Word: latinization
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...Latin American drug lords faced one big hurdle in targeting the European market: geography. Europe is thousands of kilometers from Colombia, Bolivia and Peru - home to the world's entire crop of coca leaves, from which the white powder of cocaine is refined. And Europe's sophisticated airport security systems and coastal patrols have made it tough to ship massive volumes of cocaine undetected. That means the cartels need transit points where they can store the huge amounts of the drug that they have moved across the Atlantic. It can then be divided among hundreds of smugglers who can individually...
Colombians began to rent houses in Bissau in 2004, declaring themselves exporters of fish or cashew nuts, while in reality coordinating industrial-sized shipment and storage of cocaine from Latin America. One afternoon, an undercover detective drives me around Bissau to point out the mansions where the Colombians live. Erected on dirt lanes, they have Romanesque columns, walls with kitsch pastoral mosaics, and satellite dishes on their Spanish-style tiled roofs...
...last 10 years, Ines Ligron has been ordering young Japanese women to strip, walk tall, free their inner woman and wear lots and lots of makeup in an effort to seriously compete in the Miss Universe beauty pageant. And compete they have. The contest, long monopolized by Latin America's goddess industry, has now seen three of Ligron's frightened girls make it into the top five, including a first runner-up last year and, most spectacularly, 21-year-old dance student Riyo Mori, who two weeks ago won the title of Miss Universe 2007 and brought back...
...with her east Asian facial features she has snagged more than 100 magazine pages and was chosen to be the spokesperson for a popular shampoo Asience, which celebrates Asian beauty (other endorsers include the Chinese actress Ziyi Zhang). However, Miss Universe Mori fits the more statuesque, chiseled mold of Latin American and southeast Asian beauties. When a Japanese sports daily mistakenly published Miss Thailand's picture as Mori - and blundered in its apology by claiming the photo was of Miss Korea - local tabloids, instead of faulting the newspaper, criticized Ligron's crowning achievement for having a homogeneous beauty pageant look...
Although McNamara's speech was entirely in Latin, the audience picked up on his mannerisms and eagerness, complementing his oration with chuckles and cheers...