Word: colombian
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Lebanon is teetering on the edge of chaos. A car bomb last month killed six Spanish and Colombian U.N. peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, the first attack against the force, known as UNIFIL, since it was enlarged at the end of last summer's war. In Nahr al-Bared, a Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, the national Army remains locked in a brutal six-week confrontation with militants inspired by al-Qaeda. And a series of bomb attacks and the assassination of a Sunni politician last month underscore the deep divisions tearing apart this tiny country. Those divisions have steadily...
...contingents comprising the peacekeeping force known as UNIFIL have good cause for concern. Last month, six Spanish and Colombian UNIFIL soldiers were killed in a bomb ambush, the deadliest attack against the peacekeeping mission in its 29-year history. In a video message released this week, Al-Qaeda deputy leader Ayman al-Zawahiri hailed the attack as "a response against those invading Crusader forces who were occupying a beloved part of the land of Islam". And, UNIFIL officials fear, given the worsening security situation in Lebanon, there could be more attacks on the way. "The major difficulty we are going...
...wholesales for about $40,000 in Spain - roughly double the U.S. price. (In Russia and Norway, one kilogram can fetch up to $120,000.) Divided into street-sized amounts, a kilogram can earn five times those figures. Since moving in on Europe in the mid-'90s, the cartels - overwhelmingly Colombian, but also Venezuelan and Mexican - have hugely ramped up operations...
Last September the judicial police raided one of the Colombian-rented houses in Bissau and found 674 kg of high-grade cocaine. They drove the drugs and the two Colombian tenants to the police lockup, says Gabriel Madjanhe Djedjo, the judge who handled the case. Within an hour of the arrests, he says, military officers surrounded the compound, demanding the drugs and threatening to shoot their way in. The police relented, and the soldiers loaded the cocaine - stored in 1-kg packets - onto a pickup truck and drove it to the crumbling Treasury building, where they placed...
...destination country hardest hit by the new drug pipeline is Spain. Cocaine has flooded into Spain on smuggling boats, some of which use the same extensive networks that carry illegal migrants. Officials believe that Colombian cartels have long-standing connections in Spain, based partly on their shared language, and that smugglers have converted their old hashish trade into more lucrative cocaine operations. "They are taking advantage of the old marijuana routes into southern Spain," says Matilde Duque, spokeswoman for Spain's Ministry of Health antidrug plan. "The infrastructure is already in place. They are just changing the cargo." Last year...