Word: colombia
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...smuggler's most foolhardy practice is called body packing: they swallow cocaine-filled rubber packets, usually made of fingers snipped from surgical gloves. The carriers, known as mules, gulp down the packets in Colombia with the intention of excreting them in the U.S. The danger to the mule is that a packet may rupture, causing a massive drug overdose. The technique is becoming either safer or less popular. Since late 1980, the Dade County coroner has not come across any body-packing fatalities, after an earlier spate of such deaths. Yet during the past year at Kennedy International Airport...
...depend on coca for their livelihoods, and that the crop generates nearly $1 billion a year for Peru, where the entire national budget is just over $5 billion. But the business is controlled by Colombians. All but a small fraction of cocaine headed for the U.S. comes first to Colombia, generally as a gooey coca paste, for final refining into crystalline white cocaine...
...tends 15,000 coca bushes. He harvests the leaves three times a year and processes them in a bath of gasoline, sulfuric acid, potassium permanganate and ammonia. "You can't blame me if others get poisoned with this stuff," Monroy says. "This is what they pay me for." Colombia's annual per capita income is about $1,150. From his annual end product, 35 lbs. of paste, Monroy nets $65,000. Inflation along this booming stretch of the Guayabero River is understandably rampant: prostitutes can earn $3,000 a month, coffins cost $450 each...
...Colombian government last year seized 16,000 lbs. of refined coke, only about 4% of the amount that leaves the country but more tonnage than was confiscated in the U.S. Persuading Colombia to step up its efforts will be difficult. Explains Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Clyde Taylor: "It is politically hard for them to crack down on coca production if it is seen as reacting to pressure from the U.S. against the poor peasant farmers...
Inland the story is worse. Each year nearly 4.4 million acres of forest are destroyed. In Central America, vast tracts have been converted to pasture land, largely to raise beef for the U.S. market, while natural grasslands in Venezuela and Colombia go largely unused. Still another reason for loss of forests is the in creasing incidence of slash-and-burn agriculture. As impoverished peasants lose their traditional lands to the spreading single-crop plantations, they move higher and higher up forested mountains, clearing away timber for firewood and subsistence farming. In Haiti and Jamaica, the results have been disastrous...