The Anniston Star from Anniston, Alabama • Page 8

Sunday, Sept. 10, 1989 Page 8A ulljr Aimudon Star Drug baron's personal death squad held They said he was linked to a political assassination earlier this year in Monteria and a failed death plot The daily terrorist attacks linked to drug traffickers continued in Medellin, home of the powerful cocaine cartel of which Escobar is the overlord. Bombs knocked out telephone lines, and damaged two factories and a restaurant, police said. Three people were injured, they said. Also, police in Medellin said they arrested five suspects in connection with a mid-week bombing there of a government-run savings bank.

The 4th Army Brigade in Medellin said it had arrested four leaders of Escobar's feared "Love for Medellin" assassin squad sarcastically named after a local charity group. THE GROUP acted as bodyguards for Maria Victoria Henao Vallejo, Escobar's wife, the communique said. An army lieutenant, speaking on condition of anonymity, described them as "hit men." By Bruce Handler Th AMociatad Prm The gang also operated as a morals death squad, killing local drug addicts and others to "clean up the streets" in the city of 2 million, the army said. Escobar heads the list of Colombian drug lords wanted in the United States and who are believed to supply the vast majority of cocaine-consuming Americans. On Friday, authorities said Luis Fernando Galeano, a key aid of Escobar's and a suspected trafficker, was released from custody because there was no legal Colombian warrant for holding him and also no extradition request from the United States.

The Drug Enforcement Administration in Washington said Galeano was not wanted there. Colombian newspapers said Saturday that Galeano was a financial administrator for the Medellin cartel. against a man with ties to the rival cocaine cartel in the city of Cali. The government of President Virgilio Barco began a crackdown on Aug. 18, after death squads linked to drug traffickers assassinated leading presidential candidate Sen.

Luis Carlos Galan. DRUG TRAFFICKERS responded with bombings and shootings and threats to kill judges, journalists and government officials. Barco assumed special emergency powers, such as confiscating bank accounts and property linked to suspected traffickers and the "administrative extradition" of traffickers to the United States, bypassing the slow, often corrupt and highly intimidated Colombian court system. BOGOTA, Colombia The army said Saturday it has captured four leaders of a terrorist gang employed by drug kingpin Pablo Escobar to protect his wife and kill his enemies. The death squad, which called itself "Love for Medellin," also acted as a vigilante morals squad, killing prostitutes and homosexuals in the drug-infested city of Medellin, a military source said.

Also Saturday, military officials were quoted as saying they have made new raids on properties linked to Colombia's No. 2 drug lord, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha. They said a computer disk showed he owned 374 vehicles, all with telephones. PWXJOLY USA MADE IN for the Entire Family Men's Ladies' BlackTan FudgeTan Children's Tan Associated Press General strike Protesters rally in the square in Baku, Soviet Azerbaijan, in support of a general strike that closed businesses and services in the republic. Strikers demanded new elections and the resolu- tion of territorial disputes, but conservative Politburo member Yegor K.

Ligachev warned Saturday that continued ethnic unrest could lead to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our 3 Best Casuals Nervous Russians turn to mysticism Now In Calhoun County WOERNER TURF Hwy. 78 East Oxford 5-12 Miles East or QuInUrd Mall Premium Quality Sod Over 85 Years of Experience 831-6141 By Bill Keller The Times Men's, Ladies', Children's Tan Fudge To all my friends and customers who were so supportive during my stay in the hospital. We are now back to busi ness as usual. Marjbn's It FAMILY CLOTHING Men's, Ladies', Children's Tan Fudge Carey Sikes SikesAuto Body Repair try's curse is that the feeling of ethnic belonging has never been supplanted by a broader sense of citizenship.

"It is probably the most complicated problem in our country today," lie said in a recent interview. "It might become the rock against which the ship of per-estroika is wrecked." Volsky likes to recall Pavlov's experiments with dogs, teaching them to bark at the blink of a red light and be silent at the flash of green. "There was an international symposium and Pavlov demonstrated his work to his colleagues from around the world," Volsky said. "A dog was brought in and both lights were turned on simultaneously. The dog jumped, howled and went mad.

