Word: cartels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...families relocate to Guadalajara, introduced them to local officials and assigned them bodyguards. In the meantime, the agency, which, among other duties, is charged with keeping tabs on political subversives and works in close contact with the CIA, went after minor traffickers, winnowing down competition to the new Guadalajara cartel. In exchange, the cartel handed over 25% of all its profits...
...drug business was dominated by Mexican marijuana and heroin dealers. Now cocaine has replaced marijuana as the hemisphere's most troublesome -- and most lucrative -- drug, and the Mexicans, though still flourishing, have been surpassed in wealth and political influence by Colombians. In little more than a decade the Medellin cartel -- a small group of men who operate out of Colombia's second largest city -- has come to dominate the cocaine business, as well as the economies and governments of several countries...
...cartel, operating through a wide network of associates, controls a tightly organized enterprise. Coca leaves are grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, where they are turned into a thick paste. The paste is shipped to processing laboratories, most of them in Colombia, where it is converted into the powder that drug users, especially in the U.S., consume. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and the Bahamas are among the favored transshipment points. Profits are usually laundered in Panama and invested...
...cartel, which supplies 80% of the world's cocaine, has come to be recognized as a law unto itself. Its vast financial resources and revenues, which run to the billions, have enabled the cocaine lords to wield immense political power. "Drug money has contaminated the whole system," says Colonel Orlando Pena Angarita, commander of Colombia's investigative police force. "There isn't anywhere that is clean anymore." Reflecting the concern, an antidrug program unveiled in January by Colombia's President, Virgilio Barco Vargas, is called "Decree for the Defense of Democracy...
...Attorney General. Hoyos was gunned down by unidentified men, thought to be in the pay of the drug bosses, after he dismissed two judges and ordered the investigation of five other government officials. He had acted after a local judge released Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, one of the cartel's five leaders, from a Bogota prison. Hoyos was the latest victim in a long list of Colombian officials and prominent citizens killed by the drug brigades. The roster includes a Justice Minister, 21 judges, scores of policemen and soldiers, a newspaper editor and more than a dozen other journalists...