Word: melo
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Noriega's cronies have also been suspected of drug trafficking. His personal aide, Colonel Julian Melo, was implicated in the operations of a large cocaine laboratory inside Panama; Melo was fired but not prosecuted. Last year Cesar Rodriguez, who had worked as a pilot for Noriega, was murdered in Colombia in what appeared to be a drug deal gone awry. Critics charge that while Noriega has deported some midlevel traffickers to the U.S., he has never arrested the cocaine barons who use Panama as a plush hideout. After Colombia's Justice Minister, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, was assassinated in 1984, leaders...
...Free Trade Zone, a busy international transshipment center. There they found 17,000 55-gal. barrels of ether, worth about $1 million and enough to process around 200,000 kilos of cocaine. Both the chemicals and the building were apparently owned by Colombia's Ochoa clan. Shortly afterward, Julian Melo, the general secretary of the Panamanian National Defense Forces High Command, was arrested, accused of allowing the Colombians to transport the ether through the country in exchange for a $2 million bribe. Melo was never prosecuted, however, and many Panamanians assumed that he was merely a symbolic victim sacrificed...