Word: medellins
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...shelter of palm fronds - has led to major rejoicing in the country's war on drugs. Daniel Rendon Herrera, alias "Don Mario," allegedly headed a vast narcotrafficking operation, run largely out of the country's northwest, that caused a surge in drug violence in the nearby city of Medellin. The activities of his drug empire were allegedly responsible for 3,000 deaths in the last 18 months alone...
...Vietnam sparked an intense outcry, but by 1975 attention had turned to Colombia's cocaine industry. When Colombian authorities seized 600 kilos of cocaine hidden in everything from shoeboxes to a dog cage containing a live dog, drug traffickers retaliated by killing 40 people in one weekend. Nicknamed the "Medellin Massacre" after the city at the center of Colombia's drug trade, the murders ignited years of raids, kidnappings, and assassinations (a 1985 Medellin cartel "hit list" even included names of U.S. businessmen, embassy members and journalists...
...heyday of the Medellin and Cali cartels, motorcycle-mounted assassins shot down judges and witnesses while kingpins ran their drug empires from behind bars. Now Colombia has a modern maximum-security prison to lock down high-risk criminals. The judiciary, in turn, has switched from a written system to oral and accusatory trials similar to those in U.S. courts, making it harder for narcos to manipulate the proceedings. Still, many law-enforcement experts vigorously defend extradition as narco-traffickers now try to rig the system in more subtle ways. Last year, Guillermo Valencia Cossio, chief government prosecutor for Medell...
...Dario has little in the way of gnostic wisdom to offer the passing hiker, though he does have a funny story about what it's like trying to get through Homeland Security onto a flight to the Middle East when you have the same last name - Escobar - and birthplace - Medellin - as a legendary narco trafficker. "Many people come here because they think I know the future," he says. "I only know one thing: that we all will die." Then he tells me to get married...
...terror against civilians echoes a tactic used by Colombian drug gangs, who have long sold their cocaine to the Mexican crime families. During the 1980s and 1990s, the Medellin cartel responded to a government crackdown by killing hundreds of civilians with bombs placed on street corners, cars and even one passenger jet. Mexican gangs first started using bombs last February, when an alleged hitman blew himself up in a botched attempt on a police official. In July, two botched car bombs caught fire in the northern state of Sinaloa. The drug gangs have long used grenades in fighting with police...