Word: colombia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...roustabouts and cutthroats. Though the Mafia is starting to move in on this stream of gold, the connection is still operated mainly by Colombians (some 70,000 families are believed to be involved), most of them novices or small-time entrepreneurs. It is by far the largest business in Colombia, providing more revenue than coffee; it is also, astonishingly enough, the largest retail business in Florida. Those who enjoy smoking the weed may regard the traffic as essentially harmless, but wherever the Colombian Connection extends, it spreads violence and corruption...
Although marijuana is its main product, Colombia is also America's chief cocaine supplier, processing paste from the leaves of the coca plant, grown in the Andes, into the snowy-white chic drug of the 1970s. About 2 million Americans pay $20 billion annually for 66,000 lbs. of the stuff, and Colombia provides about 80% of it. It is the fashionable drug among movie stars, pop singers and jet-setters. As Robert Sabbag wrote in Snow Blind, his hip account of the cocaine trade: "To snort cocaine is to make a statement. It is like flying to Paris...
...Colombia, a relatively backward land, become the world's drug provider? One reason is that climate and soil conditions in the Andes are ideal for growing high-quality marijuana. Another is that Guajira is remote and inaccessible, hard to police from Bogota, with a long and irregular Caribbean shoreline that is ideal for smugglers. Still another reason is that after World War II, Colombia was prey to 15 years of civil strife, generally known simply as "La Violencia." That left 200,000 dead and a society habituated to frontier justice and pervasive corruption. There were widespread rumors that government officials...
Until then nobody had any idea of just how big Colombia's marijuana crop was. Former Assistant Attorney General Rodolfo Garcia Ordonez doubted reports that 25,000 acres were being used to grow marijuana. To disprove what he considered wild overestimates, he took a three-day helicopter tour of the northern provinces and made a "strict calculation." His final report: the weed was flourishing on not 25,000 but about 250,000 acres in Guajira. Perhaps 50,000 more acres are cultivated in the southern plains. "I was shocked," he said. "No one thought the problem could be of such...
Cocaine, which reaches the U.S. through the Colombian network, often does not originate in Colombia. Most coca shrubs grow in neighboring Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where the Indians of the Andes have chewed the leaves for more than 2,500 years. According to legend, the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, brought coca to earth from his father, the sun. The Indians used it to dull their hunger, cold and weariness. (When Georgia Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, he included small amounts of cocaine to "cure your headache" and "relieve fatigue," but the drug was eliminated from...