Rodrigo Lara Bonilla

Rodrigo Lara Bonilla named Pablo Escobar in Congress as a cocaine trafficker and was shot dead on a Bogota road fifteen months later. He was a lawyer from Neiva, a founder of the New Liberalism movement with Luis Carlos Galan, and was made justice minister in 1983 in Belisario Betancur's government at thirty-six. Escobar had been elected an alternate member of the Chamber of Representatives and was using the seat and its immunity to make himself respectable. Lara used a parliamentary debate to say where the money came from, produced the record of Escobar's 1976 arrest for importing cocaine paste, and pressed on through a campaign of harassment and a failed attempt to impeach him with fabricated evidence of taking traffickers' money himself. Escobar lost his seat and his immunity. Lara then ordered the raid on Tranquilandia in March 1984, a processing complex in the Caqueta jungle where the police destroyed around fourteen tonnes of cocaine, the largest seizure made anywhere to that date. On 30 April 1984 two gunmen on a motorcycle drew alongside his car in north Bogota and fired a submachine gun through the window. The killing changed Colombian policy overnight: Betancur declared a state of siege and began extraditing traffickers to the United States, which the cartels answered with a decade of bombings and assassinations. Galan was killed in 1989. Bogota's airport road and a Colombian air force base carry Lara's name. He was thirty-seven when he was killed. The two gunmen were teenagers hired for the job, one of whom died in the police pursuit. Colombia had no extradition treaty in effective operation before his death and had begun sending traffickers north within a week of it. His widow and children left the country.

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