Word: cartel
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...somewhere in Medellin, and very soon we'll get him." The chief of Colombia's secret police, or DAS, has been offering that prediction for nearly a year. But each time authorities announce that the capture of Pablo Escobar Gaviria is imminent, the overlord of the Medellin drug cartel slithers away. Just last week Escobar managed to elude the police once again after a massive drug raid in the northeastern part of the country. But 11 top advisers of his drug ring, including his brother-in-law, were not so lucky and have been detained...
After 11 months of all-out war, the government of President Virgilio Barco Vargas has damaged but not destroyed Escobar's multibillion-dollar empire. Since last August, when cartel hit men murdered presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan, dozens of cocaine laboratories have been torched, one top drug baron has been killed, hundreds of suspects have been arrested, and more than a dozen extradited to the U.S. In response, Escobar has unleashed a campaign of terror that has claimed some 300 civilian lives. After two successive weekends of violence in Medellin took more than 40 lives, the government two weeks...
...cartel profits remain solid, and Colombia is still the undisputed axis of cocaine trafficking. "It's an extraordinarily exhausting and frustrating fight," says a Western diplomat in Bogota, "and it's nowhere near being over." The stalemate raises questions about the government's inability to defeat the bad guys...
RING AROUND THE MONEY. What country will replace Panama as the world's leading drug-money Laundromat? U.S. law-enforcement agencies are wondering, and so, evidently, are the cocaine cartels. Uruguay, with its stringent bank-secrecy laws, would seem a natural heir. But after Uruguayan officials extradited an accused money launderer and assured the U.S. of further cooperation, cartel financiers began scurrying for alternatives. Among the prospects being watched by investigators: Vanuatu, a Pacific island republic formerly known as the New Hebrides; the Cook Islands, a protectorate of New Zealand; and the island group of Palau, which is about...
Gaviria, 43, owes his victory in part to his willingness to pick up the mantle of antidrug crusaders after his party's leading candidate, Luis Carlos Galan, was gunned down last August by drug-cartel assassins. Thrust unexpectedly into the limelight at the urging of Galan's family, Gaviria emerged as the most vocal of the candidates against the narcotraficantes. "I am a supporter of extradition," says Gaviria, but he wants to use it only as a "last resort...