Word: medellins
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...American drug business was dominated by Mexican marijuana and heroin dealers. Now cocaine has replaced marijuana as the hemisphere's most troublesome -- and most lucrative -- drug, and the Mexicans, though still flourishing, have been surpassed in wealth and political influence by Colombians. In little more than a decade the Medellin cartel -- a small group of men who operate out of Colombia's second largest city -- has come to dominate the cocaine business, as well as the economies and governments of several countries...
President Barco's crusade followed the assassination two months ago in Medellin of Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jimenez, his Attorney General. Hoyos was gunned down by unidentified men, thought to be in the pay of the drug bosses, after he dismissed two judges and ordered the investigation of five other government officials. He had acted after a local judge released Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, one of the cartel's five leaders, from a Bogota prison. Hoyos was the latest victim in a long list of Colombian officials and prominent citizens killed by the drug brigades. The roster includes a Justice Minister...
...cartel's gunmen are thought to have struck as far away as Eastern Europe; a year ago Enrique Parejo Gonzalez, Colombia's Ambassador to Hungary, was ambushed in Budapest. Last November men armed with guns attacked the home of Juan Gomez Martinez, a candidate for mayor of Medellin who vows to fight the drug scourge if he wins an election scheduled for March 13. They missed their target, and Gomez Martinez now campaigns under the protection of six bodyguards...
Andres Pastrana Arango, a mayoral candidate in Bogota, also ran afoul of the cartel. Two months ago, he was kidnaped from his office and taken, blindfolded, to a hideout near Medellin. After seven days he was released. Police raided the house where he had been held and uncovered a cache of weapons that included more than a dozen U.S.-made AR-15 rifles as well as Austrian-manufactured assault weapons and Israeli Uzi submachine guns. Also found were assorted 9-mm pistols, infrared night-vision scopes and a sniper rifle. "They have the kind of arms you only...
With the drug merchants increasingly brazen, Colombia is slipping into the kind of lawlessness that may someday risk comparison with Lebanon's. Last year most of the 3,000 murders in Medellin had to do with drugs. "Our way of life is being threatened," Bogota Prosecutor Francisco Bernal Castillo told TIME last month. Bernal, still reeling from the shock of the assassination of Hoyos, who had been his superior, was carrying a pistol in his waistband and was accompanied by a bodyguard. Last week Bernal fled to the U.S. after receiving death threats from the Medellin cartel...