Word: panama
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...violence seems likely to mount: Colombia's drug kings have sworn to kill five Americans for every compatriot extradited to the U.S. They have even placed a $300,000 bounty on the heads of U.S. narcotics agents, dead or alive. "These are very tough and mean men," says a Panama City banker familiar with the drug trade. "If you attack their livelihood, they'll fight you until the death...
...business, refining the paste into pure cocaine, then smuggling it into the U.S. As some of the Colombian drug dons have been forced out of their homeland, however, and as coca plants have begun to shoot up in Ecuador and Brazil, refineries have been springing up in Panama, Venezuela, Argentina and even Miami...
...even organized a fund to serve as a kind of insurance in the event of raids or losses. The drug dons were also shrewd enough to invest their profits in diversified holdings: they now own extensive real estate in Florida, half of the approximately 200 high-rises along Panama City's oceanfront, and a variety of small businesses and financial institutions, like currency-exchange houses, through which they can launder their profits. "These guys don't rob banks," says Craig Vangrasslek, who studied the drug industry on a Fulbright scholarship in Bogota. "They buy them." Soon the drug pipeline...
...means cowed. Within a month of the Lara murder, Entrepreneur Escobar and a few colleagues, claiming to represent a group of coqueros controlling 80% of the drug market, met first with Alfonso Lopez Michelsen, a former Colombian President, and then with Attorney General Carlos Jimenez Gomez in Panama City to offer the Colombian government a deal: in exchange for total amnesty, they said, they would dismantle their illicit empires and repatriate $5 billion into Colombia's troubled economy. The government replied ; that it would accept nothing short of the traffickers' unconditional surrender...
...business of the Colombian drug czars has emerged from the shadows, their illicit dealings with neighboring countries like Panama have also come to light. Ever since the cocaine market began to prosper, some Panamanians have taken money in exchange for allowing the coqueros to use their country as a transshipment point. In addition, a few corrupt Panamanian bankers have permitted the Colombians to take advantage of the strictest banking secrecy laws in the hemisphere by laundering drug dollars. Last June U.S. customs agents in Miami discovered that a DC-8 jet transport, owned by Inair, at the time Panama...