Word: medellin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...mountainside overlooking Medellin, Colombia, some of South America's poorest families have been uprooted from the garbage dumps where they once foraged and deposited in 4,000 neat, red-tiled homes. At the entrance to the housing development, a large billboard proclaims the author of this generosity: PABLO ESCOBAR GAVIRIA, a local billionaire who has been called one of the world's richest men. Escobar is also one of the world's richest fugitives. Last week a federal grand jury in Miami announced that Escobar and four other Medellin tycoons had been indicted because of the source of their immense...
...grand jury charged that since 1978, Escobar and his confederates have smuggled into the U.S. at least 58 tons of cocaine from facilities like Tranquilandia, a massive complex of coke-processing laboratories in the Amazon jungle that Colombian authorities busted in 1984. The Medellin drug barons were also indicted for plotting the murder of Adler ("Barry") Seal, a drug ( smuggler turned informant who was gunned down last February in Baton Rouge, La. Seal was to have been the Government's star witness in the trial of the cocaine kingpins...
Considering the billions of dollars the five bosses -- known collectively as the Medellin Cartel -- are believed to possess, they should have no shortage of safe havens. Nor has there been any short circuiting of the cartel's power. Last week, on the outskirts of Bogota, Colombia, a squad of four killers assassinated Colonel Jaime Ramirez, the respected chief of that country's antinarcotics force who led the highly successful Tranquilandia raid...
...destroy missions and, for a time, 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...
Answering this question has divided the Latin American church. The struggle harks back to 1968, when the second Latin American Bishops' Conference met in Medellin, Colombia. A liberal minority at the conference won approval of a series of documents supporting the church's newly stated "preferential option for the poor," which denounced "institutionalized violence" and other social ills, thus providing the opening wedge for liberation theology. In the '70s, as armed insurrection and military dictatorship spread across Latin America, liberation theology took on a more explicitly political dimension. The radical fringe of liberation theology eventually seemed to find its model...