Word: medellin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Andres Pastrana Arango, a mayoral candidate in Bogota, also ran afoul of the cartel. Two months ago, he was kidnaped from his office and taken, blindfolded, to a hideout near Medellin. After seven days he was released. Police raided the house where he had been held and uncovered a cache of weapons that included more than a dozen U.S.-made AR-15 rifles as well as Austrian-manufactured assault weapons and Israeli Uzi submachine guns. Also found were assorted 9-mm pistols, infrared night-vision scopes and a sniper rifle. "They have the kind of arms you only...
With the drug merchants increasingly brazen, Colombia is slipping into the kind of lawlessness that may someday risk comparison with Lebanon's. Last year most of the 3,000 murders in Medellin had to do with drugs. "Our way of life is being threatened," Bogota Prosecutor Francisco Bernal Castillo told TIME last month. Bernal, still reeling from the shock of the assassination of Hoyos, who had been his superior, was carrying a pistol in his waistband and was accompanied by a bodyguard. Last week Bernal fled to the U.S. after receiving death threats from the Medellin cartel...
Peasants tell an entirely different story. To them, the drug lords are Robin Hoods, providing housing, roads and money. Pablo Escobar-Gaviria, the acknowledged head of the Medellin cartel, has built soccer fields, a zoo and an entire suburb of low-cost housing. The cartel even fields political candidates. A case in point: Cartel Member Carlos Lehder-Rivas is running for a state legislative seat in this month's elections. Never mind that Lehder is in a Jacksonville jail while on trial for drug trafficking...
...Colombian imprint deepened when Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran drug dealer, returned from Colombia in 1986 and settled in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Matta, who has been described as a chief contact between the Medellin suppliers and Mexican smugglers, is wanted by the DEA in connection with the 1985 murder in Mexico of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar. In Honduras, which does not allow extradition, Matta is living the good life, flamboyantly dispensing money to the poor who line up outside his palatial estate. His assets are said to amount to more than $1 billion; he reportedly paid...
Costa Rica, by contrast, seems an unlikely target for the Medellin cartel. The country has no army, is not dominated by greedy generals or politicians, and is proud of a democratic tradition. Yet Costa Rica's ports and its more than 200 rural airstrips have become key transit points for cocaine cargos. In recent years the Costa Rican business community has noticed that shipments of perishable products receive a less rigorous Customs inspection than nonperishable goods upon entering the U.S. Thus they are often used to conceal drugs...