Word: colombianization
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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...
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...
BOOKS . . . NEWS OF A KIDNAPPING: The imps of literary happenstance could not have done better than ?News of a Kidnapping? (Knopf; 291 pages; $25), writes TIME Critic R.Z. Sheppard. It brings together the world?s two best-known Colombians, symbolically locked in a struggle for their nation?s soul. The first is the book?s author, Gabriel Garc?a M?rquez, Nobel prizewinner and one of the greatest living storytellers. The other is the late Pablo Escobar, once head of the Medell?n drug cartel and a terrorist responsible for hundreds of violent deaths. These two men, who achieved international fame and fortune...