Word: colombianizing
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This is the Colombian Connection, a network of farmers, smugglers, brokers and fixers that extends more than 5,000 miles from Bogota to the great markets of New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. It owns an armada of ships and planes, and it has recruited an army of bush pilots, seamen, electronics experts, roustabouts and cutthroats. Though the Mafia is starting to move in on this stream of gold, the connection is still operated mainly by Colombians (some 70,000 families are believed to be involved), most of them novices or small-time entrepreneurs. It is by far the largest...
...Colombian marijuana grower gets only about 1% of what his harvest will eventually be worth, $6 per lb., but that is five or six times as profitable as growing coffee, corn or cotton. Despite the fact that the government has begun cracking down (it has burned more than 2,000 tons of marijuana since autumn), it is not inclined to be too harsh on the farmers. Says José Miguel Garavito, the swashbuckling operations officer of the Attorney General's antidrug unit: "It is hard to blame a farmer who is growing corn and earning a few pesos for switching when...
...comes in many varieties. The "catadores, "or crop tasters, report that although Santa Marta Gold is still the most famous of the Colombian line, the Arhuaco Indians in the higher altitudes are growing an even more potent variety of pot: Mona (blond) plants so pale that they look bleached. The Cielo Azul heights produce a pale plant known as Blue Sky Blond, developed as a hybrid two years ago with seeds from Thailand. Even the arid and low-lying fields of the Guajira peninsula, which are irrigated and farmed with tractors, grow a good green grass. The broiling sun forces...
Cocaine, which reaches the U.S. through the Colombian network, often does not originate in Colombia. Most coca shrubs grow in neighboring Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador, where the Indians of the Andes have chewed the leaves for more than 2,500 years. According to legend, the founder of the Inca dynasty, Manco Capac, brought coca to earth from his father, the sun. The Indians used it to dull their hunger, cold and weariness. (When Georgia Pharmacist John Styth Pemberton invented Coca-Cola, he included small amounts of cocaine to "cure your headache" and "relieve fatigue," but the drug was eliminated from...
...money in the Colombian drug operations goes not to those who grow narcotics or process them, but to those who get them to the American consumer. One way to get the drugs out is to fly them from one of the hundreds of clandestine airstrips that have been bulldozed in Guajira peninsula. The Colombian army's map of the region is speckled with 150 pinpoints, but an officer admits, "There are so many illegal airstrips we don't really count them...