Cocaine's Kings

On a mountainside overlooking Medellin, Colombia, some of South America's poorest families have been uprooted from the garbage dumps where they once foraged and deposited in 4,000 neat, red-tiled homes. At the entrance to the housing development, a large billboard proclaims the author of this generosity: PABLO ESCOBAR GAVIRIA, a local billionaire who has been called one of the world's richest men. Escobar is also one of the world's richest fugitives. Last week a federal grand jury in Miami announced that Escobar and four other Medellin tycoons had been indicted because of the source of their immense wealth: control of up to 80% of the world's cocaine trade.

The grand jury charged that since 1978, Escobar and his confederates have smuggled into the U.S. at least 58 tons of cocaine from facilities like Tranquilandia, a massive complex of coke-processing laboratories in the Amazon jungle that Colombian authorities busted in 1984. The Medellin drug barons were also indicted for plotting the murder of Adler ("Barry") Seal, a drug ( smuggler turned informant who was gunned down last February in Baton Rouge, La. Seal was to have been the Government's star witness in the trial of the cocaine kingpins.

The others named with Escobar were the three Ochoa Vasquez brothers, Jorge Luis, Juan David and Fabio, who manage the ring's distribution networks, as well as Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, a former Colombian legislator who is suspected of financing terrorist attacks on his own government. The indictment names four lower-level associates, including Federico Vaughan, a former aide to Nicaraguan Interior Minister Tomas Borge Martinez, who is accused of helping the cartel set up cocaine labs in Nicaragua. Using incriminating photos of Vaughan supplied by Seal, the Reagan Administration has accused Nicaragua's Sandinista government of involvement in drug trafficking.

The drug barons are not likely to come to trial any time soon, if ever. The indictments were handed down secretly three months ago in the hopes that U.S. and Colombian authorities would be able to capture the fugitives unawares. No such luck. "We've been unable to arrest any of them," said a federal narcotics prosecutor in Miami.

Considering the billions of dollars the five bosses -- known collectively as the Medellin Cartel -- are believed to possess, they should have no shortage of safe havens. Nor has there been any short circuiting of the cartel's power. Last week, on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia, a squad of four killers assassinated Colonel Jaime Ramirez, the respected chief of that country's antinarcotics force who led the highly successful Tranquilandia raid.