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Documental de Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria

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Pablo Escobar Vs. 'El Chapo' Guzmán Comparison | Narcos Netflix

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https://www.instagram.com/gabbeeny_ Support My Channel By Shopping on Amazon! http://amzn.to/2atadUZ Pablo Escobar El Chapo guzman Narcos criminal justice Attorney Narcos Netflix Wagner Moura

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15 Insane Things You Didn’t Know About Pablo Escobar

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15 Insane Things You Didn't Know About Pablo Escobar - Original Video by Alux.com Full Article: http://bit.ly/1V9W7pk If you're interesting in learning a few things about the incredibly insane life of Pablo Escobar, the team at Alux.com put together this original video showcasing several amazing facts and trivia that will help you understand more about the biggest drug lord of our era.

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Steve Murphy & Javier Pena - Television Interview

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Pablo Escobar: Drug Money 'Permeated' Colombian State

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20 years after his death, a never before aired interview with Pablo Escobar reveals drug money had already penetrated the Colombian state, according to the drug capo.

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Overview of drug laws, legislative trends and drug policies in Colombia

Colombia is in the midst of a peace process with the guerrilla groups, which includes the issue of drugs in the different phases of production, trafficking and use. The government of President Juan Manuel Santos has played a prominent role on the international stage as an advocate for change in current drug policies. But in Colombia itself, modernisation of the drug law that has been in force since 1986 is still pending. This page describes what has been going on in the last few years with regard to these issues.

1. What are the current trends regarding drug laws in Colombia?

2. What are the current drug laws in Colombia?

3. What reform proposals and reforms to the drug laws have been made recently in the country?

4. What impact have the drug laws had on the prison situation in the country?

5. What does the law say about drug use? Is it a crime in Colombia? Figures on drug use

6. What measures are being implemented to address problem drug use?

7. Drugs and the peace talks

8. What is Colombia's stance in the international debate on drug policy?

9. What role has civil society played in the debate about drugs in Colombia?

10. Relevant drug laws and policy documents in the country

For the latest news on drug law reform in Colombia 1. What are the current trends regarding drug laws in Colombia?
During the twentieth century, policies on the subject of drugs in Colombia were heavily influenced by the international legislation promoted by the United States. Over the last few decades of the twentieth century especially, with the increased importance of drug trafficking in the country's economy and society, Colombia endorsed Washington's agenda.

It was in this highly repressive atmosphere regarding drugs that in 1994 the Constitutional Court ruled in favour of decriminalising the personal dose in Colombia. Over the last two decades, significant attempts have been made to reverse this measure. Although these attempts have been unsuccessful, there are still practical obstacles preventing the decriminalisation of the personal dose from fully taking effect.

Although little concrete progress has been made to date in the area of legislation, the prevailing tendency today seems to favour tipping the scales the other way, towards less repression and more protection for the weakest sectors in the drug economy: growers and harvesters on the production side, and users on the consumption side. The new Narcotics Statute announced by the government has not yet been made public.

Although President Santos's administration seems to view the legislative reforms taking place in other countries in the region with interest, and identifies with the analysis and decriminalisation proposals in the studies carried out by the OAS to address the drug problem in the Americas, the recommendations of the Advisory Commission on Drug Policy have yet to materialise.

The bill presented by Senator Juan Manuel Galán to legalise cannabis for medical purposes - for which President Santos has publicly expressed support - may mark the start of a new direction in the legislative approach to drugs. In November 2014 the Colombian Senate approved the medical marijuana bill.
2. What are the current drug laws in Colombia?
The law currently in force is Law 30 of 1986, known as the National Narcotics Statute ( Estatuto Nacional de Estupefacientes - ENE). In September 2012, the executive presented Congress with a proposal for a new national statute on drugs and psychoactive substances, which would replace Law 30 if approved by parliament.

The law's repressive stance regarding drug use underwent a significant change with the pronouncement of Constitutional Court Ruling C-221 on 5 May 1994 (delivered by Carlos Gaviria Díaz). Arguing that they violate the right to the free development of personality, this ruling declared unenforceable those articles of Law 30 from 1986 that make it an offence to carry or use minimum permitted doses of drugs. With this measure, Colombia became a pioneer in establishing a legal framework that offered an alternative to the total prohibition of drugs.

In 2009 a constitutional reform prohibited drug use, but without providing for the possibility of imposing punishments or compulsory treatment on drug users.

The Citizen Security Law, enacted in 2011, reformed the Criminal Code and eliminated the exceptional provision of not punishing the crime of narcotics possession if the quantity carried was equivalent to the personal dose. Nevertheless, and despite opposition from the Public Prosecutor's Office, the ruling waiving punishment for possession of a minimum dose was upheld. In its ruling C-491 in 2012, the Constitutional Court once again made clear that possession of the personal dose remains decriminalised and that drug use should continue to be understood as an activity protected by the right to the free development of personality.

In practice, however, the Citizen Security Law has led to considerable confusion and uncertainty regarding the issue of the minimum dose. Even though both the Constitutional Court and the Supreme Court have made it clear that possession of the minimum dose is not a criminal offence, and despite the fact that the 2009 reform only mentions administrative sanctions, police officers on the street may apply repressive measures if they decide to take action against someone found in possession of a minimum amount, especially if that person belongs to a disadvantaged sector of society.
3. What reform proposals and reforms to the drug laws have been made recently in the country?
This section highlights the most important proposals and changes to the law that have been made in recent years in Colombia.

A chronological summary of these changes, from the Constitutional Court's 1994 ruling to the present day, can be found in this report.

Important changes currently under way - The Advisory Commission on Drug Policy was set up in January 2013. Its members are well-known academics and specialists on the subject, as well as former president César Gaviria (also a member of the Global Commission) and the former chief of the National Police, retired general Óscar Naranjo. The Commission has proposed that drug users should not be criminalised, and is due to make recommendations for how criminal networks and citizen drug users should be treated, as well as the quantities to be considered a minimum dose of any given drug. In July 2014, the Commission's first report analysing the problem of drug use and proposing guidelines for addressing it was submitted to the Ministry of Justice. The analysis coincides with OAS proposals about decriminalising the use of psychoactive substances.

In May 2015, the Commission on Drug Policy published its Final Report: Guidelines for a new approach to drug policy in Colombia. This report proposes a review of drug policy in the country and makes ten key recommendations: 1. Create an agency for drug policy; 2. help reduce the risk of consumers; 3. rethink the fumigation of coca; 4. regulation of medical marijuana; 5. go beyond the simple 'say no to drugs'; 6. change the way we measure success against drugs; 7. raise the profile of money laundering efforts; 8. rethink extradition; 9. modernise the National Statute on Drugs and Psychoactive Substances; 10. lead the global drug policy debate.

In addition, with the aim of updating its drug policy, the government is preparing a new narcotics bill, the National Statute on Drugs and Psychoactive Substances, which is designed to replace Law 30 from 1986. The government announced this new bill at the start of 2013 but its publication has been delayed. The bill would define the minimum dose of synthetic drugs for the first time. Possession of up to 200 milligrams or three tablets of amphetamine-type drugs would be permitted (except for methamphetamines, the use of which would continue to be banned). The authorised doses of cocaine (1 gram) and marijuana (20 grams) would be maintained, but the authorities could resort to Legal Medicine in the case of people found in possession of the more concentrated varieties. For the first time, the new statute would also make it obligatory for all municipalities to allocate funding for drug use prevention programmes and treatment for addicts. Following the guidelines set by the Constitutional Court, it would continue to protect drug users from being charged with criminal offences.

