Word: colombianizing
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...officials and their families to leave the country. In Peru, 19 members of a U.S.-sponsored program to eradicate coca bushes in the wilds of the Amazon jungle were killed, four of them, the State Department was told, after being tortured. In Bolivia, intelligence agents discovered that Colombian and Bolivian cocaine traffickers had paid a gunman $500,000 to murder U.S. Ambassador Edwin Corr (the ambassador continues to drive around La Paz, varying his routes and his routine each...
Moreover, as coca production booms, refineries and transshipment centers have been sprouting up throughout the hemisphere. Traditionally, Peru and Bolivia have grown 90% of the world's coca and converted the leaves locally into raw coca paste (see box). Colombians have taken care of 80% of the rest of the business, refining the paste into pure cocaine, then smuggling it into the U.S. As some of the Colombian drug dons have been forced out of their homeland, however, and as coca plants have begun to shoot up in Ecuador and Brazil, refineries have been springing up in Panama, Venezuela, Argentina...
...cocaine trade in Colombia took off in the late 1970s when crime bosses entered the business. Until then, their profits had largely come from smuggling cars, liquor and electronic appliances into the country and sneaking cattle, emeralds and coffee out. Then, it seems, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, an entrepreneur whom Colombian bankers describe as "a self-taught administrator with a genius for organization," convinced Smuggler Fabio Ochoa of the profits to be earned from cocaine. The two took over the domestic industry and sent murderous local toughs, now known as cocaine cowboys, to seize control of the U.S. wholesale market...
Before long, the Colombian cocaine kings had created the largest chemical export operation in South American history. Overseeing the business as if they were heads of a multinational firm, the coqueros transformed a once chaotic industry into a vertically integrated consortium. For the transportation of drugs, they used well-established smuggling pipelines; for their distribution, a North American syndicate stretching from Miami to Vancouver. Escobar united the coqueros into a cartel and even organized a fund to serve as a kind of insurance in the event of raids or losses. The drug dons were also shrewd enough to invest their...
...drug kings to lie low for a while, they were by no means cowed. Within a month of the Lara murder, Entrepreneur Escobar and a few colleagues, claiming to represent a group of coqueros controlling 80% of the drug market, met first with Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, a former Colombian President, and then with Attorney General Carlos Jimenez Gomez in Panama City to offer the Colombian government a deal: in exchange for total amnesty, they said, they would dismantle their illicit empires and repatriate $5 billion into Colombia's troubled economy. The government replied ; that it would accept nothing short...