Word: cocas
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...intelligence reports estimated that Suarez's coca operations were earning him $400 million a year. In an effort to catch him, U.S. antinarcotics forces launched one of the most elaborate sting operations in the DEA's history. A dozen agents posed as underworld financiers and traffickers. By purchasing $9 million worth of coca paste, they lured two alleged Suarez associates to Miami for the payoff--and arrested them. As a result of the operation, Suarez was indicted by a Miami federal grand jury: so far, however, he has eluded his pursuers. He has also repeatedly denied any involvement...
Worldwide production of illicit opium, coca leaf and cannabis is many times the amount currently consumed by drug abusers. Some governments do not have control of the narcotics growing regions, and prospects in several countries are dampened by corruption, even government involvement in the narcotics trade...
...mafiosos, as they are referred to by Colombian newspapers, with some success. The first four Colombians ever to be extradited to the U.S. appeared in Miami and Washington courts last month. In Peru and Bolivia, however, the U.S. has been largely defeated in its fight to stamp out the coca plant* where it is grown...
Washington's best hope for an effective attack against Peru's coca producers was a U.S.-financed, 220-man force called the Rural Mobile Patrol Unit. Yet hardly had the understaffed and poorly equipped force entered the field than it was shadowed by rumors--all of which it denies--that it was under-reporting drug seizures, making wrongful arrests and openly filching money and goods from peasant homes. In retaliation, guerrilla-directed campesinos bombed police stations and ambushed drug busters. A score of policemen were killed. As the mutinous spirit quickened, the government of President Fernando Belaunde Terry began...
...Even as coca production continues to thrive in Peru and Bolivia, it has also begun to explode in previously undeveloped areas, such as Brazil's Amazon River Basin, a wilderness of lush jungles and rivers that is almost two-thirds the size of the U.S. Three years ago, policemen noticed that relatively primitive Indians were suddenly sporting modern clothes and traveling in motorboats. The peasants, they learned, had been pressured by Colombians into cultivating epadu, a shrubby small tree that can grow in the forest and attain a height of 10 ft. Epadu contains about 40% less active alkaloid than...