Word: colombianization
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Bissau had the money to paint a sign for arriving visitors, it might read: welcome to the world's newest narco state. This small country in West Africa is such a perfect base for cocaine operations that it could have been designed by Pablo Escobar himself. Escobar and other Colombian drug lords poured untold tons of cocaine into the United States in the 1980s, setting off a narcotics epidemic across urban America, and leading to drug wars which have taken decades and billions of dollars to combat. (See TIME's photo-essay "Guinea-Bissau, the World's First Narco-State...
...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...
...chief prosecutor Mario Iguar?n, who met this week in Washington with Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez, has said he might seek the extradition of top Chiquita officials to stand trial here. Uribe himself has said he would like to see those responsible for the Chiquita payments to the AUC face Colombian justice...
...Human rights campaigners also complain that the U.S. has not aggressively pursued U.S. financiers of the Colombian paramilitary groups on its own list of terrorist organizations. "It wasn't like this was an aggressive investigation," said Kovalik. Chiquita came forward with information about the payments, and the case "sort of fell in the lap of the Justice Department so they had to do something," he said...