Word: medellin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...testimony before the subcommittee yesterday afternoon, a Panamanian pilot, his features hidden by a black hood, said Noriega contracted in 1982 with Colombia's Medellin narcotics cartel to protect cocaine shipments flown into Panama en route to the United States. The cartel is said to be responsible for 80 percent of the cocaine imported into the United States...
Colombia's chief prosecutor thus became the latest victim in a vicious battle between the government and a group of billionaire drug traffickers known as the Medellin cartel. Hoyos had advocated the reinstatement of a 1979 extradition treaty with the U.S. that had resulted in the deportation of 16 alleged drug traffickers before Colombia's Supreme Court declared it unconstitutional last year...
After Hoyos was kidnaped, a man claiming to represent the "extraditable ones" told a Medellin radio station that the Attorney General had been executed for "betraying his country" by favoring the treaty. President Virgilio Barco Vargas responded by announcing plans to hire thousands of new policemen and judges and sharply increase sentences for drug-related crimes...
...used bribery, threats and murder to become a law unto itself. Over the past several years, a Justice Minister, scores of policemen, 21 judges and more than a dozen journalists who refused to be bought off have been murdered. In the case of Ochoa, a leader of the Medellin cartel who is wanted in the U.S., Hoyos was investigating a group of officials, including two judges, who are suspected of accepting bribes to help Ochoa walk out of prison. "Who's in control in Colombia?" asks Ann Wrobleski, head of the U.S. State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics Matters...
Hoyos believed that the Medellin cartel could be broken, but he was realistic about the consequences of trying. A year before Hoyos' murder, a former Justice Minister who had been appointed Ambassador to Hungary was tracked down and seriously wounded in Budapest. Said Hoyos at the time: "No one is safe anywhere against the vengeance of the mafia...