Word: colombian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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With its crusade against the Medellin cocaine cartel coming up short, the Colombian government decided to raise the ante. Two months ago, officials offered $625,000 for information leading to the capture of either of the country's two most infamous traffickers: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, 39, and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, 42. Late last week police scored their greatest single victory in their four-month-old war on drugs by trapping and killing one of the two: the notoriously brutish billionaire Rodriguez Gacha. And it didn't cost a cent in reward money...
...wild chase, Rodriguez Gacha's son Fredy, 17, ultimately -- and unwittingly -- led more than 1,000 police and marines to his father. Fredy was arrested last August when the Colombian army raided Rodriguez Gacha's ranch north of Bogota. His alleged crime, possession of illegal weapons, was relatively minor, but police held Fredy longer than most unindicted prisoners, hoping to put pressure on Rodriguez Gacha...
...mouse, the Justice Department said last week that it had found and triggered the freezing of $60.1 million in bank accounts in five countries that contained the personal income of Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a leader of the Medellin cartel. Using financial records and computer disks captured by the Colombian government, U.S. agents traced Rodriguez money to accounts in the U.S., Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria and Britain...
...Rodriguez's purported financial advisers, Panama-based Mauricio Vives, tried desperately to keep moving the money one step ahead of the agents. Vives called a British banker and told him to move several million dollars, fast, to an account in Luxembourg. If the bank were to delay, his Colombian client would kill him, Vives pleaded. The banker refused, and British authorities cooperating with the DEA froze the account. Not all countries were as helpful. U.S. agents said they tracked Rodriguez's money to the Cayman Islands, Spain and Montserrat, but local authorities said they could not cooperate, citing rigid bank...
Financial experts are beginning to recognize that Washington will be unable to control drug money unless the U.S. compels offshore financial institutions to make their books "transparent" enough to show the true owners of the money. In the end, the Colombian drug cartels are about to force the world to re-examine the international financial system that has developed haphazardly over the 60 years since the Swiss first popularized secret banking. Countries may not yet be willing to make their banking transactions fully "transparent," but some light must be shed on everyone's books. Says Kerry: "It will take significant...