The death of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Colombia's most notorious cocaine lord, offers the Government a symbolic victory in a war in which it is faring badly.

But Mr. Clinton sensibly waived that penalty on the grounds that it served the national interest to continue to support Colombia's efforts to fight the cocaine lords.

The first major cocaine lord sent to the United States in a round of extraditions that began in 2000 was sentenced in Federal District Court in Manhattan to 40 years in prison.

He learned that Mr. Murillo had once been a henchman for Pablo Escobar, who until his death in 1993 was known as Colombia's pre-eminent cocaine lord.

First, in early 1990, Pablo Escobar, Medellin's cocaine lord, announced that he would pay a bounty for every city policeman killed.

To the outside world, it is a dark frontier populated by cocaine lords, money launderers and hitmen.

Striking a blow against Pablo Escobar, the fugitive Colombian cocaine lord, a combined police and army unit today shot to death a man identified as the Medellin cartel's military commander.

The federation of paramilitary groups has always had ties to traffickers, with the first groups founded by cocaine lords.

The Panamanian authorities extradited one of Colombia's most-wanted suspected cocaine lords to the United States, where he is accused of smuggling large amounts of cocaine in recent years.

While getting the cash together, he and his fellow cocaine lords form an organization called MAS (muerto a secuestradores, or "death to kidnappers").