Word: narco
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...duty on every sale and purchase of unrefined cocaine in that area. Similar tariffs nationwide - and ransoms earned from kidnapping - are said to net the FARC hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Colombian government, as well as its allies in Washington, have long used the term "narco-guerrillas" to describe the FARC, which they accuse of morphing from a guerrilla force into a drug cartel. "If not for drug trafficking, the FARC would not exist today," argues Colombian Foreign Minister Fernando Araujo, who spent six years as a FARC hostage, not far from the 18th Front's territory...
FARC commanders dismiss the "narco-guerrilla" portrayal as government propaganda and insist they're still a viable rebel movement whose survival doesn't depend on drug income. For his part, Alberto points to his unit's spartan housing conditions - mountain and jungle shacks often without electricity or running water - as proof that they're not exactly living as sumptuously as famous cocaine kingpins like Pablo Escobar...
...locals who have spent more than a year outside the area must secure the FARC's permission before they can enter. The 18th Front remains the only authority for miles around, executing thieves, suspected informants and anyone who tries to evade the coca taxes. And despite the area's narco-economy, drug consumption of any kind is strictly forbidden - to such a draconian extent that a few days before TIME arrived, guerrillas executed two drug addicts in the nearby town of Puerto Valdivia...
...Many Sinaloans hail the traffickers as heroes, saying they have fought hard to bring wealth to the hardscrabble region, and crediting them with helping the poor by rebuilding houses, buying medicine and handing out extravagant Christmas gifts. Their exploits are celebrated in song in narco corridos or drug ballads, which are banned on radio and television but are immensely popular on the street, where the gunslingers are often referred to valientes, or brave ones - and stores with names like "Mafia Clothes" sell gold chains of Kalashnikov rifles to heavily armed men in alligator-skin boots who drive huge, gleaming pickups...
...honored by the shrine to Jesus Malverde in Culiacan, so often packed with locals, is no ordinary Mexican saint - Malverde was a Sinaloan bandit who has been adopted as a kind of a patron saint by the northern province's drug traffickers. Sinaloa is the cradle of Mexico's narco-trafficking industry, producing the majority of the nation's drug kingpins in recent decades. Their number includes such storied figures as Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo, who ran the Guadalajara Cartel and ordered the savage killing of a DEA agent; Amado Carrillo Fuentes, alias "The Lord of the Skies," who died...