Word: colombianizing
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
When General Jose Guillermo Medina Sanchez, 53, retired as head of Colombia's 80,000-member National Police last month, the country's law-enforcement officials turned out in full dress uniform, complete with ceremonial gilt swords. But Medina's departure was not quite so honorable as it seemed. Colombian police officials have told TIME that Medina was fired on orders from President Virgilio Barco Vargas after the general came under suspicion of being on the payroll of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, patriarch of one of the leading families of the Medellin drug cartel...
After Escobar narrowly escaped capture in an army raid on one of his estates last year, Colombian officials suspected that he might have been tipped off by Medina. A military surveillance team subsequently was assigned to tail the general. The spying operation reportedly established ties between Medina and both Escobar and another drug baron, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, nicknamed "El Mexicano." Apparently not certain that the evidence would hold up in court, the government allowed Medina to retire. Two days after Medina's successor, General Miguel Antonio Gomez Padilla, took over, the National Police launched Operation Primavera, the most successful strike...
Shortly after dawn, five helicopter gunships took off from the Palanquero military air base southeast of Medellin. Thirty minutes later, skimming over the treetops of the Colombian jungle, the clattering swarm descended on a ranch outside the Magdalena River town of Puerto Triunfo. Thirty members of Colombia's elite National Police antinarcotics unit jumped from the copters and began searching the grounds. Their eventual payoff: discovery of three complexes containing eight cocaine laboratories. After the raiders methodically burned chemical dumps and bunkhouses, a five-man explosives team blew up brick buildings, generators and 15,000-gal. chemical holding tanks...
...began Operation Primavera, the latest effort by Colombian authorities to destroy the massive cocaine-processing industry that thrives under the green canopy of the country's jungles. By the time the ten-day campaign ended last week, Operation Primavera had become the most successful bust of coke labs in Colombian history, netting a total of 26 plants capable of producing 6.6 tons of the addictive white powder a week. Though the plants never achieved that level of production, the potential output is about three times the demand of the U.S. market. Boasted a senior police official: "This is a bullet...
...from the industrialized nations to the Third World. By participating in this Faustian technology transfer, the drug-consumer nations are, in effect, providing vital raw ingredients for the scourge that bedevils them and that they often blame exclusively on coke-producing countries. "Look at all this equipment," said a Colombian police commander last week, surveying the ruins of a coke lab. "It's almost all from the U.S. And these chemicals come from all over the world. All Latin America supplies are the coca leaves and the labor...