Colombia captures top cocaine boss wanted by US

BOGOTA, Sep 11 (Reuters) Colombia's top drug lord, who earned the title ''boss of bosses'' for smuggling hundreds of tonnes of cocaine to the United States, was captured on Monday, the country's biggest narcotics arrest in a decade.

Soldiers surrounded Diego Montoya, also known as ''Don Diego, in a farmhouse near the western coffee town of Armenia, capping a more than seven-year manhunt.

He was on the FBI's ''Ten Most Wanted'' list in the United States and had a 5 million dollar price on his head.

''This shows our commitment to the fight against drug trafficking, which is a matter of national security in Colombia,'' Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos told reporters yesterday.

The 230-pound Montoya, known for his burly physique and links to right-wing paramilitary militias, helped found the Norte del Valle cartel, the only gang that still controls the business from the cultivation of coca plants, to production of cocaine and its exportation.

Montoya's private army of assassins, called Los Machos, have killed 1,500 people in his campaign to maintain leadership of the Norte del Valle organization, which has a hand in exporting 70 per cent of the cocaine that leaves Colombia for the United States and Europe, Santos said.

The capture comes amid a scandal in which high level military officers are accused of taking bribes to protect Montoya, who led bloody battles against rival gangs for control of smuggling routes leading to Colombia's Pacific coast.

He consolidated his empire using paramilitaries to brutally control rural areas used to produce and transport cocaine. The ''paras'' have committed some of the worst massacres and atrocities of this Andean country's four-decade-old war between left-wing guerrillas and the government.

Since the days of Pablo Escobar, head of the mighty Medellin cartel in the 1980s, Colombia's cocaine trade has mainly splintered into smaller groups specializing in separate areas of the production and exportation chain.

But the country still exports more than 600 tonnes of the drug every year despite billions of dollars in US aid aimed at stamping out the business.

The combination of Montoya's arrest plus the August capture of a drug lord known as ''Lollipop'' and the July extradition of another one known as ''Scratch,'' is the hardest blow against the drug trade since Escobar was killed in 1993, said Rafael Nieto, a political commentator and former deputy justice minister.

''Montoya's arrest will certainly initiate a fight for control of what is left of the Norte del Valle organization,'' Nieto said.

REUTERS TB RN0459