured one of the world's most wanted drug lords hiding in bushes in his underwear. Colombian officials called it their biggest drug war victory since the killing of the Medellin cartel leader Pablo Escobar in 1993.

Diego Montoya, who sits with Osama bin Laden on the F.B.I.'s 10 most wanted list and has a $5 million bounty on his head, is accused of leading the Norte del Valle cartel. It is deemed Colombia's most dangerous drug gang and is accused of shipping hundreds of tons of cocaine to the United States since the 1990s.

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Officers Provided Secret Information on U.S. Navy Ships

BOGOTA, Colombia -- An investigation by the Colombian Defense Ministry has found that drug traffickers and rebels from the country's largest guerrilla group infiltrated the U.S.-backed military here, paying high-ranking officers for classified information to help elude capture and continue smuggling cocaine.

The information obtained by the powerful Norte del Valle drug cartel included the secret positioning of U.S. naval vessels and aircraft in the Caribbean early last year, part of a carefully coordinated web designed to stop cocaine from reaching the United States, according to high-ranking Colombian military officials. The cartel is headed by Diego Montoya, who is on the FBI's list of most wanted fugitives.

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In Wake of Colombia's U.S.-Backed Disarmament Process, Ex-Paramilitary Fighters Regroup Into Criminal Gangs

BOGOTA, Colombia -- Colombia's cocaine trade has never been controlled by a single cast of characters.

In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar and other flamboyant cocaine cowboys, wielding billions of dollars and armies of hit men, nearly brought the state to its knees. Their deaths ushered in more discreet groups, so-called baby cartels, that outsourced trafficking and murder to gangs. Then came a paramilitary force that relied on cocaine to fund a war against Marxist rebels, a bloody phase the government says ended with the disarmament of militias last year.

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EL PENOL, Colombia -- With a machete and a long-handled spade, Colombian farmers like Claudio Gualtero are trying to succeed where seven years of aerial coca fumigation struggled in the battle to slash the country's drug exports.

After receiving billions of dollars in U.S. aid to spray coca crops from the air, Colombia is shifting strategy to intensify manual eradication on the ground to attack the leaves used to make cocaine that ends up on U.S. and European streets.

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A Joint Force Including U.S. Officials Is Working to Stem Cocaine Exports and Related Violence Along the Pacific Shore.

BUENAVENTURA, COLOMBIA -- At the sound of approaching patrol boats, the drug smugglers hurriedly fled their camp hidden among the mangroves, leaving behind a wealth of evidence.

The Colombian Coast Guard's raiding party arrived to find a still-warm makeshift stove, short-wave radios, satellite phones, enough AK-47 assault rifles to arm a platoon, and, buried under freshly turned mud, 8 tons of cocaine.

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Colombia Announced It Will Favor Manual Eradication of Coca Crops Over the Current System, Which Focuses Heavily on Aerial Spraying

BOGOTA -- In a major policy shift likely to get both praise and close examination in Washington, Colombia has announced it will favor manual eradication of coca crops over the current system that focuses heavily on aerial fumigation.

The iconic image of Colombia's largely U.S.-funded war on drugs may well be a single-engine airplane spraying bright green fields of coca bushes with chemical defoliants -- the country's key strategy since the 1980s.

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The Colombian Government Agreed to Provide an Alternative Base for Counter-Drug Efforts if the United States Loses Access to the Manta Airfield in Ecuador

The U.S. accord with Ecuador for use of the base in Manta expires in 2009. Ecuador's president has pledged not to renew the accord.

Colombia has offered the U.S. government an alternative base for counter-drug surveillance flights if Ecuador evicts it from its largest South American military outpost, according to a senior U.S. defense official.

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Government Bringing Social Programs to Long-Neglected Regions in Bid to Establish a State Presence

SAN VICENTE DEL CAGUAN, Colombia -- Marxist rebels once ran a visitors center in this town in southern Colombia, the office staffed by a young, amiable female guerrilla and the walls decorated with huge posters of famed fighters. Rebels ran a court, built bridges and taxed locals, including the farmers who grew coca in such abundance that the region became ground zero for the war on drugs.

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Uprooting Bushes by Hand Preferred Over U.S.-Funded Aerial Spraying

EL MIRADOR, Colombia -- The latest shift in Colombia's war on drugs is evident on a green hilltop in this town, as weather-beaten men in gray jumpsuits -- government-paid eradicators -- use hoes and muscle to rip out bushes of coca. Policemen carrying M-16 assault rifles and land-mine detectors stand sentry, while a radio operator listens in on the crackling conversation between two Marxist guerrilla units.

The operation here in the southern state of Caqueta is tedious, hard and dangerous, since destroying coca is a financial blow to the guerrillas, who draw much of their funding from the crop that is used to make cocaine. But Colombian officials say uprooting by hand is the future -- a strategy at odds with U.S. reliance on aerial fumigation.

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Critics And Farmers Say Old Approaches Aren't Working In Colombia.

TENCHE, Colombia -- Numar Tirado used to make money on the side growing coca bushes, the notorious plant whose leaves make cocaine.

But the dairy farmer stopped two years ago after a U.S.-financed aerial spraying campaign reached this remote corner of the Andean foothills, turning hillsides into withered gray-brown dead zones.

Tirado went back to legal, but less profitable, farming. He invested in some more cattle and planted new pasture.

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Despite widespread spraying of defoliants financed by the U.S., total acreage of coca cultivated in Colombia rose 19% in 2006 compared with 2005, according to an annual survey by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

The report stresses that much of the gain may be attributed to an expansion of the area included in the survey, which is done by satellite, airplane and on the ground.

The White House said the increase was due partly to "rapid crop reconstitution," the use of smaller plots in more remote areas and farmers' increasing use of national parks, where aerial spraying is forbidden.

