Latinnews Archive
Andean Group - 13 May 1997
Who exactly is Pastor Perafan? FORMER ARMY SERGEANT BECAME MULTIMILLIONAIRE
Justo Pastor Perafan, who was captured in the Venezuelan border town of San Cristobal del Tachira on 17 April, was regarded by the Colombian police as the last of the big drug barons still at large. After the capture of the Rodriquez Orejuela brothers and the other Cali cartel capos in 1995, the national police director, General Rosso Serrano, said that Perafan was his next target, and a price of US$ 500,000 was later put on his head. He has the Venezuelan national guard to thank for bringing him in.
Misplaced confidence. It was a mark of Perafan's confidence that he would remain undetected that he chose to live out his enforced exile within hailing distance of his homeland, even though the Bloque de Busqueda, the special Colombian police/army task force, had been on his trail since the beginning of the year. He also seems to have forgotten that Venezuela, unlike Colombia, has an extradition treaty with the US.
As we went to press it seemed likely that Perafan would be extradited to the US, where he faces charges of importing and distributing up to 30 tonnes of cocaine between 1988 and June 1994. An indictment was issued by a New York federal court in August 1995.
Illicit enrichment. In Colombia he is only wanted for illicit enrichment and falsifying documents, which carry a much lower sentence. An arrest warrant was only issued in Colombia in May last year, and investigations into his alleged drug-related activities by the public prosecutor's department have so far not resulted in formal charges being brought.
The Venezuelan supreme court must decide, and that will probably take until the end of June. But state prosecutor Ivan Dario Badell has said Perafan should be extradited to the US, and the head of the national drugs commission, Carlos Tablante, agrees. The extradition treaty between the two countries stipulates that the maximum sentence he would face in a US court is 30 years imprisonment.
Some observers in Colombia regard it as suspicious that the Colombian authorities have apparently made no serious efforts to secure Perafan's extradition -- even though President Samper said immediately after his capture that he would like him to go on trial in Colombia.
Man who knew too much. There has been speculation that Perafan knows too much, and leading political figures would prefer him to stand trial in the US rather than risk embarrassing evidence coming out in a Colombian court. The Venezuelan government appears to believe he would be treated too leniently in Colombia, and foreign minister Miguel Angel Burelli Rivas remarked to El Nacional newspaper that 'there is an unofficial belief here that the government and people of Colombia would prefer him not to be sent to Bogota.'
There is a perfectly respectable reason why the Colombians might prefer Perafan to be sent to the US. As things stand, he cannot be extradited from Colombia, and that would serve to worsen still further Bogota's relations with Washington. To relinquish their claim to put him on trial would be a gesture of good faith that would not be lost on the US authorities. The Colombian extradition request, it has been noted, was filed several hours after the US filed its own papers.
There is no doubt that Perafan maintained extensive political contacts. Until the order went out for his arrest, Perafan enjoyed being in the limelight, cutting a dash in Bogota society by throwing lavish parties and cultivating leading political, media and sporting figures. In 1994 he was decorated by the Colombian congress for his services to Colombian industry.
Perafan's past generosity to politicians has already cost one minister his job: defence minister Guillermo Alberto Gonzalez resigned in March after it transpired that he had received a cheque for US$ 2,800 from Perafan to help finance his 1989 senate election campaign. Another of those implicated is the Colombian ambassador of Spain, Rodrigo Marin Bernal. Press reports suggest that 600 cheques signed by Perafan or his associates have been found by investigators of his convoluted business affairs.
Baker, tailor, trafficker . . . A former army sergeant, Perafan returned to civilian life in October 1979, at the age of 32. After working for a while as a baker, dental mechanic and tailor, he began to build up an impressive property empire over a period of 15 years. He also formed a network of trading companies, in such areas as coffee exporting, timber, petrol distribution and tourism.
Several of these businesses are on a 'black list' drawn up by the US government, and have been intervened by the Colombian public prosecutor's department.
The principal Perafan companies are Colombian Hotels, Coexcafe, Inpehi Ltda, ATJ Construcciones and Siderurgica Zipaquira.
Perafan is credited with being the chief of at least two 'cartels': Bogota and Popayan, with close links to the Cali bosses, and to have amassed a personal fortune of at least US$ 10bn. Assets worth some US$ 3bn have already been tracked down and confiscated.
Weakness for beauty. He married six times and has 10 children. His weakness for young former beauty queens seems to have been his undoing. When his sixth wife, Luz Adriana Ruiz, was arrested by police intelligence agents in a flat in Medellin on 4 April, she was found to have travelled regularly to San Cristobal in recent months, using a false passport in the name of Alba Lucia Lopez. A San Cristobal resident later remembered seeing her photograph (she is a former Miss Vichada) with a middle-aged man in a local paper, and tipped off the police.
Perafan had managed somehow to slip out of Colombia under the noses of the police, obtain false identity papers in Venezuela and radically change his appearance by means of plastic surgery and hair implants (he could only be identified by his fingerprints). In San Cristobal, where he arrived a year ago, he was known as Rafael Antonio Rojas Cruz.
Perafan continues to insist that he is merely a successful businessman, and has never been anywhere near the US. He is, nevertheless, a much-travelled man. He is believed to have been captured in Panama in 1982, with 550kg of cocaine in his possession, but managed to escape. In 1986 he turned up in Costa Rica, as the owner of a cocaine refining laboratory in the San Isidro region. He is still wanted in both countries, and also in Italy.
Perafan's organisation has continued to unravel since his arrest. On 5 May one of his leading frontmen, Edgar Trochez, was captured by agents of the Colombian secret police, DAS, in Popayan, where he is registered as the owner of a number of properties. Perafan comes from Rosas, also in Cauca department.
Trochez was captured once before, in 1993, in the course of an international 'sting' operation codenamed 'Angelo II'. He was held in Colombia along with two Italians after the first-ever 'controlled delivery' of a consignment of cocaine in an operation organised by British, Italian and Colombian authorities, with the support of the US Drug Enforcement Admnistration (DEA). A consignment of 263kg of cocaine was shipped to Britain from Guayaquil, in Ecuador.
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