Word: bogota
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...luxury hotels of downtown LaPaz to the adobe huts of Aymara Indians who chew cocoa leaves and eat dried potatoes like their ancestors did hundreds of years ago. Ill-clad Indian children sell two joints of marijuana for ten cents behind the 35-story Hilton Hotel in downtown Bogota, Columbia, and recently-arrived mothers from the mountains beg in the shopping district of Lima, Peru, so their children...
Criminals continue to smuggle out stones, and hijacking is common. The shoulders of the main road between the mining zone and Bogota are dotted with crosses that mark the graves of those who lost their lives and their booty to pistol-packing esmeralderos. Last year, for example, a gang called La Pesada (the Heavy Mob) held up a caravan of smugglers working for El Ganso (the Goose), took their emeralds, and machine-gunned five of them to death...
...into a kind of tropical Klondike. Yet many prospectors continue to slip by the army patrols, hole up in caves by day and dig for emeralds through the night with the help of masked flashlights. The army itself is not immune to emerald fever. Says Willis Bronkie, one of Bogota's biggest and most successful emerald dealers: "one of the best jobs in the army is commander of that post out in the zone. I know several men who came back very rich...
...Along Bogota's 14th Street, the trading center for small-time dealers, illegally mined emeralds are openly hawked on the sidewalks or in seedy bars and backrooms. The esmeralderos sell the better gems to major dealers or big international combines, which smuggle them out by light planes from Colombia's hundreds of private airstrips. The biggest emerald buyers by far in recent years have been the Japanese, who have bought an estimated $300 million worth since 1967. Prices for emeralds in Japan have more than doubled in the past two years, and a dealer can be assured...
American policy, he acknowledged, had been "characterized by alternating periods of what some of you have considered intervention with periods of neglect. We are proposing to you a friendship based on equality and on respect for mutual dignity." With U.S. encouragement, the Latin Americans met in Bogota last November to work out an agenda for Mexico City...