Word: bolivia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Latin America's cocaine and marijuana czars have extended the scope and volume of their operations well beyond what Southeast and West Asia's more established opium lords ever dreamed of. Greasing palms and, when necessary, using the gun, the drug barons have spawned corruption from Bolivia to the Bahamas, and in more than one country are threatening to supplant elected government as the reigning power. Warns John Kerry, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads a Senate panel that is investigating the problem: "There is a whole new force in our hemisphere. The power of the narcodollar is buying countries...
...main threat to the region's fragile governments. The tentacles of the narcotraficantes reach up to top officials and down to lowly policemen. With a wink and a nod from cooperative judges and prison officials, notorious narcotics peddlers have strolled out of jails in Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia. Customs and immigration officials in Costa Rica and the Bahamas look the other way as some of the hemisphere's most wanted men have walked from their private planes to waiting limousines. Police and military officials in Honduras and Panama have tipped off traffickers to impending raids. Efforts to slow the trade...
...cartel, operating through a wide network of associates, controls a tightly organized enterprise. Coca leaves are grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, where they are turned into a thick paste. The paste is shipped to processing laboratories, most of them in Colombia, where it is converted into the powder that drug users, especially in the U.S., consume. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and the Bahamas are among the favored transshipment points. Profits are usually laundered in Panama and invested...
...Bolivia and Peru, where the cocaine trail begins, governments have made considerable progress toward cleansing themselves of corruption. While some high-level bribery persists, both governments must convince poor farmers that they should get out of the coca business and give up the $1,000 the cartel pays for each 2.5 acres planted in the leaf. The local poseros, or processors, who grind the leaves into paste, are paid even better, which enables them to . acquire four-wheel-drive vehicles and color television sets. "It is an unbalanced and unfair fight," says Juan Carlos Duran, Bolivia's Interior and Justice...
...indictments came at a time when the U.S. campaign against the Latin drug trade is being sorely tested. Four of the region's countries -- Mexico, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia -- are on the U.S. Government's list of seven "big producer" states targeted for maximum surveillance (the other three: Pakistan, Burma, Thailand). Latin America produces all the cocaine and nearly all the marijuana consumed in the U.S., dominating the illicit $130 billion-a- year market...