Word: escobar
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...walled Old Town. If they had heard of Cartagena at all, it was only as the backdrop of the classic 1980s romantic caper Romancing the Stone, a place of corrupt juntas and bodice-ripper-reading drug dealers - a parody turned deadly serious by four decades of civil war, Pablo Escobar and cocaine cartels. But what my friends - who spent their vacations standing in line at Space Mountain or screaming down the Atlantis waterslide - failed to realize is that Cartagena has become one of the Caribbean's most charming hidden gems...
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...
...surprisingly, the political ABCs often trump purely judicial considerations. In the post-Escobar era, paramilitary commanders emerged as some of Colombia's most dangerous narco-criminals. By deftly holding the sword of extradition on drug charges over their heads, Uribe convinced dozens of these warlords to turn themselves in and demobilize their troops. Those who cooperated and confessed were eligible for light sentences. But soon these death-squad leaders began implicating political allies of the President, including lawmakers, army officers, the government's spy chief and even Uribe's cousin, who was forced to resign from the Senate...
...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...