Word: bogota
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...served flan. Luncheon had been arranged with a caution befitting one of the world's richest fugitives. Nine weeks ago, TIME's reporter in Bogota, Tom Quinn, received a call from a go-between: "The Cali guys have an announcement to make. Do you want to talk to them?" A week later, after an introductory phone chat and a roundabout journey to the rendezvous, Quinn found himself dining in a modest apartment in downtown Cali, a tidy industrial city in the Cauca Valley currently under occupation by 4,000 Colombian antidrug commandos and a CIA anti-crime task force...
...nearly a year, the Rodriguez brothers have been trying to cut a deal with the Colombian government in exchange for slap-on-the-wrist punishment. For just as long, impatient drug fighters in Washington have been pressing Bogota to make the narcobosses pay a stiff penalty for their crimes. When Ernesto Samper Pizano was elected President nearly five months ago, the Clinton Administration thought it had assurances that the Rodriguez brothers would not get the deal they wanted...
...responses immediately raised questions of exactly how onerous such a surrender might be. The drug lords were optimistic. Samper's statement, said a spokesman for Rodriguez, "is the answer we've been waiting for." U.S. officials, however, preferred to think otherwise. Assistant Secretary of State Robert Gelbard said that Bogota had previously "told us their strong preference is to capture them rather than to go for the kind of surrender program the previous government was so enthusiastic about." If a deal was struck, he said, U.S. ambassador to Colombia Myles Frechette "doesn't believe they will be lenient with them...
Some U.S. analysts claim they have purchased at least as big a chunk of the government. Recently retired Bogota DEA chief Joe Toft says narcodollars have influenced "from 50% to 75% of the Colombian Congress." The traffickers have also bought an unknown number of prosecutors, policemen and soldiers. But "their most significant victory," claims a U.S. diplomat, was the surrender program for retiring dons. "The Cali cartel dictated the penal-code reform," he says. Under the 1993 code revisions, drug traffickers who turn themselves in can have their sentences reduced by as much as two-thirds at the discretion...
...parole. For almost a decade, Ames spied for the Soviet Union and then Russia. Prosecutors claim he was responsible for the death of at least 10 CIA agents. Rosario pleaded for leniency so she could take care of their son Paul, now living with relatives in her native Bogota, Colombia. But, says TIME correspondent Elaine Shannon, her case was hurt when it came out that in 1992 she accompanied her husband to New York and freely spent $6,000 in money she knew he had "earned" from...