Word: deas
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...diplomats argue that putting too much emphasis on drugs is parochial and that the DEA often gets manipulated by corrupt governments. The junta, they say, set up splashy drug busts for the Americans that traffickers were happy to treat as a cost of doing business. "The DEA," says an intelligence source,"was being played for a patsy by a bunch of Burmese military folks who were getting a cut of the action...
Sources familiar with the Inspector General's investigation say the former CIA station chief absolutely denies wiretapping Horn. For his part, Huddle says "there's absolutely no truth whatsoever in Horn's allegations." Personality clashes played their part: a State Department colleague calls Huddle "a little martinet," while a DEA buddy admits that Horn is "sometimes pigheaded." But the core of the fight in Burma was a vexing question of policy: How intimate should Washington be with a vicious regime to win its help on curbing drugs...
...They would submit only to a set of Colombian laws passed last year offering extreme leniency to drug kingpins who give up. They expected protection under a 1988 Colombian Supreme Court ruling making extradition unconstitutional, especially to the U.S. where Gilberto faces charges of drug dealing and threatening a DEA employee with death. To assure such immunity, Gilberto, whose nickname is "the Chess Player," insisted that any deal "would have to be endorsed...
...deny the vast, perhaps controlling influence of surviving drug lords. While the Medellin cowboys attempted reign by Uzi, shooting four presidential candidates in 1989, the Rodriguezes and fellow members of their cartel are known as the gentle dons. They rely on the quiet clout that a profit estimated by DEA at $7 billion a year can buy. The money saturates the Colombian economy: the narcobosses are thought to own 30% of the country's best farmland and a substantial share of the Colombian stock market...
Some U.S. analysts claim they have purchased at least as big a chunk of the government. Recently retired Bogota DEA chief Joe Toft says narcodollars have influenced "from 50% to 75% of the Colombian Congress." The traffickers have also bought an unknown number of prosecutors, policemen and soldiers. But "their most significant victory," claims a U.S. diplomat, was the surrender program for retiring dons. "The Cali cartel dictated the penal-code reform," he says. Under the 1993 code revisions, drug traffickers who turn themselves in can have their sentences reduced by as much as two-thirds at the discretion...