Word: colombia
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...contrast to all the bloodletting and legal gymnastics that surrounded extradition in the 1980s and '90s, sending Colombian criminal suspects north has of late become an almost everyday ritual. In December, drug lord Diego Montoya - a.k.a. Don Diego, or the Boss of Bosses in Colombia's underworld - was extradited to the U.S., where he had been on the FBI's most-wanted list along with Osama bin Laden. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has dispatched nearly 800 thugs to the U.S. - about two per week - since he was first elected in 2002. That is 10 times more than his predecessor, Andres...
When he was the king of cocaine, the prospect of doing hard time in an American penitentiary was about the only thing that made Pablo Escobar's blood run cold. Living by the motto "Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States," Escobar unleashed a wave of car bombings and assassinations that forced the Colombian government to water down extradition laws. Cowed officials even built Escobar a five-star jailhouse, with a Jacuzzi, discotheque and fake waterfall, for a brief stint behind bars before the drug lord was gunned down by police...
...procedure and one that - like most drug-war tools - has failed to stem the flow of illegal narcotics into the U.S. "Every day we extradite more people, but the problem continues," says Maria Victoria Llorente, director of the Bogotá think tank Ideas for Peace. (While the U.S. says Colombia's cocaine production has decreased from 680 tons in 2002 to 535 tons in 2007, the United Nations says it has increased from 580 tons to 630 in the same period...
...There are certainly some unfortunate precedents: Self-proclaimed anti-gang vigilantes became a key part of the civil war in Colombia, where they morphed into paramilitary armies with thousands of members. These groups fought leftist guerrillas and allied with the government to bring down major drug traffickers such as the notorious Pablo Escobar. Many of the paramilitary leaders later confessed they had funded their own activities by dealing drugs, but claimed they virtually stopped anti-social crime in areas under their control. Gustavo Duncan, who authored a book on the Colombian paramilitaries, says similar organizations could emerge in Mexico amid...
...victory in 1998. So it should have come as no surprise that many Latin American Presidents took issue with Obama's suggestion, in a Univision interview last month, that the Venezuelan leader aids terrorists. After all, last summer Chávez all but disowned Colombia's Marxist FARC guerrillas, declaring unambiguously that violence no longer had a place in the politics of the left in Latin America...