Word: gaviria
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Such debates have their roots in the tenure of the previous Colombian President, Cesar Gaviria Trujillo. His credentials as a drug fighter are undisputed: he ordered the bloody and ultimately successful 17-month campaign against the Medellin cartel. Yet few would 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...
Samper, 43, a former economics minister in the government of President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo, quickly denied that he had taken money from drug lords. His contention was supported by Giraldo, a longtime go-between for the Cali cartel, who said the Cali bosses had offered funds to both the Samper and Pastrana campaigns but were turned down. Colombians were not only skeptical, but angry that the tapes, which had come into President Gaviria's hands several days before the election, were not released earlier...
Copies of the tapes also came into the possession of U.S. officials before the vote, and their decision to take no action ignited a behind-the-scenes flap in Washington. While the State Department went along with Gaviria's decision to withhold the recordings from the public -- "We can't interfere with elections," explained a State Department member -- some officials of the Drug Enforcement Administration were furious. "No one did anything," said one. "They allowed this travesty to take place. Everybody, including the U.S. government, is participating in this cover...
...tapes surfaced June 15, four days before the election, when an unidentified man handed them to Pastrana during a campaign stop in Cali. Exactly who recorded the telephone conversations remains unclear. Pastrana presented them to Gaviria on June 17. The President in turn gave them to Prosecutor-General Gustavo de Greiff, the controversial director of Colombia's antinarcotics effort, to check their authenticity. After his election loss, Pastrana made them public. "Let's bring them out in the open and get to the bottom of it," he said at a news conference. That exercise required some explanation from Pastrana, whose...
...Colombia has shown that there is not any criminal organization that can defeat the nation," President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo told TIME. But few experts believe the Cali cartel, a smooth, sophisticated and low-profile organization, will simply walk away from a monopoly that brings in $9 billion a year. More likely, say several DEA officials, the Rodriguez Orejuelas and other Cali families will mend fences with the surviving members of Escobar's Medellin network, joining together in a supercartel more formidable than anything Colombia has yet seen. "We believe that it's going to be one big happy family down...