Word: cartels
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With its crusade against the Medellin cocaine cartel coming up short, the Colombian government decided to raise the ante. Two months ago, officials offered $625,000 for information leading to the capture of either of the country's two most infamous traffickers: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, 39, and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, 42. Late last week police scored their greatest single victory in their four-month-old war on drugs by trapping and killing one of the two: the notoriously brutish billionaire Rodriguez Gacha. And it didn't cost a cent in reward money...
...Rodriguez Gacha hooked up with Pablo Escobar and the then fledgling Medellin cartel. Gradually he worked his way up to midlevel cocaine dealer, pioneering new routes through Mexico and into the U.S. This, coupled with his fascination for bandito folklore, earned him the nickname El Mexicano. Through the years he financed the import of expensive foreign technology to serve the cartel's needs, and he has been linked to paramilitary death squads...
...drug lords seem to be getting the message. An authorized spokesman for one of the cartels told TIME that Escobar, Gacha and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, don of the Cali cartel, recognize Barco's inflexibility and are waiting for his term to expire next August. Says the source: "They'll try to reason with the next President." But "reason" is surely a euphemism for "control." Through intermediaries, the narcos are putting money behind candidates for President, Congress and mayors of key cities. After election day, the bill will come...
...high-tech game of cat and mouse, the Justice Department said last week that it had found and triggered the freezing of $60.1 million in bank accounts in five countries that contained the personal income of Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a leader of the Medellin cartel. Using financial records and computer disks captured by the Colombian government, U.S. agents traced Rodriguez money to accounts in the U.S., Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria and Britain...
...leaders of the powerful Medellin cocaine cartel have become folk heroes for their ability to escape the relentless pursuit of government security forces. Last week Pablo Escobar Gaviria, 39, a leader of the drug ring that controls 80% of the cocaine entering the U.S., pulled off one of the most impressive getaways. In an operation code named Against the Fortress, some 600 police and army troops raided a ranch 70 miles outside Medellin, but Escobar managed to elude them...