Word: panama
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have strolled out of jails in Colombia, Mexico and Bolivia. Customs and immigration officials in Costa Rica and the Bahamas look the other way as some of the hemisphere's most wanted men have walked from their private planes to waiting limousines. Police and military officials in Honduras and Panama have tipped off traffickers to impending raids. Efforts to slow the trade, from destroying coca crops to extraditing traffickers, are bumping against the drug barons' bloody blueprint for expansion...
...organized enterprise. Coca leaves are grown mostly in Peru and Bolivia, where they are turned into a thick paste. The paste is shipped to processing laboratories, most of them in Colombia, where it is converted into the powder that drug users, especially in the U.S., consume. Costa Rica, Honduras, Panama and the Bahamas are among the favored transshipment points. Profits are usually laundered in Panama and invested...
...Colombia's political leaders are being challenged by the drug dealers, some of Panama's leaders are the drug dealers. Two federal indictments were unsealed in Florida last month charging General Manuel Antonio Noriega with an assortment of crimes, among them drug trafficking and money laundering. Witnesses who testified before Senator Kerry's subcommittee charged that ! Noriega and his cronies institutionalized corruption, putting the country's military services, corporations, banks and airfields at the disposal of the traffickers in exchange for hundreds of millions of dollars...
Perhaps the most startling testimony was offered by Jose Blandon Castillo, the former director of Panamanian political intelligence and a Noriega adviser until the two men had a falling-out earlier this year. Blandon branded Noriega's Panama a "criminal empire" and cataloged its alleged sins: bribery, kickbacks, money laundering, arms trafficking, kidnaping, murder. Warned Blandon: "This is a new type of political, economic and financial power, one which can even have an influence here in the United States...
...foreign governments that fail to make a good-faith effort at halting the drug trade. Each year the President must "certify" whether drug-trafficking countries have made progress. Those that are "decertified" lose U.S. aid, trade preferences and other economic benefits. There is particular pressure in Congress to punish Panama and Mexico. This week President Reagan is expected to decertify Panama. Mexico, however, will probably receive only warnings and be exempted from economic sanctions on the ground that greater punishment might tend to destabilize it and thus thwart U.S. security interests...