Word: cartelizing
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Andres Pastrana Arango, a mayoral candidate in Bogota, also ran afoul of the cartel. Two months ago, he was kidnaped from his office and taken, blindfolded, to a hideout near Medellin. After seven days he was released. Police raided the house where he had been held and uncovered a cache of weapons that included more than a dozen U.S.-made AR-15 rifles as well as Austrian-manufactured assault weapons and Israeli Uzi submachine guns. Also found were assorted 9-mm pistols, infrared night-vision scopes and a sniper rifle. "They have the kind of arms you only...
...Bernal Castillo told TIME last month. Bernal, still reeling from the shock of the assassination of Hoyos, who had been his superior, was carrying a pistol in his waistband and was accompanied by a bodyguard. Last week Bernal fled to the U.S. after receiving death threats from the Medellin cartel...
Also last week, Alfredo Gutierrez Marquez, the new Attorney General, shocked law enforcement officials at home and abroad when he suggested that the only way to fight cocaine trafficking was to legalize the drug and possibly negotiate with the cartel. "The fight against drug dealing is useless," Gutierrez asserted. "It's time we stopped playing the fool." Gutierrez's proposal reflects the desperation Colombian officials feel as the drug lords gain strength. More and more Colombian lawyers refuse judicial appointments, fearing they will become marked...
Peasants tell an entirely different story. To them, the drug lords are Robin Hoods, providing housing, roads and money. Pablo Escobar-Gaviria, the acknowledged head of the Medellin cartel, has built soccer fields, a zoo and an entire suburb of low-cost housing. The cartel even fields political candidates. A case in point: Cartel Member Carlos Lehder-Rivas is running for a state legislative seat in this month's elections. Never mind that Lehder is in a Jacksonville jail while on trial for drug trafficking...
...many secluded airstrips make Honduras an ideal transit point. Last November a shipment of mahogany boards arriving in Florida from Honduras was packed with 8,052 lbs. of cocaine. A few days later the Honduran military attache in Colombia, Colonel William Said Speer, was linked to traffickers when Cartel Member Ochoa was arrested while driving Said's $80,000 sports car in Colombia. "The upper echelon of our military has been corrupted," charges a Honduran official...