Information about the 2012 bill that proposes to decriminalise the growing of plants used to manufacture psychoactive substances can be found in this report.

August 2014 - Senator Juan Manuel Galán presented draft law 27 of 2014 to Congress. The objective of this bill is to regulate the use of cannabis for therapeutic purposes.

4. What impact have the drug laws had on the prison situation in the country?

The percentage of prison inmates held for drug-related crimes is quite high in Colombia. According to the National Prison and Penitentiary Institute ( Instituto Nacional Penitenciario y Carcelario -INPEC), this group of crimes accounts for the third highest number of people in jail, surpassed only by crimes against property and crimes against life and personal integrity (homicide)

Prisons are overcrowded. At the end of 2013, according to INPEC, 120,032 people were being held in prisons that have a maximum capacity for 76,066 inmates. About 15 per cent of these people are in jail for having committed drug-related crimes (trafficking, manufacture or possession). Over the last ten years, drug-related offences are one of the four types of crime that have been swelling the prison population in Colombia.

According to a study by DeJusticia, "the vast majority of people jailed for drug-related activities between 2007 and 2009 did not have any significant involvement in drug trafficking networks, as only 2 per cent of them were charged with additional offences such as conspiracy to commit a crime or carrying arms illegally." Read more in this article.

Drug-related crimes seem to be increasingly committed by women in Colombia. Although more men than women are in prison for drug offences, the percentage of women in jail who are there due to drugs is higher than the percentage of male prisoners jailed for drug offences. The women behind bars for drug crimes usually have little schooling and low incomes. Accepting the risk of losing their freedom is seen as a small price to pay when set against the possibility of earning money to support their family. [See the chapter on Colombia in the report on drugs and prisons, "Systems overload".]

According to the organisation DeJusticia, prison sentences in Colombia are harsher for those selling drugs or committing a minor crime in the retail drug trade than for murderers or rapists. In recent years these sentences have increasingly been passed against women.

Durante la Asamblea Extraordinaria de la OEA en septiembre de 2014, Colombia presentó el i nforme: Alternativas al tratamiento penal de los delitos relacionados con drogas
5. What does the law say about drug use? Is it a crime in Colombia? Figures on drug use
Drug use is prohibited by the constitution, and there are laws banning it in certain specific circumstances, but it is not a criminal offence. Possession of the quantity of a drug permitted for personal use is not a crime. Law 30 of 1986, article 2, clause j says that "The dose for personal use is defined as a quantity of marijuana not exceeding twenty (20) grams; a quantity of hashish not exceeding five (5) grams; a quantity of cocaine or any cocaine-based substance not exceeding one (1) gram, and a quantity of methaqualone not exceeding two (2) grams." (See also this CEDD infographic).

The drug courts that are being set up in other Latin American countries with OAS support as an alternative to imprisonment do not exist in Colombia. The current feeling is that treatment should be voluntary, but the subject of drug courts is being explored.

Some figures - According to the most recent national study on drug use published by the Colombian government in 2013, "consumption of alcohol and illicit substances increased in Colombia between 2008 and 2013, with marijuana being the substance whose use was found to have increased the most." The study also reported increases in cocaine, crack, ecstasy and heroin use. Drug use in general rose from 8.8 per cent in 2008 to 12.2 per cent in 2013. Read an official summary of the report here. Also according to this study, marijuana is the most popular drug among Colombians. 11.5 per cent stated that they had used it at some time in their lives, and 3.3 per cent said they had used it in the last year. In second place is cocaine, with 3.2 per cent of people saying they had used it at some time in their lives. There are also the so-called "emerging drugs". Surveys reveal the appearance of certain inhalants (which are the most commonly used drug after marijuana among schoolchildren) and LSD, whose use by university students has increased. For some observers, this increase shows that current policies have failed. This article also looks at the increase in domestic demand. This article also looks at the increase in domestic demand.

For more information on drug use, visit the Observatorio de Drogas de Colombia website. See also the 2012 Colombia Report on an epidemiological study of drug use among university students in 2012.

With regard to drug use, one commentator said recently in the press: "With the 2012 study of drug use among university students, it was all about the increase in the use of ecstasy and LSD. With the 2011 study of drug use in schools, it was all about the increase in drug use in private schools. But in the new 2013 National Study on the Use of Psychoactive Substances, although the use of various drugs has increased, there's no hiding the fact that the main problem in Colombia is alcohol."

On the substances most used in Colombia, see this infographic in Semana magazine.
6. What measures are being implemented to address problem drug use?
The increase in drug use has been interpreted by local analysts as a failure of the public policies implemented until now. One United Nations adviser has stated that the EPS (Health Promotion Facilities) are not complying with Law 15-66, which provides for treatment for people addicted to psychoactive substances. "The expert declared that drug users are stigmatised and excluded from various social circles, leaving them more vulnerable to falling into the gutter where, as well as drug use, they are at risk of committing certain crimes."

According to press reports, the government - through the Ministry of Health - is preparing a new plan to address drug use and the health problems that result from it. The plan will be unveiled at the end of 2014. "The roadmap for dealing with this problem will operate in parallel with the agreement signed with the FARC. It will form part of post-conflict policies and affirms that the Colombian government's antidrugs policy will from now on be based on a public health approach."

Innovative harm reduction programmes have been implemented at the local level for several years now. In September 2012, with the aim of providing integrated treatment to addicts and reducing crime rates in the city, the government of Bogotá under the current mayor, Gustavo Petro, launched a pilot project called CAMAD - Medical Care Centres for Drug Addicts. These are mobile units located in marginal areas of the city where medical and social work professionals provide care to addicts. This programme is in keeping with the view of the drug problem as a public health issue. For more information on the CAMAD, see this TNI report.

The Bogotá city government is also considering launching a pilot health project to treat crack addicts using marijuana. The proposal has sparked fierce controversy and the Ministry of Justice has expressed opposition to it, but the project itself represents a shift in the repressive attitude towards drug users. The treatment programme would be provided in the mobile medical care centres for drug addicts (CAMAD). See also this video from September 2012.

Another noteworthy local programme is Proyecto Cambie in the city of Pereira, which seeks to prevent injecting drug users from contracting HIV. More information on this project can be found in this press report and this video.

In the opinion of the organisation Acción Técnica Social (which works on harm reduction more broadly), the National Drugs Plan being prepared by the Colombian government does not reflect these local experiences.

We recommend reading this study: Auto-suministro de cannabis en población habitante de la calle en Bogotá. Complejidades en torno al tráfico y consumo de bazuco, efectos y alternativas para su tratamiento en el contexto de la salud pública, la convivencia y la seguridad ciudadan a - Report produced by the Centro de Estudios y Análisis en Convivencia y Seguridad Ciudadana CEACSC, January 2014

7. Drugs and the peace talks

The subject of drugs was included in the agenda for the peace talks being held in Havana between the government and the FARC guerrilla. The issues of illicit crops, drug production and trafficking are among the major challenges for a sustainable peace in the country. In May 2014, the Colombian government and the FARC reached a provisional agreement on drugs. TNI analyses the scope of this agreement in this report.

