Word: medellin
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After almost a year on the run with a $400,000 bounty on his head and the largest police dragnet in Colombian history on his tail, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria surrendered quietly to authorities last week. After handing over his pistol to officials on the outskirts of Medellin, he was whisked by helicopter to a special prison in the Andean foothills. There, overlooking his boyhood hometown of Envigado, the man regarded as Colombia's No. 1 drug thug will serve time on as yet unannounced charges...
Although the Medellin cartel is experiencing a meltdown, there is no guarantee that Escobar will not continue to deal in drugs from behind bars. "Ironically, coming out of hiding could help him to reorder a business that became difficult to manage on the lam," says a Bogota-based U.S. narcotics expert. Skeptics say that Escobar could be free in as little as three years. That may be just the rest a tired don needs to resuscitate himself and his cartel...
...reporter who covers crime knows that when the flash-bang goes off at the front door, the SWAT team is storming the back door," says correspondent Elaine Shannon. And so, when Pablo Escobar Gaviria, the ferocious leader of the Medellin drug cartel, surrendered to authorities in Colombia last week, Shannon knew that the real story lay elsewhere. "Escobar is a terrific sound- and-light show," she says. "But people of such towering stupidity always flame out." In her eyes, the group to watch is the Cali cartel. And, as deftly laid out by her in one of this week...
...look at organized-crime groups the way I might analyze companies in which I am considering investing," says Shannon, who has kept tabs on the Cali group since 1984. "Medellin had more wholesale and retail outlets, but the organizations were sloppy and high-handed. Cali, on the other hand, is always finding new ways to handle high volume with efficiency and security. They're like Detroit and the Japanese automakers used...
...With Medellin's drug dons behind bars, the scepter passes to the Cali cartel...