Word: bogota
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Again and again each day, the juxtapositions of culture and language are jarring, like some mad laboratory experiment in continental drift. In the real world, 9,700 miles separate Shanghai from Bogota. In Jackson Heights on Roosevelt Avenue, they butt right up against each other, as when, one recent afternoon, a Colombian teenager loped into a hole-in-the-wall take-out restaurant. "You do chicken?" he asked haltingly. The Chinese teenager behind the counter frowned for a moment, baffled, then smiled. "Dumpling!" she said, nodding. "We have all kind dumpling...
Betancur talked last week with TIME's Caribbean Bureau Chief Bernard Diederich in Bogota's elegant Nario Palace. Excerpts from the interview...
Immediately after that operation last year, death threats fell down upon Colombia's Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who had been leading a lone crusade against his country's bustling $5 billion-a-year cocaine trade. Less than two months later, in the streets of Bogota, two young hit men on a red Yamaha motorcycle pulled up alongside Lara's white Mercedes-Benz and pumped seven bullets into the 38-year-old minister. The killing electrified Colombia and enraged its government. "We've had enough," said President Belisario Betancur Cuartas, trembling with anger during his elegy to the slain minister...
Indeed, as the drug busters step up their campaign, they find themselves targeted more and more often for reprisals by multimillionaire cocaine czars. Last November alone, Washington's efforts were menaced on three separate fronts. In Colombia, a bomb exploded under a car parked outside the U.S. embassy in Bogota, killing a woman and, when backed up by telephoned death threats, causing 17 U.S. officials and their families to leave the country. In Peru, 19 members of a U.S.-sponsored program to eradicate coca bushes in the wilds of the Amazon jungle were killed, four of them, the State Department...
...approximately 200 high-rises along Panama City's oceanfront, and a variety of small businesses and financial institutions, like currency-exchange houses, through which they can launder their profits. "These guys don't rob banks," says Craig Vangrasslek, who studied the drug industry on a Fulbright scholarship in Bogota. "They buy them." Soon the drug pipeline was operating as smoothly and as punctually as a regularly scheduled airline. Almost every day, soon after dawn, Colombians in sleek twin-engine Cessnas descend upon remote airstrips carved out of the hinterlands of Peru and Bolivia. In a matter of minutes the traffickers...