Recommended articles and reports on the subject:

Find more on drugs and the peace process in Colombia on this page
8. What is Colombia's stance in the international debate on drug policy?
Although in the domestic arena it has not committed to significant reforms of the country's drug laws and policies, on the international stage the government of President Santos has called for the start of a debate on alternative policies and openly questioned the existing prohibitionist regime. It also supports the idea of considering drug use as a public health issue. President Santos played a very active role in this regard at the 2012 Americas Summit held in Cartagena, Colombia.

In October 2012, the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia sent a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, calling on "the United Nations not only to participate in but to lead a debate befitting the twenty-first century, setting aside false prejudices, and thus enable us all to find solutions under new and effective approaches." Read the joint declaration here.

April 2013 - First Working Meeting on Drugs between the Republic of Uruguay and the Republic of Colombia. The first working meeting on drugs between these two countries was held on 18-19 April 2013 in Montevideo. The minutes of the meeting can be found here.

During the 2014 World Economic Forum in Davos, President Santos once again showed himself to be a progressive figure on the subject of drugs, and was given widespread coverage in the international press. He again pronounced himself in favour of opening up a debate with the aim of shifting the current paradigm on drugs. He also talked of the need to undertake research with a view to legalising cannabis.

At the 2014 session of the Commission on Narcotic Drugs, Colombia was part of a small group of Latin American countries calling explicitly for a review of the current policy on drugs.

In the Commission for Narcotic Drugs (CND), March 2015, Minister of Justice Yesid Reyes called on the UN to change the drug strategy and review the international drug conventions. Here is the speech of the Minister.
9. What role has civil society played in the debate about drugs in Colombia?
Broad swathes of civil society and experts on drug policies in Colombia have expressed their opposition to the various re-criminalisation initiatives that emerged especially during former president Uribe's time in office.

In response to the government's plans to modify Law 30 from 1986 and replace it with a new statute, a group of citizens has presented the Ministry of Justice with a document that amounts to a counter-proposal. In it, they call for a prevention policy that focuses mainly on social integration rather than emphasising the punitive consequences of personal drug use. They also ask for civil society to be allowed to participate on this issue.

As in other large Latin American cities, there is also a growing pro-cannabis movement in Colombia's urban areas.

The harm reduction programmes taken forward by the Bogotá city government have been controversial, but numerous civil society groups in Colombia have given them their support.

As part of the peace talks, and on the agenda item regarding drugs in particular, numerous initiatives have been put forward by civil society groups wishing to contribute their experiences and proposals. The producers of illicit crops have proposed setting up an organisation to protect producers, with a view to finding ways to regulate these crops.

In August 2014, several Colombian NGOs and think tanks, together with the UNODC and the Colombian government, launched a ' National Dialogue on the Future of Drug Policy', as a space for broad-based debate on drug policies.

10. Relevant drug laws and policy documents in the country
Legislative and Government Documents Studies, surveys and other documents

Informe: Alternativas al tratamiento penal de los delitos relacionados con drogas - Informe presentado por Colombia en la Asamblea Extraordinaria de la OEA, September 2014

Gobierno colombiano presenta resultados del último Estudio Nacional de Consumo de Drogas - Red Iberoamericana de ONG que trabajan en Drogodependencia RIOD, July 2014

In Search of Rights: Drug Users and State Responses in Latin America, Colectivo de Estudios Drogas y Derecho (CEDD), May 2014

Ending 50 Years of Conflict: The Challenges Ahead and the U.S. Role in Colombia - WOLA Report, Adam Isacson, April 2014

Informe final Encuentro de productores de cultivos declarados ilícitos de Colombia - Observatorio de Cultivos Declarados Ilícitos OCDI, 14 February 2014

Auto-suministro de cannabis en población habitante de la calle en Bogotá. Complejidades en torno al tráfico y consumo de bazuco, efectos y alternativas para su tratamiento en el contexto de la salud pública, la convivencia y la seguridad ciudadana - Documento elaborado por el Centro de Estudios y Análisis en Convivencia y Seguridad Ciudadana CEACSC, January 2014

Penas alucinantes. La desproporción de la penalización de las drogas en Colombia - DeJusticia. Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes, Diana Esther Guzmán y Jorge Parra Norato, 2013

Reportaje: Odisea de un gramo de cocaína - Este trabajo cuenta el recorrido de un gramo de cocaína desde su producción hasta su consumo en Europa, y reúne varios años de reportajes periodísticos. Por: Christine Renaudat - Vincent Taillefumier. 2013

Nuevo estatuto nacional de drogas, mucho ruido y pocas nueces - Razón Pública, Augusto Pérez. 4 February 2013

Addicted to punishment. The disproportionality of drug laws in Latin America - DeJusticia, Rodrigo Uprimny Yepes, Diana Esther Guzmán y Jorge Parra Norato. January 2013

Despenalización del porte y consumo de drogas; paralelo entre Colombia y Uruguay - Razón Pública, Juan Diego Jaramillo y Lukas Jaramillo, 9 July 2012

Dosis mínima, máximo debate - Semana, Lina Santo. 13 October 2011

Acción Técnica Social (Website)

Estudio: Patrullando la dosis personal. El control policial al consumo de dosis personal de droga en Bogotá - Universidad de los Andes, Alejandro Gaviria, Daniel Mejía (Compiladores), April 2011

For the latest news on drug law reform in Colombia, click here.

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united nations single convention on narcotic drugs

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convención única sobre estupefacientes de 1961

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oficina de las naciones unidas contra la droga y el delito

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Overview of drug laws, legislative trends and drug policies in Colombia Colombia is in the midst of a peace process with the guerrilla groups, which includes the issue of drugs in the different phases of production, trafficking and use.

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The Business - Colombian Traffickers | Drug Wars | FRONTLINE | PBS

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After the destruction of both the Cali and Medellin cartels, the cocaine business began to fragment. Younger lieutenants realized that the large organizations had been more vulnerable to attack by US and Colombian authorities. They formed smaller, more controllable groups and began compartmentalizing their responsibilities. One group simply smuggles the drugs from Colombia to Mexico.

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Some 4% of the world's population has consumed cocaine in his or her life. That is almost 300 million people. Approximately half of this cocaine comes from Colombia.

Last year alone, at least 17 million people used the illicit drug, allegedly consuming between 700 and 800 tons of pure cocaine with a street value of at least $20 billion.

The demand for the drug comes primarily from the United States and Europe, but South America - particularly Brazil - has also grown into a major consumption market.

Prevalence of cocaine use per country

Supplying the demand

Almost all cocaine consumed across the globe comes from Colombia, Peru and to a lesser extent Bolivia; countries where coca - the crop used for cocaine - has been common for centuries and is consumed legally by chewing the leaves or making tea.

In Colombia, the coca used to produce cocaine is grown mostly in remote parts of the country where the state has long lacked control.

Because of the lack of state control, the necessary amount of land is available for all kinds of illegal or informal activity.

Colombian coca farmers use approximately an accumulated area of between 69,000 hectares and 188,000 hectares to produce the country's cocaine.

The UN estimated in 2016 that some 106,000 Colombian farming families live off coca.

These families receive on average little less than $1,200 a month from selling coca, which sells at a little more than a dollar per kilo, depending on the region.

To produce one kilo of cocaine some 125 kilos of coca is needed, which would cost a local drug lab $137.50. Once the lab has turned the coca leaves first into coca paste, then into coca base and ultimately into real cocaine, the value will have increased to $2,269.

