Word: colombianization
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...hard to think of anyone who could resist the call of today's roaring bull market. So when agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration set out to crack a Colombian cocaine ring three years ago, they opened a fully licensed--but also fully bogus--brokerage in suburban Atlanta to get inside the drug world. Even though the customers never made a single stock trade--double-digit stock gains are paltry in contrast to 400% returns on cocaine--the sting paid off last week with federal indictments of five Colombians, who are believed to have ties to the Cali drug cartel...
...played out, agents picked up drug funds in gym bags, luggage and boxes on the streets of such cities as New York, Dallas, Madrid and Rome. Then, with the help of black-market money changers in Colombia, the dollars were converted into pesos and deposited into the traffickers' Colombian accounts. But much to the dismay of the brokerage firm's clients, their gains turned out to be purely short term...
...carnage is a sign of an epic shift in the drug business. From the early 1970s until a couple of years ago, if you went out on the streets of New York City to score cocaine, you'd look for a Colombian trafficker or a Dominican who dealt with a Colombian. Nowadays, you're just as likely to find yourself face-to-face with a Mexican. Your dealer's ethnic roots probably won't matter to you so long as the product is as advertised. But to DEA agents, the decline and fall of Colombia's once impregnable Cali cartel...
...kingpins like Amado changed all that. He fancied himself the Bill Gates of Mexican drug traffickers--a visionary who earned the nickname "Lord of the Skies" for the multiton shipments of Colombian cocaine he received in Boeing 727s. When he died in 1997 after botched plastic surgery, DEA agents were skeptical that his brother Vicente would last as the successor head of the Juarez syndicate. But in Vicente's favor, says a U.S. agent, "he's vicious...
Because of threats and imminent danger, seven to 10 prominent Colombian journalists are now in exile. But Cavalier said the nation's press struggles to remain undaunted...