Columbian Drug Cartel & Escobar

Pablo Emilio Gavoroa Escobar also known as "The Godfather" was the founder and leader of the Medellfn Colombian drug cartel in the 1970's and 1980's. One of the most powerful drug traffickers in the world, he started out in cocaine trafficking as a middleman who obtained small amounts of coca paste from Ecuador and sold it within Colombia. He then bought it from newly established laboratories in the Columbian Amazon where the paste had been converted into cocaine and employed couriers ("mules") who moved it to traffickers in Panama This was not sufficient to bring in serious money, though, and Escobar took the business vertical so that he could buy in bulk directly from Bolivia and Peru. Using the cash he had obtained through partnerships with the Ochoa brothers, he started making cocaine in his own laboratories. "By the mid-1970s, his criminal activities in car theft, kidnapping, fencing stolen goods, and drug trafficking yielded sufficient profits to establish his own labs and smuggling routes" (1).

When Carlos Lehder bought Norman's Cay, an archipelago in the Bahamas, the cartel was able to considerably step up its capacity to move cocaine into the United States. Lehder equipped the narrow strip of coral reef with cocaine transport facilities electronic equipment and an airport and larger shipments of cocaine began to reach the Florida Everglades and locations in the Southwest via Mexico To kept the authorities from interfering with their operation, Escobar and Le

Related Essays

International Drug Trafficking This paper will d .... The Columbian national authorities began concentrating their efforts on the Cali cartel and its .... of the international nature of drug trafficking. .... (4003 16 )

The Life of Pablo Escobar .... leader of the Medellfn Colombian drug cartel in the .... One of the most powerful drug traffickers in .... newly established laboratories in the Columbian Amazon where .... (1350 5 )

and criminal organizations, shifting power away from legitimate authority" (3). The war on drugs has never been won; it continues today, and its deleterious effects are still eroding our national security, integrity, and economy. For all of these reasons and many more, it was imperative that Pablo Escobar be captured, although for a long time no one in his country or ours believed it would ever happen. The Colombian government offered a reward of $400,000 for the capture of Pablo Escobar, but instead of facilitating his capture, the strategy backfired. Escobar responded by offering $500 to $2,000 a head for each policeman killed in Medellfn, and by July 1990, 140 policemen had died (4). However, despite the odds against it, in December 1993, Escobar was killed in a shootout with police officers. "He had escaped from a prison he had built to ensure his own safety and comfort prior to surrendering to authorities on drug trafficking charges. Dissatisfied with prison restrictions, Escobar escaped and was the subject of a countrywide manhunt that ended with his death" (1). Escobar's legacy to Columbia is a still-active heroin trade with all the underworld crime that accompanies that trafficking. Colombian opium production was es

Category: Foreign - C