Word: escobars
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...dress uniform, complete with ceremonial gilt swords. But Medina's departure was not quite so honorable as it seemed. Colombian police officials have told TIME that Medina was fired on orders from President Virgilio Barco Vargas after the general came under suspicion of being on the payroll of Pablo Escobar Gaviria, patriarch of one of the leading families of the Medellin drug cartel...
...After Escobar narrowly escaped capture in an army raid on one of his estates last year, Colombian officials suspected that he might have been tipped off by Medina. A military surveillance team subsequently was assigned to tail the general. The spying operation reportedly established ties between Medina and both Escobar and another drug baron, Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, nicknamed "El Mexicano." Apparently not certain that the evidence would hold up in court, the government allowed Medina to retire. Two days after Medina's successor, General Miguel Antonio Gomez Padilla, took over, the National Police launched Operation Primavera, the most successful strike...
BCCI denies any pervasive corruption. U.S. Customs officials, though, say the bank laundered $14 million in narcotics funds for its undercover agents and considerably more for real criminals. They allege that BCCI was a greenback laundry for the Medellin cartel, the ruthless Colombian mob controlled in part by Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez that supplies most of the cocaine entering...
...Pablo Escobar Gaviria, generally acknowledged to be head of the Mafia, as the cartel is known locally, became something of a local philanthropist, building a zoo, soccer fields and an entire suburb of low-cost houses that is still called Barrio Escobar. In the manner of feudal serfs, residents in Barrio Escobar refer to their benefactor with cap-doffing deference and slip the Spanish honorific Don in front of his name...
...prosperity to Medellin. "Their money hasn't created much employment because they haven't invested in productive infrastructure," says Juan Gomez Martinez, publisher of Medellin's biggest daily newspaper, El Colombiano (circ. 100,000), and a candidate for mayor. "They have spent a lot of money on imported luxuries." Escobar, for example, is said to have imported gold-plated bathroom fittings for a penthouse he frequently used. His wife had more shoes in her closet, according to local lore, than Imelda Marcos. The penthouse was abandoned by the Escobars last January, after a car bomb blew the side...