Word: cartels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Bolivia and Peru, where the cocaine trail begins, governments have made considerable progress toward cleansing themselves of corruption. While some high-level bribery persists, both governments must convince poor farmers that they should get out of the coca business and give up the $1,000 the cartel pays for each 2.5 acres planted in the leaf. The local poseros, or processors, who grind the leaves into paste, are paid even better, which enables them to . acquire four-wheel-drive vehicles and color television sets. "It is an unbalanced and unfair fight," says Juan Carlos Duran, Bolivia's Interior and Justice...
...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...
Costa Rica, by contrast, seems an unlikely target for the Medellin cartel. The country has no army, is not dominated by greedy generals or politicians, and is proud of a democratic tradition. Yet Costa Rica's ports and its more than 200 rural airstrips have become key transit points for cocaine cargos. In recent years the Costa Rican business community has noticed that shipments of perishable products receive a less rigorous Customs inspection than nonperishable goods upon entering the U.S. Thus they are often used to conceal drugs...
...spotlight may soon shift to Haiti. Leon Kellner, the U.S. attorney in Miami who prepared one of the two pending cases against Noriega, is concluding an investigation of Haitian Colonel Jean-Claude Paul for allegedly helping the Medellin cartel move cocaine into the U.S. Paul, who commands an infantry battalion in Port-au-Prince, is widely regarded as Haiti's most powerful military man. For more than a year Haitian exiles have suspected that the airstrip on Paul's ranch, across a valley from Port-au-Prince, is a refueling point for U.S.-bound cargoes of cocaine. Paul's former...
...grave as Colombia's. Local moguls oversaw marijuana and poppy harvests; many made money; no one got hurt. Then on Feb. 1, when 22 suspected narcotics traffickers were arrested in three Mexican states, it became increasingly clear that Mexico had become yet another way station for Medellin cartel business. Six of the detainees were Colombians believed to be midlevel operatives for the cartel. When Mexican federal police inspected a warehouse the Colombians used in Sonora, they found 100 AK-47 assault rifles, 65,000 rounds of ammunition, 92 bayonets and six infrared night scopes. Said a high- level Mexican official...