It didn't know what to do. I feel the same way. The only thing that-saves me is that I live not by reflexes but by reason." Once the Communist Party en-forced a stuporous stability in the land. But now the party, like Pavlov's dog, writhes in confusion. In Lithuania, fqr example, the party is split in two factions.

The -liberals are trying' to ride and influence the wave of Lithuanian nationalism THETCONSERVATIVES, notably the party-cell leaders at many factories around the republic, are forming strike committees and threatening to battle Lithuanian nationalism with economic sabotage. The party faces not only mass defections and electoral embarrassment, but open ridicule as well. Chumak, the healer, recently told an interviewer that party functionaries cannot absorb his restorative energy, because they are too hardened by their soulless work. People have little faith in Gorbachev's laborious reconstruction of the economy, but they instinctively trust the radical economist Nikolai P. Shmelyov, who recently predicted on television that within two years the Soviet Union will have universal rationing and a reactionary coup.

To a public that is busy cashing in ration coupons for back-to-school uniforms and notebooks, this seems grimly plausible. And there is no escape in the cool refuge of the local movie theater The current films feature characters with few redeeming qualities and situations with no way out: "International Girl," the melodrama of a prostitute who escapes the tourist-hotel milieu by marrying a Swedish businessman and ends up just as miserable in Stockholm. "Emergency at the District Level," about a piggish young Communist careerist "The Servant," the tale of a man and his chauffeur, whose message is thai Russians are slaves at heart "Behold our new heroes vagrants, prostitutes, juvenile delinquents, drug addicts, people tortured by life, living unhappily through each day and rejoicing when it is finally over." writes the critic Irina Shilova. who wonders what ever happened to the presumption of innocence, let alone I he happy ending MOSCOW An analyst diagnosing the collective emotional health of the Soviet Union in these days of ethnic discord and economic distress need look no farther than a television set, where the political commentators are being reinforced by hypnotists and faith healers. Early mornings, it's Alan Chumak, who urges viewers to place bottles of water before the TV set to be charged with his healing energy.

In prime time, it's Anatoly Kashpirovsky, a psychotherapist whose eerie studio seances somehow seem the perfect runup to the 9 p.m. news. The airwaves have also made way for the inimitable Dzhuna Davitashvili, a practitioner of magic hands who was called in to work on the ailing Leonid I. Brezhnev, and who lately has taken to making astrological predictions of dooms day. There is nothing new about the mystic bent of the Russian people! but these shows all fabulously popular, and not only with super-' stitious babushkas lend a last-days-of-Pompeii quality to per-estroika's midlife crisis.

A system that cannot promise its anxious people political stability or economic security offers hypnosis instead. THE DESPERATION for something to believe in goes beyond the usual spiritual quest the Russians call "god-seeking," beyond the annual surge of anxiety that tends to coincide with the summer vacation of Mikhail Gorbachev, the rationalist-in-chief. It is a general feeling that the country has entered a period of testing political, economic and spiritual. Daily the Soviet public faces fresh evidence that what divides this country is stronger than what binds it. Most unsettling at the moment is the galaxy of ethnic minorities now twitching and colliding in their or- bits.

One by one, the non-Russian peoples who make up nearly half of the Soviet population have been declaring that before they are Soviet citizens or Communists they are Lithuanians, Armenians, Azerbai-janis, Moldavians. But Gorbachev phoned Lithuania to warn that he does not plan to be remembered as the Soviet leader who lost the Baltics, and last week the Lithuanian Communist Party leader, Algirdas Brazauskas, said he could not rule out the use of military force if Moscow's patience was pushed to the limit. Even the Russian majority has begun to consolidate in a patriotic backlash, fueled by pride and an emotional sense of tragedy When Russians talk about the good old days, more and more they mean the rule of Czar Nicholas II ARKADY i. VuLSkY, the engineer-diplomat sent by Gorbachev to preside over a shaky peace in the embattled Azerbaijani territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, says the coun 20 ON BALI BRAS. I It's a not-to-be-missed fall sale on every Bali bra.

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