By the time it gets to the street in, for example the United States, that kilo of cocaine will provide $60,000 in revenue. In Australia this could be as much as $235,000.

A resilient industry

Authorities are trying to curb coca cultivation by eradicating plants and, until recently, spraying chemicals over areas where coca fields are most prevalent.

Nevertheless, Colombia had a record potential cocaine production of 866 tons in 2016.

According to Colombia's Defense Ministry, it destroyed more than 52,000 hectares of coca in 2016.

The DEA expected in August that 2017's coca cultivation will see an increase compared to the year before.

Coca eradication

Colombia does not have an extensive crop substitution program like Peru, meaning that many farmers continue cultivating coca after their current harvest has been destroyed.

The lack of absolute results in the reduction of coca cultivation demonstrates how easily coca farmers recover territory for their illicit crops.

From coca to cocaine

Cocaine is made in three separate chemical processes; first the coca is converted into coca paste, then coca base before it becomes real cocaine.

The coca is grown by tens of thousands of peasants in areas that suffer traditional state neglect.

Coca cultivation in Colombia

The converting of coca leaves into coca paste is mainly done by the farmers and to a lesser extent by the drug trafficking organizations. This because for one kilo of cocaine requires approximately 125 kilos of coca leaves.

The dried coca leaves are drenched in gasoline for between 8 to 12 hours to extract the alkaloid or coca base.

Next, the gasoline and the leaves are separated from the alkaloid and water and sulfuric acid are added, combined with pulverized limestone or ammonia.

This is then mixed with acetone and laid to rest. The substance is then filtered with more ammonia and washed in water. The water is evaporated by putting the substance in a slow-burning oven, converting it in something similar to oil.

Once cooled down, this substance has become coca paste, which is dissolved in ether. After another filtering round, chloride acid and more acetone are added. Once this is dry, the cocaine is ready.

Potential cocaine production (in tons)

The drug labs are generally run by the farmers under control of local drug trafficking clans, individual guerrilla units, or associates of the international organizations that traffic the drugs to the US, Europe or the Southern Cone.

Moving the product to the border

Once the coca is processed to cocaine, it is trafficked by local drug traffickers, guerrillas and nationally operating groups to either one of the country's two coastlines, or one of the country's borders. A relatively small amount of cocaine is taken to airports.

The cocaine is hidden in trucks or cars if transported over land, or is moved in small boats through dense jungle areas where rivers provide the perfect corridors for almost unhindered illicit trafficking. Along these routes, the drug traffickers intimidate locals and bribe officials to prevent their routes and shipments from being exposed.

Nevertheless, according to Colombia's Defense Ministry, more than 150 tons of cocaine is seized annually.

Cocaine seizures in Colombia

The export of cocaine is supervised by transnational crime organizations that do business with foreign crime organizations, particularly Mexican cartels. In a few cases, the Colombian groups have maintained direct routes to foreign markets.

Most of Colombia's current drug trafficking organizations were formed a decade ago by mid-level commanders of state-aligned paramilitary groups that were active between the 1980s and the early 2000s.

Some of the organizations have their roots in the old Medellin and Cali cartels.

The traffickers bribe security forces, politicians and judicial authorities to protect their routes, and secure the continuity of their business.

How the drugs are trafficked to the US and Europe

When drugs arrive at Colombia's Caribbean and Pacific coast lines they are loaded onto small ships or submarines and sailed to transit hubs in the Caribbean and Central America, in some cases already under the supervision of transnational crime groups like the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel.

In the cases of port cities, local crime gangs with close ties to local law enforcement and port authorities oversee the loading of the drugs into containers, often in coordination with international drug trafficking cartels.

Over the past few years, Venezuela has become a major transit hub for cocaine. Hundreds of clandestine airstrips have been found in the country, allegedly used to fly cocaine to Central America or, in fewer cases, to Caribbean islands like the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico or the Bahamas.

Smaller amount of drugs are trafficked by air, in risky operations by "drug mules" who either swallow small amounts of drugs, or carry pounds or kilos of the illicit substance in their luggage. These drug mules generally work for Colombian organizations with a criminal partner organization in the destination country.

Large quantities of drugs find their way out of the country through the country's ports where corruption is rife. One important criminal organization running such operation is "La Empresa," a local mafia that's long been in charge of Colombia's largest port, Buenaventura. They will have foreign partners on the receiving end, more often than not these would be cells or gangs linked to large organized crime organizations.

It is almost impossible to define which form of transport is most effective to get the drugs to its consumption markets in the US, Europe and South America.

The UNODC has said that - when referring to global trafficking of all drugs - most seizures were made while drugs were transported by air or road, but even though only a few busts have been made in ports or clandestine maritime entry points, the largest drug seizures abroad were made there.

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Some 4% of the world's population has consumed cocaine in his or her life. That is almost 300 million people. Approximately half of this cocaine comes from Colombia. Last year alone, at least 17 million people used the illicit drug, allegedly consuming between 700 and 800 tons of pure cocaine with a street value of at least $20 billion.

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Illegal drug trade in Colombia - Wikipedia

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Illegal drug trade in Colombia ( Spanish: Narcotráfico en Colombia ) refers to a practice of Colombian criminal groups of producing and distributing illegal drugs. Colombia has had four major drug trafficking cartels and several bandas criminales, or BACRIMs which eventually created a new social class and influenced several aspects of Colombian culture and politics.

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Culture can define and shape somebody's approach to trying out cocaine, and then their cocaine habit following their initial use by a long shot. A majority of people who use cocaine are middle class Caucasians. Using cocaine is very acceptable in certain social groups. This drug is a social one and, unlike marijuana, you aren't going to find somebody using it medicinally or for a relaxing night in. Because it provides the user with energy, confidence and makes them more focused, most people who use it like to do it in order to sober up and keep drinking for longer periods of time so as to prevent getting too drunk. (As if getting too high on cocaine is a better alternative.)

You can find these people at nightclubs, "trendy" fashion industry parties, or other such events that would socially accept a drug like cocaine. Not only that, but cocaine makes a person more talkative which makes it appealing especially to those seeking to network at an industry type of event. Unlike crack, cocaine isn't totally and wholly stigmatized. It's vividly and repeatedly glamorized by pop culture. Cocaine is glorified in movies, television and pop songs. You can find the drug being unabashedly referenced in a myriad of popular rap songs. It's even been propped up by the media countless times as a non serious type of drug of the "hip" variety by celebrities who get caught using with little consequences.

The reality of the matter is that cocaine is highly dangerous and could be cut with all sorts of adulterants, but most people don't quite grasp this concept when going into a cocaine habit. Instead it seems like a cool aspect of social acceptance within the scene they're a part of or trying to be a part of. Let's take the entertainment industries, namely fashion, for example. This is a perfect example of the type of scene in cities like New York or Los Angeles where cocaine is pretty much regularly used without a second thought. It's practically a bonding ritual for these people, and a significant part of the nightlife.

The perception of cocaine in especially metropolitan areas is a lot different than narcotics such as crack or meth. Crack and meth are regarded with caution and as harshly harmful substances, while cocaine on the other hand gets a free pass just because it's popular. This false perception is leading tons of people in the wrong direction. When the occasion of getting offered cocaine arises in particularly a big city like New York people tend to accept the invitation gracefully under the false idea that it's a casual, harmless drug. It's precisely this type of misguided perception and attitude that is leading someone into an addiction while staying oblivious to the fact that they're hooked.

