Word: escobar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When he was the king of cocaine, the prospect of doing hard time in an American penitentiary was about the only thing that made Pablo Escobar's blood run cold. Living by the motto "Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States," Escobar unleashed a wave of car bombings and assassinations that forced the Colombian government to water down extradition laws. Cowed officials even built Escobar a five-star jailhouse, with a Jacuzzi, discotheque and fake waterfall, for a brief stint behind bars before the drug lord was gunned down by police...
...some unfortunate precedents: Self-proclaimed anti-gang vigilantes became a key part of the civil war in Colombia, where they morphed into paramilitary armies with thousands of members. These groups fought leftist guerrillas and allied with the government to bring down major drug traffickers such as the notorious Pablo Escobar. Many of the paramilitary leaders later confessed they had funded their own activities by dealing drugs, but claimed they virtually stopped anti-social crime in areas under their control. Gustavo Duncan, who authored a book on the Colombian paramilitaries, says similar organizations could emerge in Mexico amid the breakdown...
...displayed courage, tenacity and a willingness - even an eagerness - to mix church and state. He has gone deep into Colombian jungles to mediate between leftist guerrillas and right-wing death squads, and once, while still a bishop, he showed up at the house of cocaine king Pablo Escobar disguised as a milkman. Revealing himself, Castrillón implored Escobar to confess his sins, which, presumably at some considerable length, the vicious gangster did. "Anyone who's had interaction with him will tell you he's an imperious [person] who acts first and worries about the consequences later," says the Vatican official...
...proverbial desert, Father Dario has little in the way of gnostic wisdom to offer the passing hiker, though he does have a funny story about what it's like trying to get through Homeland Security onto a flight to the Middle East when you have the same last name - Escobar - and birthplace - Medellin - as a legendary narco trafficker. "Many people come here because they think I know the future," he says. "I only know one thing: that we all will die." Then he tells me to get married...
Puig's financial records were a mess, and his accountant was a convicted felon with ties to the Colombian drug kingpin, Pablo Escobar. But that never seemed to bother Puig's investors or lenders, who kept showering him with money as long as condo prices kept soaring. It certainly didn't bother Puig, who explained in a recent deposition that he never paid attention to his books, in part because his expertise was in matters like where to advertise property and whether to paint the doors yellow or white, and in part because he never imagined the Florida housing market...