Word: medellins
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Peasants tell an entirely different story. To them, the drug lords are Robin Hoods, providing housing, roads and money. Pablo Escobar-Gaviria, the acknowledged head of the Medellin cartel, has built soccer fields, a zoo and an entire suburb of low-cost housing. The cartel even fields political candidates. A case in point: Cartel Member Carlos Lehder-Rivas is running for a state legislative seat in this month's elections. Never mind that Lehder is in a Jacksonville jail while on trial for drug trafficking...
...Colombian imprint deepened when Ramon Matta Ballesteros, a Honduran drug dealer, returned from Colombia in 1986 and settled in the capital city of Tegucigalpa. Matta, who has been described as a chief contact between the Medellin suppliers and Mexican smugglers, is wanted by the DEA in connection with the 1985 murder in Mexico of DEA Agent Enrique Camarena Salazar. In Honduras, which does not allow extradition, Matta is living the good life, flamboyantly dispensing money to the poor who line up outside his palatial estate. His assets are said to amount to more than $1 billion; he reportedly paid...
Costa Rica, by contrast, seems an unlikely target for the Medellin cartel. The country has no army, is not dominated by greedy generals or politicians, and is proud of a democratic tradition. Yet Costa Rica's ports and its more than 200 rural airstrips have become key transit points for cocaine cargos. In recent years the Costa Rican business community has noticed that shipments of perishable products receive a less rigorous Customs inspection than nonperishable goods upon entering the U.S. Thus they are often used to conceal drugs...
...spotlight may soon shift to Haiti. Leon Kellner, the U.S. attorney in Miami who prepared one of the two pending cases against Noriega, is concluding an investigation of Haitian Colonel Jean-Claude Paul for allegedly helping the Medellin cartel move cocaine into the U.S. Paul, who commands an infantry battalion in Port-au-Prince, is widely regarded as Haiti's most powerful military man. For more than a year Haitian exiles have suspected that the airstrip on Paul's ranch, across a valley from Port-au-Prince, is a refueling point for U.S.-bound cargoes of cocaine. Paul's former...
...were not as grave as Colombia's. Local moguls oversaw marijuana and poppy harvests; many made money; no one got hurt. Then on Feb. 1, when 22 suspected narcotics traffickers were arrested in three Mexican states, it became increasingly clear that Mexico had become yet another way station for Medellin cartel business. Six of the detainees were Colombians believed to be midlevel operatives for the cartel. When Mexican federal police inspected a warehouse the Colombians used in Sonora, they found 100 AK-47 assault rifles, 65,000 rounds of ammunition, 92 bayonets and six infrared night scopes. Said a high...