Gateway Drugs To A Cocaine Habit

There's quite a bit of controversy as well as a myriad of opinions and theories out there on the discussion regarding which exact drugs are the gateway drugs to cocaine use. The consensus is that the following substances are gateway drugs to cocaine:

* Alcohol

* Nicotine

* Marijuana

The chances of cocaine addiction are increased a lot if the person tried one or more of these gateway drugs under the age of 18. However, it doesn't matter at what age these substances are tried, they can all lead to cocaine addiction. Alcohol and nicotine often go hand in hand, especially at parties, bars and nightclubs. The scenes that you can find using cocaine are likely to be smoking cigarettes and drinking alcohol often as well. One interesting statistic is that 90% of cocaine users between ages 18 and 34 had smoked cigarettes prior to using cocaine. As you can see, this isn't necessarily unheard of.

However, marijuana isn't as widely known or seen as clearly as a gateway drug. This might have to do with the obvious fact that marijuana is a downer, and cocaine an upper. But this is precisely one connection between the two and what can cause someone to either switch over to cocaine or to alternate between the two.

An aspect of this is when somebody had been smoking or using marijuana, especially over a longer period of time, and then quits or stops; they will begin to get the effects from withdrawing from marijuana. When these effects set it, they begin to crave or need to fill in the void or mask the unwanted effects. If this is a person who goes out and drinks regularly, they are likely to invite a cocaine offer with open arms. They might not be aware of what's going on, as the symptoms of withdrawing from marijuana aren't widely known in itself, so they might just have an itch for cocaine meanwhile staying oblivious as to the reason why.

Another aspect of marijuana being the gateway drug to cocaine is that these are two of the most common illicit drugs. Cocaine is the second most used illegal substance in the United States, marijuana is the first. It's purely circumstantial that people who have tried out marijuana will also try out cocaine and vice versa, for the same cultural reasons- they both appear like harmless, casual and "social" drugs and are constantly promoted that way in these social circles. Marijuana is merely a stepping stone, usually, to longer lasting and habitual cocaine use.

In a majority of cases, though, we see that people who use alcohol and cigarette also use marijuana- all three of which lead into an eventual cocaine habit. There may be a pretty obvious reason for this: evidently these people are prone to addiction in general. So while it may seem that a hard drug like cocaine would require one or a combination of these substances to get started, that isn't always or routinely the case. People becoming involved in any addiction for that matter are especially inclined toward addictive type behavior. Needless to say, these gateway drugs mentioned can definitely act as catalysts to using cocaine and therefore falling into an addiction thereof.

C ocaine Portrayal Versus Reality

Cocaine is portrayed by various media outlets and pop culture as something entirely different than what it really is. What cocaine really is, illusions brushed aside, is a harmful drug which is potent and very addictive. Addiction is common when dealing with cocaine, a fact that is currently being squashed by a false rumor which spreads otherwise.

The bottom line is that this drug leads many people into a full-blown addiction regularly. Anyone who says otherwise is being inaccurate. The unfortunate reality of cocaine is not congruent with the misguided and structured facade we see in movies. Cocaine might seem alluring when falsely promoted but it actually can lead to dangerous situations. Because a tolerance builds up fast with this drug, more of the drug is required (and more often, too) in order to achieve the high desired. An addiction to cocaine can end up running someone's life in this way and hence make a dent on their financial situation. In conclusion cocaine remains a serious issue and a current struggle in our society today.

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Culture can define and shape somebody's approach to trying out cocaine, and then their cocaine habit following their initial use by a long shot. A majority of people who use cocaine are middle class Caucasians. Using cocaine is very acceptable in certain social groups.

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Cocaine is a central commodity of the neoliberal age; so, too, its re-processed form ("crack") for the desperately poor in de-industrialized cities of the North and South Atlantic. First announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, the "War on Drugs" predates the rise of cocaine and crack by nearly a decade, but, in the 1980s and '90s, the "War on Drugs" was redoubled in response to the explosion of the cocaine business. It now ranks as the U.S.A.'s longest running military-police campaign. Thus, if we look at cocaine as a social hieroglyph - not as a thing but as a complex relation between networks and organizations of people, as well as between states and bureaucracies - we may glimpse some of the distinguishing features of the contemporary world.

There is a strong argument to be made for the impact of the cocaine business on architecture, urban design and construction, fashion, media entertainment, sports, and aesthetics, not to mention banking and credit institutions. The war on cocaine producers, sellers, and users has radically changed the shape of states in relation to those who are, at least nominally, rights-bearing citizens, as states have become more militarized, policed, punitive and carceral, and citizens more powerless and less protected by the rule of law. As the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu observed in his late work, states do not disappear under neoliberalism: rather, their repressive right wings are strengthened while their progressive, redistributive rights-based wings are weakened or eliminated. This is most notable in cities, where urban space has been re-made in line with the requirements of policing and surveillance to protect capital investment and affluent consumers.

Though it does not advance these arguments, except tangentially, Tom Feiling's well-researched The Candy Machine: How Cocaine took over the World (Penguin, 2009) makes a similar claim for the importance of its subject.Yet, could not the same be said of any essential commodity: oil, for instance, or cars or clothes? What makes cocaine different? The answer, of course, would depend on whom one asks, but what makes cocaine extraordinarily profitable for its import-export merchants is the fact that it is illegal. The fact that one country - Colombia - supplies 90 per cent of the cocaine consumed in the U.S. also makes the commodity different. Ninety per cent of Colombian cocaine enters the U.S.A. through Mexico (and Guatemala); smuggling having been made considerably easier by NAFTA, which de-regulated trucking and shipping.

Plan Colombia and Plan Mérida (Mexico) - based on counternarcotics and counterterrorism - are the two most important U.S. foreign policy initiatives in the Western Hemisphere, with Plan Colombia and its successors costing U.S. taxpayers $8 billion between 2000 and 2008, and Plan Mérida, approved in 2008, costing $500 million in 2009. So, cocaine is not only big business, it is also high politics: Plan Colombia has been held up as a model of counternarcotics and counterinsurgency success for Mexico, Afghanistan and Pakistan. One senior U.S. official told CBS News, "The more Afghanistan can look like Colombia, the better."

Public debate in the U.S. concerning the suppression of cocaine production and consumption - and the U.S. has determined international drug policy since the U.N. Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 - is moralistic, due to the weight of conservative strains of Protestantism, even among non-evangelicals, not to mention neoconservative Catholicism: decent, responsible people should not consume drugs, and should not be allowed to consume them, because, if they do, they will become unproductive degenerates.

If supply is reduced, the official argument goes, prices will rise for consumers in the U.S.A., and demand will drop correspondingly. Nevertheless, Plan Colombia and related anti-drug initiatives in the Andes and Mexico have not reduced the supply of cocaine to the U.S., where prices have tended toward secular decline since the early 1980s and domestic demand has fluctuated from generation to generation. The volume of illicit drugs that U.S. citizens consume has not changed significantly over time, but the type of drugs they consume has, with cocaine coming back into fashion, together with pharmaceuticals, among young, affluent people during the Bush II period.

In terms of costs and benefits, fighting cocaine production and consumption is a disaster even by the standards of the Pentagon: according to a 1994 RAND Corporation study, to reduce cocaine consumption by 1 per cent in the U.S., it would be twenty-three times cheaper ($34 million) to spend on treatment and education for consumers than on coca eradication for producers ($783 million).