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Uribe Administration, Seeking U.S. Trade Pact, Lobbies Hard to Overcome Scandal Allegations

WASHINGTON -- To win approval of a new trade pact, Colombia is putting together a richly financed lobbying campaign piloted by ex-Clinton White House officials, complete with advertisements, a rapid-response media team and regular visits by Colombian bigwigs to Congress. The necessity and breadth of such a campaign demonstrates just how far Colombia has fallen politically in Washington. For years, the Andean nation was considered a model ally that battled guerillas and narcotraffickers and embraced free-market policies, unlike Venezuela's Hugo Chavez, who mocked President Bush and boasted of creating "21st-century socialism." But since Democrats took control of Congress this year, the focus has shifted to a deepening scandal in Colombia, where government officials have been accused of working with right-wing paramilitary leaders who have murdered hundreds of union members and other political foes.

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A Paramilitary Boss' Testimony Underscores Militias' Grip on Political and Business Life in the Nation.

SINCELEJO, COLOMBIA -- This is the chronicle of a death foretold.

Mayor Eudaldo "Tito" Diaz knew he was a marked man. He had resisted right-wing paramilitary fighters in El Roble, a town in the northern state of Sucre, and the assassins had him in their sights. In a town hall meeting, he confronted Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, grabbing the microphone and warning that he was going to be killed.

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A Politician Says That If the U.S. Doesn't Pass a Free-Trade Agreement, His Country Could Be Forced to Withdraw.

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- A prominent politician closely allied with President Alvaro Uribe said his nation should pull out of a U.S.-financed effort to fight drug trafficking and terrorism if the American Congress does not pass a free-trade agreement with his country.

Sen. Carlos Garcia, a presidential aspirant and leader of the largest bloc in Colombia's Congress, said Monday in an interview that the failure to pass the trade accord could force the government to withdraw from Plan Colombia, which has cost the United States about $5 billion over seven years.

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Commanders Cite State Complicity In Violent Movement

MEDELLIN, Colombia -- Top paramilitary commanders have in recent days confirmed what human rights groups and others have long alleged: Some of Colombia's most influential political, military and business figures helped build a powerful anti-guerrilla movement that operated with impunity, killed civilians and shipped cocaine to U.S. cities.

The commanders have named army generals, entrepreneurs, foreign companies and politicians who not only bankrolled paramilitary operations but also worked hand in hand with fighters to carry them out. In accounts that are at odds with those of the government, the commanders have said their organization, rather than simply sprouting up to fill a void in lawless regions of the country, had been systematically built with the help of bigger forces.

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BUENAVENTURA, Colombia -- Visitors to this city can be forgiven for thinking no place is safe here. Gunfire often echoes through the slums surrounding its port, the country's most important on the Pacific coast. As larger cities have calmed, Buenaventura has emerged as the deadliest urban center in Colombia's long internal war.

Soldiers search almost every car at checkpoints on the winding road from Cali. Guerrillas recently fired mortar shells at the police headquarters. The stately Hotel Estacion, a neo-Classical gem built in 1928, where executives come to hammer out deals to import cars or export coffee, is guarded by dozens of soldiers in combat fatigues.

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The Current And Former Officials Are Suspected Of Signing A 'Devil's Pact' With Paramilitaries

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- The Colombian government ordered the arrest of 19 current and former officials Monday who are accused of signing a 2001 "devil's pact" with outlawed paramilitary groups in which they promised to work together to "re-found Colombia."

The orders represent the government's biggest move yet to bring to justice politicians it alleges were complicit with the right-wing militias in Colombia's decades-long civil war. Farmers and businessmen formed the militias for self-defense against leftist guerrillas in the 1980s, but many of the groups evolved into mafias engaged in killings, drug trafficking, extortion, land grabs and election fraud.

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Defense Minister Says Neither He Nor The President Knew The National Police Were Listening In On Public Figures, Including Officials

BOGOTA, COLOMBIA -- President Alvaro Uribe faced a new scandal Tuesday over alleged wiretapping of political opponents and journalists, one day after he ordered the arrest of 19 present and former Colombian officials accused of signing a "devil's pact" with right-wing paramilitaries.

In a news conference Tuesday, Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos disclosed that the administration had uncovered a broad and systematic practice by the national police of wiretapping prominent public figures, including members of Uribe's government.

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A NEW hummingbird species discovered in a cloud forest in Colombia already needs protection from humans, according to the experts who found the bird.

Called the gorgeted puffleg, the new species, with a blue and green throat, measures between 90 and 100 millimetres.

The male was an iridescent green and electric blue patch on its throat - -- the gorge -- and from tufts of white feathers at the top of the legs.

Ornithologists Alexander CortDes-Diago and Luis Alfonso Ortega first saw the bird in 2005 during surveys of mountain cloud forest in the Serrania del Pinche, in south-west Colombia.

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Colombia has made its largest ever drugs seizure, with almost 25 metric tons of cocaine, valued at UKP250 million, found ready for export in a hide on the Pacific coast.

"This is the largest seizure in Colombian history," said Defence Minister Juan Manuel Santos of the shipment found near the town of Pizarro in the Pacific province of Choco.

The discovery was the result of eight months of undercover work by Colombia's secret intelligence service, the DAS, which received a tip off that the huge drug consignment had been put together in the estuary of Pizarro. The drugs, in almost 1000 waterproof, vacuum-packed bricks, were about to be loaded onto 'go fast' launches to make the trip along the Pacific coast up towards Mexico. The high speed motor boasts were to either rendezvous with larger ships or transfer the drugs onto other launches which would take them to Central America or Mexico where Mexican cartels would smuggle the cocaine across the border in to the US. advertisement

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