Word: cartelizing
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...strapped for cash is the Soviet Union? So strapped that Moscow bent its long-standing opposition to apartheid last week by agreeing to sell $5 billion of diamonds over the next five years through an international cartel controlled by South Africa's De Beers Consolidated Mines. A Swiss subsidiary of De Beers will handle the sales and thus permit Moscow to deny that it is dealing directly with South Africa...
...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...
Better coordination is also needed. Last year army troops were closing in on cartel chieftain Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha when an A-37 air force reconnaissance jet buzzed overhead. The aircraft was on an unrelated mission, but it alerted Rodriguez Gacha to the military's presence, and he escaped. And the explosion of narcoterrorism has diverted manpower: half of DAS's 3,000 agents guard politicians and judges whose lives are at risk...
Last month Barco announced a shake-up of the military's top brass. Among other things, an army captain has been sentenced to five years in prison for warning the cartel of upcoming antidrug operations...
...supporting the cartel? Anyone who buys cocaine. But foreign governments help too. Earlier this year, Colombia disclosed that Israel had sold a large consignment of automatic weapons to Antigua, purportedly for its army. The guns wound up on one of Rodriguez Gacha's country ranches, where they were confiscated after his death. Chemicals needed to refine cocaine, once ordered from the U.S. and Western Europe, now come from Brazil and Ecuador, which are also becoming new production centers...