Word: colombia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cocaine trade in Colombia took off in the late 1970s when crime bosses entered the business. Until then, their profits had largely come from smuggling cars, liquor and electronic appliances into the country and sneaking cattle, emeralds and coffee out. Then, it seems, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, an entrepreneur whom Colombian bankers describe as "a self-taught administrator with a genius for organization," convinced Smuggler Fabio Ochoa of the profits to be earned from cocaine. The two took over the domestic industry and sent murderous local toughs, now known as cocaine cowboys, to seize control of the U.S. wholesale market...
...enough, however, the cocaine czars could afford to send bulk shipments into the U.S. in their own DC-6 aircraft or by high-powered speedboats. By 1983, indeed, the system was running so efficiently that the market was glutted with cocaine, and the wholesale price of a kilo in Colombia plunged from $20,000 to $5,000 (it is now roughly $7,500). All the while, million-dollar bribes, backed often by threats, bought the coqueros official indulgence at home and abroad. "These are vicious people with huge amounts of money at their disposal," says Francis ("Bud") Mullen, head...
Last year, however, the traffickers' seamless system was disrupted when President Betancur declared a state of siege under which suspects could be arrested in Colombia without warrant. Betancur also revived extradition, which he had previously opposed on philosophical grounds. Signaling his determination to pursue even the most powerful of traffickers, he promptly signed an agreement with Washington for the extradition of Cocaine Kingpin Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas, an ultrarightist who is wanted for a host of drug-related crimes in the U.S. In all, Washington has requested the arrests of 85 Colombians for drug-connected offenses...
...drug market, met first with Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, a former Colombian President, and then with Attorney General Carlos Jimenez Gomez in Panama City to offer the Colombian government a deal: in exchange for total amnesty, they said, they would dismantle their illicit empires and repatriate $5 billion into Colombia's troubled economy. The government replied ; that it would accept nothing short of the traffickers' unconditional surrender...
...make the point, the 1,500 men of Colombia's U.S.-supported antinarcotics squad persevered in their search-and-destroy missions and, for a time, scored one spectacular victory after another. In early December, for example, they intercepted more than 550 kilos of high-grade cocaine, packed and readied for shipment at a rambling ranch known as Villa Julia, and flushed it down a sewer in nearby Medellin. Four days later, in northern La Guajira province, squad members came upon 1,054 kilos of pure coke that had been stashed in lunch boxes, leather pouches and even official-looking CARE...