Word: colombianizing
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Even as those probes got under way, investigators in Colombia and Luxembourg examined dealings between Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a leader of the Medellin cocaine cartel who died in a 1989 shootout with police, and a Colombian shadow bank that B.C.C.I. used to launder drug money. Among other things, the probers want to know why Colombian prosecutors slapped B.C.C.I. with a token $10,000 fine after discovering that the shadow bank took in a whopping $45 million in foreign currency in just six months in 1986 -- six times the amount B.C.C.I.'s Colombia branch reported for the entire year...
Superlatives are quickly exhausted: it is the largest corporate criminal enterprise ever, the biggest Ponzi scheme, the most pervasive money-laundering operation and financial supermarket ever created for the likes of Manuel Noriega, Ferdinand Marcos, Saddam Hussein and the Colombian drug barons. B.C.C.I. even accomplished a Stealth-like invasion of the U.S. banking industry by secretly buying First American Bankshares, a Washington-based holding company with offices stretching from Florida to New York, whose chairman is former U.S. Defense Secretary Clark Clifford...
Critics fear the proud father is grooming his children for political office as well. "Someday their sons will rule part of this country," predicts Luis Gabriel Cano, who has succeeded his assassinated brother, Guillermo, as publisher of Bogota's crusading newspaper El Espectador. Unless the Colombian government can now break the hold of the cartel in Cali, Cano's warning may have come too late...
After almost a year on the run with a $400,000 bounty on his head and the largest police dragnet in Colombian history on his tail, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria surrendered quietly to authorities last week. After handing over his pistol to officials on the outskirts of Medellin, he was whisked by helicopter to a special prison in the Andean foothills. There, overlooking his boyhood hometown of Envigado, the man regarded as Colombia's No. 1 drug thug will serve time on as yet unannounced charges...
Still, Escobar will not be doing hard time, a fact that galls U.S. law- enforcement officials, who believe the Colombian government has bent too far to accommodate Escobar's demands in exchange for getting him off the streets. U.S. officials are also exercised by a nine-month-old presidential decree that enables traffickers to plead guilty to minimal charges in exchange for reduced sentences and guarantees that they will never be extradited. Escobar, who faces nine indictments in the U.S., including a murder charge, took no risks: he waited to surrender until after the Constitutional Assembly voted last week...