But the failure to achieve stated objectives has yet to affect policy-making, which is driven mainly by ideology. Empirical data have little bearing on the policy-making process. The logic driving the War on Drugs has been chiefly ideological and political, not economic: domestic politics in the U.S. have determined policy abroad. One of the defining policies of Cold War liberalism, President Johnson's War on Poverty - which had less than one-tenth of the lifespan of the War on Drugs - took for granted that federal and state governments should take responsibility for improving the plight of the poor in northern cities and represented a semi-coherent response to African-American riots and insurgencies. But what if poor black people in cities could be held responsible for their poverty? What if, as industrial jobs disappeared by the millions, they became addicted to selling or consuming illegal drugs, produced and/or distributed by U.S. government allies in Cold War counterinsurgent campaigns? Then African Americans could be locked up for nonviolent drug offenses and warehoused in prisons at an accelerated rate.

It is to Feiling's credit to have discovered this larger truth, albeit in bits and pieces: "As long as the focus stayed on drug sales and drug abuse, inner-city residents could be blamed for the poverty they had been driven into ... what the politicians had to do was convince the American public that the inner cities deserved to be abandoned."

In the 1970s, President Richard Nixon and Governor Nelson Rockefeller in New York campaigned for office by whipping up hysteria about "crime" and "drugs," and then criminalized African-American communities, militarized policing, and increased incarceration. After a brief respite under Carter, fighting crime and drugs in urban African-American neighborhoods became the rhetorical coin of the political realm under Ronald Reagan. The idea was to put African Americans back in their place without Jim Crow segregation, and to get elected or re-elected by doing it. Fear was to be one of the most enduring weapons in the U.S. politician's arsenal. In his diary in 1969, Nixon's top aide, H.R. Haldeman, provided a succinct summary of the overall strategy: "Nixon emphasized that the whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes that, while not appearing to do so."

In a letter to Dwight Eisenhower, Nixon wrote, "Ike, it's just amazing how much you can get done through fear. All I talk about in New Hampshire is crime and drugs, and everyone wants to vote for me - and they don't even have any black people up here."

Nixon's War on Drugs," Feiling notes, was "politically expedient, since it turned attention away from ... Vietnam, while preserving the military culture that had inspired the war in the first place."

Nearly all of those imprisoned in New York State for drug offenses have been African-American or Latino males, most of them from eight neighborhoods in New York City. Whereas the U.S. had 200,000 prisoners in the 1970s, it currently has 1.8 million in jail and 5 million on probation or parole, making it the largest carceral state-society in world history. The U.S. accounts for 5 per cent of the world's population and 25 per cent of its prison population; 500,000 people are serving time for nonviolent drug offenses.

Needless to say, the profile of the U.S. prison population does not reflect consumption patterns: whites consume an estimated 80 per cent of cocaine in the U.S.A., while African Americans consume 13 per cent; whites consume cocaine in disproportionate numbers, while blacks do not. Yet 38 per cent of those arrested and 59 per cent of those convicted for drug offenses have been African Americans. And stereotypes notwithstanding, whites account for 46 per cent of all crack use, while African Americans consume 36 per cent and Latinos 11 per cent. That is to say that although African Americans use crack out of proportion to their numbers, probably because it is the least expensive of illicit drugs, they consume considerably less of it than whites do.

Just as Jim Crow succeeded slavery at the end of the 19th century after Reconstruction was reversed, militarized policing and prisons replaced Jim Crow after the civil rights movement was rolled back. Black freedom struggles determined the limits of U.S. democracy from the early 19th century through the 1960s, and the criminalization and incarceration of young African-American males through the War on Drugs at the end of the 20th century represented another dramatic constriction of democratic politics in the U.S., first under President Nixon and accelerating under Presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton. As Feiling and others have stressed, it was through sentencing laws on crack vs. powder cocaine which passed in 1986 under Ronald Reagan - in cooperation with Democratic house majority leader Tip O'Neill - and a revolution in police tactics and organization, that this was achieved.

Such is the domestic context, without which it is impossible to make sense of U.S. foreign policy in producer countries in the Andes (Colombia, Peru and Bolivia) and transport countries in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean (leaving aside Brazil, whose government does not respond to U.S. pressures). After Ronald Reagan was elected, aerial fumigation was undertaken against marijuana growers in Mexico, Jamaica and Colombia in the early 1980s, even as the Pacific Northwest became the leading supplier of the U.S. marijuana market thanks to its competitive advantage in transport costs; the region was soon to find itself subject to similar, if less toxic campaigns. In 1982, President Reagan became the first to appoint a high-level official, then Vice President George H.W. Bush, to run the South Florida Drug Task Force - composed of agents from the DEA, Customs, FBI, ATF, IRS, Army, and Navy - to deal with cocaine trafficking in Miami, by which time the city's homicide rate had made headlines thanks to the violence that Colombians had unleashed in their bid to take over and maintain distribution networks.

Before launching the invasion of Panama and the Gulf War, in 1989 President George H.W. Bush created the Office of National Drug Control Policy, led by "drug czar" William Bennett, militarized anti-narcotics policing in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, and doubled the anti-drug budget to $12 billion. Mexico had already become the major transshipment point for Colombian cocaine, but its dominance only increased with the end of U.S. counterinsurgency wars in Central America, the passage of NAFTA, and the fall of the two so-called cartels in Colombia - Medellín and Cali - under President Clinton.

The Candy Machine's greatest strength may be its presentation of perspectives from former gang members and drug users, drug traffickers and retired narcotics enforcement officials in the U.S. Thus Rusty, a former narcotics officer for the Department of Corrections in Arizona: "When I talk about legalizing drugs, people say, 'you can't mean heroin and crack, right?' But after 30 years of the drug war, spending a trillion dollars ... the bad guys still control the price, purity, and quantity of every drug. Knowing that they control the drug trade, which drug are you going to leave under their control? Regulation and legalization is not a vote for or against any drug. It's not about solving our drug use problem. It's solely about getting some control back."

"They" refers to drug barons, many of them large landowners, as well as warlords, in Colombia, Mexico, Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the problem with Rusty's analysis is that U.S. government allies in such countries - the intelligence services, the judicial systems, the military and police, business and political elites - are either complicit with or directly involved in supplying U.S. and European markets with cocaine and/or heroin, generally in order to finance counterinsurgency wars. As Cockburn and St. Clair's Whiteout [to be reissued, updated, in 2010 by CounterPunch Books]describes, this pattern was set in the 1950s, with opium and heroin in places like Burma, Marseilles and Cuba, repeated in the 1960s and '70s in Vietnam and Laos, and updated with Colombian cocaine in Central America and Central Asian heroin in the 1980s.

The career path of "Freeway Rick" Ross in the 1980s, is illustrative. Unlike everyone else selling cocaine or crack, Rick Ross was supplied with cocaine at cut-rate prices by Danilo Blandon, a Nicaraguan employee of the CIA in the U.S. government's war against the revolutionary Sandinista government, as documented in Whiteout and the late Gary Webb's Pulitzer-prize winning Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Explosion (2003). From prison, Ross explained to Feiling, "Me and Danilo Blandon were really tight. I knew from earlier that he was backing some war, and I knew that he was from Nicaragua, but I had no idea about the Contras. I was illiterate at that time, you know. I never read a newspaper or listened to the news. They say that Danilo was protected, and you can assume from the Feds that I was protected too, but I never knew that. I was just in it for the money, trying to get out of the ghetto."

