Word: cartelism
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Legions of Colombians adore Uribe for restoring security and a measure of hope to Colombia, which endured four decades of guerrilla war and drug cartel shootouts. But his reelection drive may ultimately damage his legacy. Uribe's implicit message - that without him Colombia would suddenly fall back into chaos - pokes holes in his own argument that things are going along so swimmingly. In turn, his determination to run has kept other highly qualified candidates who share his governing philosophy - like Vargas Lleras and former Defense Minister Juan Manuel Santos - on the sidelines. Thus, if Uribe's reelection drive comes unglued...
...fear may be justified, the loathing less so. Stock-trading in the U.S. was long dominated by a cartel (the NYSE) that charged exorbitant fees and stifled competition. That cozy arrangement began to fall apart in the early 1970s with the birth of the Nasdaq electronic exchange for small stocks. The rapid growth of Nasdaq companies like Intel and Microsoft, coupled with Madoff's poaching of orders from the NYSE in the 1980s and '90s, brought more direct competition. Now things have broken wide open. Nasdaq and the NYSE are still the biggest players, but they must do daily battle...
...cartel is dead and has been replaced by a brutally competitive environment in which the price of trading has plunged. It's a market in which exchanges do constant battle over trading volume. The biggest volume generators at the moment are high-frequency trading firms you've never heard of - GETCO, founded a whopping 10 years ago, is the granddaddy - that try to get ahead of millisecond-by-millisecond price movements and take advantage of rebates paid by exchanges to those who create liquidity (that is, offer to buy or sell stock at a certain price and assume the market...
Mexican law-enforcement triumphs always seem to greet visits by top U.S. officials. When U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder arrived in Mexico City this year, a major drug-cartel kingpin was suddenly arrested. As President Obama met with Mexican President Felipe Calderón this month in Guadalajara, an alleged narcoplot to assassinate Calderón was foiled. Such spectacular collars are laudable, of course, but they're also timed to impress lawmakers in Washington who control hundreds of millions of dollars in U.S. antidrug aid for Mexico...
However, such programs are scarce in Mexico's many provincial prisons, where inmates have almost no help to kick the habits. Most of the 43 riots and 22 escapes this year were in prisons in the arid north of Mexico where the drug trade is concentrated. With thousands more cartel soldiers flooding into these same jails, pundits fear the worst may be yet to come. "Mexico's prisons are a powder keg," wrote syndicated Mexican columnist Hugo Sanchez Gudino. "Sooner or later they are going to explode...