Word: medellin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...brings together the world's two best-known Colombians, symbolically locked in a struggle for their nation's soul. The first is the book's author, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Nobel prizewinner and one of the greatest living storytellers. The other is the late Pablo Escobar, once head of the Medellin drug cartel and a terrorist responsible for hundreds of violent deaths...
...became one of the most corrupt in the region, long known for sheltering traffickers in armaments and drugs. According to U.S. intelligence sources, Bird's son Vere Jr. has been tied to a 1990 plot to establish a school that would train mercenaries to fight for the Medellin cartel. He was also involved, they say, in covert gun shipments to the cartel through Antigua, Panama and Colombia. U.S. investigators contend that the Bird dynasty--the current Prime Minister is Vere's son Lester--continues to look the other way as traffickers operate. Another son, Ivor Bird, was convicted last year...
Only a year ago the Cali kingpins were freely gadding about, unhampered by both the Colombian authorities and the rival Medellin cartel, which died along with its chief Pablo Escobar in 1993. The Cali cartel now handles 80% of the world's cocaine traffic, with a $7 billion gross last year in the U.S. alone. "This is probably the biggest organized-crime syndicate there has ever been," says Thomas Constantine, head of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. "For their impact, profit and control, they're bigger than the Mafia in the U.S. ever was." Santacruz lived as a cocaine baron...
Since the demise of the Medellin cartel in 1993 with the death of Escobar, Cali has had a stranglehold on the cocaine market. Unlike the Medellin operatives, the Cali drug lords preferred bribery to violence for controlling state officials. The Rodriguezes' counterintelligence operations have been impressively sophisticated as well. In 1991 DEA and U.S. Customs Service agents watching fence posts filled with cocaine being off-loaded in Miami were stunned to discover that Cali agents were watching them watch the fence posts. Last year Colombia seized a cartel computer with an unbreakable code encrypting its files. The computer was being...
Such debates have their roots in the tenure of the previous Colombian President, Cesar Gaviria Trujillo. His credentials as a drug fighter are undisputed: he ordered the bloody and ultimately successful 17-month campaign against the Medellin cartel. Yet few would deny the vast, perhaps controlling influence of surviving drug lords. While the Medellin cowboys attempted reign by Uzi, shooting four presidential candidates in 1989, the Rodriguezes and fellow members of their cartel are known as the gentle dons. They rely on the quiet clout that a profit estimated by DEA at $7 billion a year can buy. The money...