Word: colombians
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...cruel guerrilla leader who helped hold three U.S. military contractors hostage for more than five years was suddenly prostrate on the floor of the helicopter. Colombian Army commandos, disguised as humanitarian aid workers in a sting operation to rescue the prisoners, were pummeling the rebel commandante into submission. One of the hostages on board, Keith Stansell, joined in on the action. The chiseled former U.S. Marine and self-described southern redneck reared back and socked his long-time nemesis in the eye. Then, embracing his now liberated American colleagues, Marc Gonsalves and Tom Howes, Stansell said: "Just one blow...
...dollars are also spent annually to incarcerate each foreign detainee. What's more, for every Don Diego, there are dozens who rarely merit the trouble of extradition. "There is no system to filter the important from the unimportant," says Joaquin Perez, a Miami-based lawyer who defends accused Colombian traffickers. Many of those caught in the net are small-fry - like the smuggler's driver, the document forger or the guy who prepared the box lunches for the crews of the go-fast boats. Once in U.S. custody, many high-level smugglers do cop pleas and then turn...
...generation ago, extradition was aimed at violent kingpins whose cartels threatened the Colombian government's stability. But the kind of narco-terrorism that cost thousands of Colombian lives in that era, and which stemmed largely from the drug lords' determination to erase extradition from the law books, has since been reined in. As for deterrence, even supporters of extradition acknowledge that fallen drug bosses are simply replaced by their ambitious underlings. "We oversold it," concedes Myles Frechette, who as U.S. ambassador in the 1990s pressured Colombian officials to reinstate extradition after it had been banned by the 1991 Constitution...
...mass extraditions have stymied Colombian prosecutors looking into paramilitary massacres and land grabs and hamstrung their efforts to compensate the victims of these crimes. True, the extradited all face lengthy prison terms in the U.S. But because they only have to answer for their drug crimes, the warlord defendants now have little motive for elaborating on their human rights atrocities back in their homeland. Only one has provided Colombian prosecutors with extensive testimony, though teams from the Colombian attorney general's office are in the U.S. this week to try again. "The investigations lost a lot of momentum because...
...Take the strange saga of Boss of Bosses Montoya, who headed the Northern Valley cartel. After he was arrested in 2007, Montoya presented such a security risk that prison officials decided to house him on a Navy ship off Colombia's Pacific Coast. But during his transfer there, clueless Colombian agents picked up the wrong prisoner, a paramilitary warlord known as Don Berna. After the confusion was cleared up, the two dons were eventually extradited...