Word: colombian
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...told me he is in a hotel room near La Guardia Airport. I don't know what to do." The distraught woman on the other end of the phone line pleaded with Orlando Tobon, or "Don Orlando" as he is known in the tight-knit neighborhood of Colombian immigrants in the Jackson Heights district of New York City...
Tobon knows what to do. For more than 10 years, the Colombian drug lords have been smuggling cocaine by hiring human "mules" to swallow as many as 100 condoms filled with the white powder. Many die en route or during the painful extraction process. And, over the decade, Tobon has received at least 400 calls for help from families of the dead. He tells the woman not to worry. Then he makes the phone calls...
Tobon, 50, immigrated 30 years ago from a small village in the Colombian Andes. He explains that charity runs in his family. His mother was returning from a trip to deliver clothes for the poor in Colombia when she was killed in the Avianca crash on New York's Long Island seven years ago. Tobon is angry at what the drug trade has done to the local community. His tiny travel agency is two doors from the spot where, three years ago, the cartel's killers murdered a reporter for asking too many questions. And then there are the mules...
Most of the hostages were women, including Diana Turbay Quintero, daughter of a former Colombian President. A TV journalist, she imprudently walked into an Escobar trap, taking a film crew with her. Turbay, 40, was killed during a raid by government security forces. The other fatality was 64-year-old Marina Montoya, a former Bogota belle and the sister of a once highly placed Colombian politician; she was executed with six bullets to the head. Her body, clad in expensive underwear beneath a pink sweatsuit, was then dumped in a vacant...
DIED. VIRGILIO BARCO, 75, Colombian President whose social reforms were undercut by his unrelenting war against cocaine barons; of stomach cancer; in Bogota. A former mayor, the owlish-eyed, professorial Barco stammered his way to the presidential palace in 1986. With neither flair nor fanfare, he hunkered down to combat poverty and drugs until his administration was overrun by vengeful cartels...