Word: colombia
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Even for a country so security-minded that it assigned 1,300 soldiers to protect the contestants in a beauty pageant last year, Colombia's precautions for this week's antidrug summit are extraordinarily tight. Though a spokesman for the drug cartels against which Colombia has been waging an all-out war promised that they would not make trouble, the government is taking no risks. Hundreds of Colombian and U.S. undercover agents disguised as beach vendors, taxi drivers, bellboys and happy-go-lucky tourists are prowling the Caribbean resort city of Cartagena, where George Bush and the leaders...
...while the pomp and preparations make it appear that a momentous new phase of the war on the drug lords could be at hand, the reality is probably otherwise. For all the bold talk of hammering out a coordinated antidrug assault by the U.S., Bolivia, Colombia and Peru, not much is likely to happen until the post-Panama cooling of Washington's relationship with many Latin nations is reversed...
...Boeing 707 had been delayed fully 89 minutes in various holding patterns on its scheduled five-hour flight from Medellin, Colombia, to New York. Bad weather had stalled 248 other planes heading for Kennedy that day; in the two hours before the Avianca disaster, 33 pilots chose to land at other airports. The Avianca crew reported it did not have enough fuel to reach its designated alternate, Boston. Apparently because of high winds and low clouds, the plane missed its first landing attempt at Kennedy. It crashed on its second approach when all four engines failed, almost certainly for lack...
Human error is likely to be cited when investigators complete their probe of the accident. They must determine if enough fuel was loaded in Colombia in the first place. Under international regulations an airliner must carry enough fuel to reach its destination as well as its assigned alternate, plus enough extra to handle at least 45 minutes of delays...
...crash of Avianca Flight 52 on Long Island's North Shore, which killed 72 of the 161 people aboard, was the first major air disaster in the U.S. since the United Airlines DC-10 crash in Iowa last July that killed 111. But for Colombia's national airline, it was the third serious mishap in eleven months. Counting last November's terrorist bombing of a Boeing 727, the disasters have taken 279 lives...