Blandon sold cocaine to Ross at a price, of a quality, and in quantities that none of Ross's competitors could match. As former DEA agent Celerino Castillo III, who served in El Salvador, told Feiling, "They gave all the coke to Danilo Blandon, who was a CIA asset. He in turn fronted all that stuff to Ricky Ross. Ross became the Walmart of crack, distributing to the Bloods and Crips and everybody else all over the country... Hangars 4 and 5 at Ilopango airport in El Salvador were used as a trampoline for drugs coming in from Colombia and Costa Rica. Oliver North and a Cuban exile named Felix Rodríguez [a former CIA agent who supervised the execution of Che Guevara in Bolivia] were running one of them, and the other one was owned by the CIA.

All evidence pointed to Vice President George H.W. Bush's office as overseeing the operation, but, of course, nothing came of it besides the Kerry Committee Report of 1989, which charged the State Department with making payments to Nicaraguan Contras involved in the cocaine business.
In the neoliberal economy of the 1980s, anchored in financial services, insurance, real estate, and speculative asset bubbles, many African-American males and immigrant males of color saw the cocaine-crack business as the way to achieve material security. Cocaine gave a shot in the arm to street gangs, who handled lower levels of wholesale and retail distribution in the U.S. Rick Ross describes his trajectory: "I was a youngster. Uneducated, uninformed, unemployed. I was looking for opportunities. I wanted to be important in the world, somebody who was respected. Basically, I wanted the American dream, so I guess I was ripe for the picking. The opportunity came in the form of drugs and I latched onto it. I just kept saving my money and buying more drugs. My childhood friends would be walking, but I'd be driving a nice car, and they'd want to know how I got the car. 'Oh, I'm selling cocaine now,' I'd say. 'Teach me how to sell cocaine,' they'd say. So my friends started to get involved, and, before long, we're making a lot of money, and I'm eating at McDonald's whenever I want to. At our height, some days a million dollars would come through our hands in a single day. Next thing I know, the whole neighborhood is selling, people were already gang-banging, but now we were able to afford more expensive weapons, more expensive cars, and better houses and the police started noticing it more."

The comment about eating at McDonald's speaks volumes about the depths of poverty from which Rick Ross escaped, only to wind up living most of his life in a prison cell. Indeed, for most of those serving hard time for nonviolent drug offenses, the crack business offered much less distance from poverty than it had for Ross. Marc, from South Jamaica neighborhood in the borough of Queens, N.Y. - currently the epicenter of the foreclosure crisis in New York City's black and brown neighborhoods - described his work as follows: "It was the hardest job I ever had. It's pure capitalism, you know. Say, you're selling drugs in the South Bronx, say at 138th and 3rd Avenue, and another crew of guys is selling the same drugs as you two blocks away. The block they're on is making $2,000 per day, and the block you're on is making about $2,000 per day. They decide, 'You know what? You're a punk. You're a pussy.' So they move you." It's dog eat dog, to quote the title of a remarkable 2008 film about the cocaine business in Cali, Colombia: a Hobbesian capitalist world of all against all and murder for hire.

This pattern - with gangs as cell forms of organized crime - was repeated among a host of new immigrant groups in the U.S., involved in cocaine distribution and/or smuggling and money-laundering: Colombians, Mexicans, Salvadorans and Guatemalans in L.A.; Colombians, Mexicans and Puerto Ricans in Chicago; Colombians, Jamaicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, Albanians, and Russians in New York. These gangs, of course, are bi- and transnational, just like the cocaine commodity circuit, in which they are embedded: in L.A., there are roughly 2,000 gangs; in Medellín, Colombia, there were reportedly 6,300 gangs in 2003; Chicago is said to have 70,000 gang members.

Gangs involved in distribution aim to reproduce the corporate organization of capitalism, from which their members have been excluded. Hip-hop music testifies to this, particularly the Brooklyn variety pioneered by Biggie Smalls and Jay-Z. Lance, a cocaine wholesaler from South Jamaica, Queens, described his outfit as follows: "The structure of the business is like a Fortune 500. We'd have different titles, but it all basically remains the same as in corporate America. You have your CEO, your supervisor, your treasurer. You might be the captain; you have your lieutenants, your soldiers." Most Fortune 500 companies have different titles for their executives, though; only the Sicilian mafia uses such terms for its employees. This would seem to be an indication of the extent to which poor African Americans - not to speak of Jamaicans, Dominicans, Mexicans, Colombians, Salvadorans, and so forth - have seized upon mafia organization and ideology to justify the pursuit of employment, upward mobility, material abundance, and, most importantly, "respect." If so, it provides evidence of delusion, desperation, or some combination thereof, for, as anthropologist Phillipe Bourgeois' In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio (1995) shows, the cocaine-crack business is much like any other low-wage service industry offering no benefits. Feiling found that "street-level sellers earn roughly the federal minimum wage, which at the time of writing stood at $6.55 per hour." Most top dealers have day jobs and take no more than 25 per cent of total revenues. Only one in six brings home more than $5,000 per month, as 60 per cent of revenues go to wholesalers and retailers on the lower rungs of the distribution chain.
Yet, in spite of the new mafia ideology encapsulated in Jay-Z's (typically self-glorifying) verse, "even righteous minds go through this" (when contemplating whether to participate in the crack game), the cocaine business offers only marginally more room for upward mobility than the service industries to which African-American and Latino youth are confined in the licit economy - with the added risk, or near-certainty, of prison or violent death at an early age.

For direct producers of tropical agricultural commodities like coffee, neoliberal policies in the countryside - nowhere else applied with greater blood and zealotry than in Colombia - have accelerated a long-term secular price decline: there are no options other than coca for people in isolated rural frontier areas, where there is no state presence or source of employment. A coca grower from the department of Sucre (Monterrey municipality) does the arithmetic: "Getting a sack of potatoes to market will cost a farmer between 3,000 and 5,000 pesos, and it will sell for between 10,000 and 12,000 pesos, depending on demand. Meanwhile, coca is a lot easier to sow and process, and doesn't need transporting because the traffickers come to the village to buy it. They pay 1,500,000 pesos for a kilo of coca paste." Making coca paste is and will remain the only option for survival for millions of impoverished peasant families on the Colombian agricultural frontier; the same is true for Peru and Bolivia.

As the experience of the Bolivians Yungas with northern Argentina demonstrates, a legal market for coca dramatically reduces the amount of coca leaf produced for the cocaine business. Bolivian President Evo Morales, whose political base remains the coca growers' trade union federation in the Chapare that produced him, would like nothing better than to tour the world touting the medicinal benefits of the coca leaf and coca tea, and it is easy to imagine a successful "coca diplomacy" with leaders and consumers in the EU, the U.S., Australia and Japan. But, first, the U.N. Single Convention of 1961 would have to be revised so that companies and firms other than Coca Cola could use the leaf for industrial purposes. Until U.S. domestic politics changes, it will stand.

