Word: colombia
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When General Jose Guillermo Medina Sanchez, 53, retired as head of Colombia's 80,000-member National Police last month, the country's law-enforcement officials turned out in full dress uniform, complete with ceremonial gilt swords. But Medina's departure was not quite so honorable as it seemed. Colombian police officials have told TIME that Medina was fired on orders from President Virgilio Barco Vargas after the general came under suspicion of being on the payroll of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, patriarch of one of the leading families of the Medellin drug cartel...
Shortly after dawn, five helicopter gunships took off from the Palanquero military air base southeast of Medellin. Thirty minutes later, skimming over the treetops of the Colombian jungle, the clattering swarm descended on a ranch outside the Magdalena River town of Puerto Triunfo. Thirty members of Colombia's elite National Police antinarcotics unit jumped from the copters and began searching the grounds. Their eventual payoff: discovery of three complexes containing eight cocaine laboratories. After the raiders methodically burned chemical dumps and bunkhouses, a five-man explosives team blew up brick buildings, generators and 15,000-gal. chemical holding tanks...
...seizure of unprecedented quantities of chemicals used in the manufacture of cocaine. The cache included 417,095 gal. of ether acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and 95 tons of potassium permanganate -- enough chemicals to make 104 tons of cocaine, a third of the estimated annual cocaine output of Colombia, Bolivia and Peru combined...
...some cases the drums were stacked 15 ft. high, creating Andean peaks of testimony to the proportions of the smuggling operation. Ethyl ether, for example, is essential to the final processing of cocaine base into a white hydrochloride powder. The manufacture of ethyl ether has been outlawed in Colombia, and importation is closely regulated. A 55-gal. drum of ethyl ether that sells for $500 in the U.S. fetches more than $12,000 in Colombia. Says Alfonso Barragan, president of the Colombian Society of Chemical Engineers: "The Colombian black market in chemicals probably has a higher profit margin than that...
Authorities may be able to trace at least some of the U.S.-produced chemicals seized in Colombia over the past two weeks. The contraband included containers marked with the logos of Dow Chemical Co. and Union Chemical Corp. Both companies are among major U.S. chemical producers who have agreed to cooperate with the DEA in seeking to ascertain the final destination of the chemicals before allowing them to leave the country. In the case of the chemicals seized in Colombia, however, most of the batch numbers on labels had been scratched off by knife blades. Given how successful drug lords...