Word: colombianizing
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Displays at the museum begin with the Opium Wars of the 19th century and extend to the bloody confrontations with Colombian cocaine cartels in our day. Elizabeth and 15 of her classmates from Arlington's Washington-Lee High School followed this narrative arc with the help of Fred Smith, who, like most of the museum's docents, is a retired DEA special agent...
...March 4 arrest was dramatic. Gun-toting Drug Enforcement Administration agents stopped a van near Philadelphia and pulled out VICTOR MANUEL TAFUR DOMINGUEZ. Justice Department officials proudly announced he was a fugitive drug trafficker who would be the first Colombian ever extradited from the U.S. to Colombia...
...only human rights activists who are concerned. "The U.S. military is reluctant to be drawn into a counterinsurgency war," says TIME Pentagon correspondent Mark Thompson. "They don't think it's possible to say you're going to go down there and help the Colombian military shoot drug traffickers without shooting at the FARC, and that makes them very nervous. It's a rebellion that's been going on for some 40 years, and it's plainly not going to come to an end soon - the Pentagon fears it's a whirlpool that's going to suck them...
...Part of the problem raised with a policy of fighting drugs by funding the Colombian military is that it avoids the fact that the drug trade has permeated all sides of that war, not only leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries but the armed forces themselves and even the civilian leadership: Pastrana's predecessor, President Ernesto Samper, for example, has been accused of taking some $6 million in campaign contributions from drug barons. "There's general agreement that President Pastrana is pretty clean," says McGirk. "But it's hard to know how deep the corruption in the military goes...
...Cocaine is big business, and its only political allegiance is to those who guarantee it the speediest, safest passage to market. With Colombian government economists calculating that the drug accounts for some 5 percent of the country's GNP, it's a safe bet that even if the U.S. aid package helped the Colombian military eliminate the FARC from the jungles of the south, Colombia's cocaine crop may yet find its way to the ever-hungry U.S. market. The drug war's greatest successes have been to substantially slash cocaine production in Peru and Bolivia, but Colombian expansion...