Word: calied
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Only a year ago the Cali kingpins were freely gadding about, unhampered by both the Colombian authorities and the rival Medellin cartel, which died along with its chief Pablo Escobar in 1993. The Cali cartel now handles 80% of the world's cocaine traffic, with a $7 billion gross last year in the U.S. alone. "This is probably the biggest organized-crime syndicate there has ever been," says Thomas Constantine, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "For their impact, profit and control, they're bigger than the Mafia in the U.S. ever was." Santacruz lived as a cocaine baron...
Then last March, the U.S. State Department accused the government of Colombian President Ernesto Samper Pizano of lacking the political will to go after Cali's bosses. Though the State Department stopped short of suggesting that the U.S. cut off aid to Colombia and veto loans from institutions such as the World Bank, the rebuke apparently rocked Samper, whose presidential campaign was alleged to have been partly financed by the cartel...
...recent years, Santacruz has preoccupied himself with countersurveillance. His lieutenants moved about Cali with laptop computers linked, via radio, to a mainframe that contained such information as records of every long-distance call into and out of the city. Old-fashioned, low-tech ruthlessness was not beneath him, however. In addition to allegedly being connected to at least three killings in the U.S., he was the one who established the cartel's draconian methods of policing its own ranks. As insurance, the dealers to whom cocaine is consigned put up not only cash and property, but also human collateral...
...more corporate knowledge in his little finger," says a DEA agent, "than anybody else down there has in his whole body." That's why Santacruz's arrest is seen as wiping out the cartel's trade. "With the capture of Gilberto Rodr?guez Orejuela and Santacruz, the Cali cartel has crumpled," Serrano said. "I think the justice system will give the maximum penalties that a criminal like Santacruz deserves...
Even if his arrest spells the demise of the Cali cartel, few experts believe that this means an end to the business of drug trafficking in Colombia. "The Rodr?guez Orejuelas are going to fall," said William Ram?rez, a political-science professor at the National University in Bogota. "The Scorpions will fall. But there are always going to be others to replace them until you tackle consumption." That, however, is a problem the U.S. must tend to within its own borders...