Word: guajira
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reported on Latin American drug trafficking for the past 20 years, first from Mexico City and now from Miami, one of the main U.S. entry points for cocaine. Says he: "From Mexico's Sierra Madre, where I covered opium-eradication programs in the 1970s, to Colombia's La Guajira Peninsula, which I visited late last year, the mark of the drug trade is the littered wreckage everywhere of smugglers' planes that didn't make it." The drug trade has apparently also wrecked the image of Colombians. Says Diederich: "A Colombian told me that because of the way U.S. Customs officials...
...scored one spectacular victory after another. In early December, for example, they intercepted more than 550 kilos of high-grade cocaine, packed and readied for shipment at a rambling ranch known as Villa Julia, and flushed it down a sewer in nearby Medellin. Four days later, in northern La Guajira province, squad members came upon 1,054 kilos of pure coke that had been stashed in lunch boxes, leather pouches and even official-looking CARE packages...
...Navy vessels across a wide sweep of the Caribbean to intercept the huge shipments of marijuana that are transported from Colombia to the U.S. at the conclusion of the pot harvest in November and December. The elaborate strategy called for Colombian soldiers to move against marijuana traffickers in the Guajira Peninsula, between the Gulf of Venezuela and the Caribbean. With Venezuelan and Panamanian soldiers guarding their respective borders, the smugglers would be forced to ship out the marijuana. At sea in the Caribbean, they were to be met by American vessels. The pot would be confiscated and the smugglers arrested...
...best magazine reporting from abroad, for their work on last year's cover story "The Colombian Connection: Billions in Pot and Coke." Neff interviewed drug enforcement officials in New York, Miami and Bogotá, and surveyed by small plane the clandestine airstrips and marijuana plantations of Colombia's remote Guajira province. "We got shot at when we flew too low," says Neff. "They probably thought we were hijackers after their crop." Isaacson, who wrote the story, haunted seedy cafes in New York City's Jackson Heights to talk with distributors at the other end of the "Colombian connection...