Word: medellin
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
With its crusade against the Medellin cocaine cartel coming up short, the Colombian government decided to raise the ante. Two months ago, officials offered $625,000 for information leading to the capture of either of the country's two most infamous traffickers: Pablo Escobar Gaviria, 39, and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, 42. Late last week police scored their greatest single victory in their four-month-old war on drugs by trapping and killing one of the two: the notoriously brutish billionaire Rodriguez Gacha. And it didn't cost a cent in reward money...
...Rodriguez Gacha hooked up with Pablo Escobar and the then fledgling Medellin cartel. Gradually he worked his way up to midlevel cocaine dealer, pioneering new routes through Mexico and into the U.S. This, coupled with his fascination for bandito folklore, earned him the nickname El Mexicano. Through the years he financed the import of expensive foreign technology to serve the cartel's needs, and he has been linked to paramilitary death squads...
President Virgilio Barco Vargas' four-month-old war against his country's top narcos -- Gacha, Pablo Escobar Gaviria and the three brothers of Medellin's Ochoa family -- has not gone as well as he or the nation had hoped. Since Mob hit men assassinated presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan in August and ignited Barco's offensive, the leaders of Colombia's coke cartels have gone into hiding, forfeiting posh estates and bank accounts; some law- enforcement officials believe that the drug princes have even undergone plastic surgery. Nevertheless, Gacha and company remain immensely powerful, with their pipeline...
...coke battle. The blast, which gouged a 30-ft.-deep crater and damaged buildings as far as 40 blocks away, killed at least 52 and injured 1,000. The day before the bombing, a judge involved in prosecuting the drug masters was gunned down while strolling the streets of Medellin. And nine days earlier, the narcos planted a bomb that ripped apart an Avianca jetliner en route from Bogota to Cali, claiming 107 lives. An anonymous caller said the plane had been destroyed because its passengers included five "snitches" -- people who, like the major, had defied the Mob to help...
...high-tech game of cat and mouse, the Justice Department said last week that it had found and triggered the freezing of $60.1 million in bank accounts in five countries that contained the personal income of Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha, a leader of the Medellin cartel. Using financial records and computer disks captured by the Colombian government, U.S. agents traced Rodriguez money to accounts in the U.S., Luxembourg, Switzerland, Austria and Britain...