Decriminalizing Marijuana and Cocaine

Perhaps in recognition of this fact, a number of Latin American countries have de-criminalized personal consumption of cocaine and marijuana. Colombia was the pioneer: in 1994, as head of the Constitutional Court, created in the Constitution of 1991, Judge Carlos Gaviria legalized the personal consumption of up to 20 grams of marijuana, and/or a gram of cocaine, because, he argued, drinkers were much more likely to commit violent crimes, and no one had suggested prohibition of alcohol consumption since the 1920s. Gaviria, who has since moved on to a political career in Colombia's turbulent electoral Left, said, "Legislators can proscribe certain forms of behavior toward others, but not how a person is behaving toward him or herself, as long as this doesn't interfere with the rights of others." Ecuador, Argentina and Mexico have since followed suit, which represents the extent to which Latin American countries have sought and attained greater autonomy from U.S. imperial control, as many of the anti-drug laws in Latin America were drafted under U.S. diplomatic pressure. Latin American countries have now joined the Netherlands in treating drug consumption as a public health problem rather than a police problem.

In the U.S., however, as Feiling points out, "legalization" is a "third-rail issue" for politicians, meaning that most will not mention it for fear of destroying their political careers. As President Obama's drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, put it in July 2009, t"Legalization is not in my vocabulary nor is it in the president's." To understand why, it is helpful to ask who wins and who loses from legalization. The losers, not necessarily in order of importance, would include U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the DEA, U.S. Border Patrol, the FBI, the ATF, the IRS, state and local police forces, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. armed forces, to name only some of the agencies whose budgets depend on the drug war for funding, as well as their counterparts in U.S. client states throughout the Americas; arms manufacturers like Sikorsky Helicopters; large pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer; suppliers of chemicals for fumigation like Monsanto; the banking sector as well as off-shore tax havens; the Republican Party; along with warlords, gangs and gangsters. The clearest winners would be consumers, direct producers, and societies that would be less militarized, less carceral, less moralizing, and would have stronger public health and education systems. But, as Jack Cole, who spent 26 years in policing narcotics in New Jersey and is now the executive director of Law Enforcement against Drug Prohibition, stressed to Feiling, "When you train your police to go to war, they've got to have an enemy." Cole considers the War on Drugs a "terrible metaphor" for "policing in a democratic society." Terrible, alas, but substitute "neoliberal" for "democratic," and it is nothing if not apt. Predictably, Obama and Kerlikowske have dropped the nomenclature, but the policies remain intact.

FORREST HYLTON is the author of Evil Hour in Colombia (Verso, 2006), and with Sinclair Thomson, of Revolutionary Horizons: Past and Present in Bolivian Politics (Verso, 2007). He can be reached at forresthylton@yahoo.com.

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Cocaine is a central commodity of the neoliberal age; so, too, its re-processed form ("crack") for the desperately poor in de-industrialized cities of the North and South Atlantic. First announced by Richard Nixon in 1971, the "War on Drugs" predates the rise of cocaine and crack by nearly a decade, but, in the 1980s and '90s, the "War on Drugs" was redoubled in response to the explosion of the cocaine business.

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http://www.narcoticnews.com/drug-prices/cocaine/

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Playboy Mansion Julian Wasser/Getty Images Cocaine And Arms Bust New York Post

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The
Syndicate
By Peter S. Green
How Cocaine Traffickers from Medellín Transformed the Multibillion Dollar Global Drug Trade

The Medellín Cartel was an empire of stunning sweep and unimaginable violence. At its height, it earned as much as $4 billion a year-most of it cash-for its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake.

Pablo Escobar and his partners called their business a cartel, but instead of controlling price and supply, it behaved far more like a criminal syndicate that pumped an endless supply of cocaine into the market and let the market set the price. It was not only a lethal purveyor of stimulants and mayhem, it was also a brilliant business, no different in many ways from a Fortune 500 corporation, but built to operate wholly outside the law.

"What the Medellín cartel did is exactly what any global pharmaceutical firm has to do," says Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who fought the drug cartels as a deputy U.S. attorney general in the mid-1990s. "You start with an ordinary manufacturing and sales business, and then you overlay it with three other things to make up for the fact that you are working outside the legal system."

That first element was fierce, almost irrational, loyalty to the syndicate's leaders, especially Escobar. The loyalty, often laced with violence, replaced the courts that a legal corporation would use to enforce contracts. Escobar was a master at wielding loyalty to get what he wanted. "Escobar was the CEO, very charismatic, very powerful, very demanding," says former U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency officer Javier Peña. He tracked Escobar from 1988 until the trafficker's death in 1993. "He was considered a Robin Hood in Colombia."

Escobar rallied support among Colombia's poorest citizens by stepping in where the government couldn't or wouldn't. He built an apartment complex in a neighborhood of Medellín that still bears his name, where even today people praise him for what he did for their families and community. "There were tugurios [slums], what we call houses of cardboard and wood," remembers Iván Hernández, a community leader in the Barrio Pablo Escobar. Escobar paid to build hundreds of homes in the impoverished area that had previously been a vast garbage dump. "While he was alive, everyone respected him, everybody managed themselves well in the neighborhoods and comunas."

If loyalty didn't work, then the syndicate turned to brutal violence.

Violence was a masterful substitution for the merger and acquisition tactics of legitimate businesses. Anyone who crossed Escobar, even fellow cartel members, was killed by his legion of sicarios, hired guns as young as 14, plucked straight from the hellish ghettos of Medellín. He paid them $100 to $3,000 to kill Colombian cops-a huge amount of money in a city where kids from the slums had few options.

Peña remembers sicarios telling him, "Our life expectancy is 22. If we have some money to give to our mama, some money for sneakers and drinking, what else do we want?"

Cartel member José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha built the cartel's military arm, hiring British and Israeli mercenaries to train his men, and uniting with right-wing death squads and paramilitary groups battling Colombia's leftist guerillas.

Plata o Plomo

Escobar's challenge was simple: "Plata o plomo" ("Take my silver or take my lead").

Finally, the Medellín organization used vast amounts of money to bribe law enforcement and government officials. The bribes were the criminal equivalent of legitimate businesses hiring lobbyists and paying regulatory fines. Although it meant handing over "a very sizeable share of their income" in bribes, Heymann says, it was simply a line item on the cartel's profit and loss statement. Of course, the bribes came with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Escobar's challenge, oft repeated, was simple: "Plata o plomo" (literally, "silver or lead," as in, "take a bribe or take a bullet to the head").

Loyalty, violence, bribery: For two decades, that lethal mix gave the Medellín syndicate a stranglehold on nearly every aspect of the global cocaine trade, from coca farms in Colombia to street dealers in Chicago. The deft use of those tactics made the Medellín syndicate the world's most ruthless, violent and financially successful criminal organization before it withdrew into the shadows following Escobar's death in 1993. In Colombia, a limited version of the business model lived on for another couple of decades through the Oficina de Envigado, whose members included surviving Medellín traffickers and some of Escobar's former associates, and the Urabeños, the largest surviving criminal organization in Colombia. Pressured by Colombia's police and U.S. law enforcement, today's Medellín traffickers form smaller, looser organizations with less control of their markets and no visible kingpins, while keeping a lower profile as they move cocaine around the world and develop a thriving market in Brazil and Argentina. The business model has thrived where the state is weak and police corrupt, most notably with Mexico's Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

The
Ever-Changing
Logistics of
Drug Smuggling

By Peter S. Green

If Escobar was the syndicate's charismatic CEO, his cousin Gustavo Gaviria Rivero was its chief operating officer and the "brains of the cartel," Peña says. Gaviria Rivero developed and controlled the cartel's key smuggling routes-what would be called logistics in the legitimate world of moving goods around the world.

Until the late 1970s, cocaine entered the United States mainly in small quantities stuffed into suitcase linings on commercial flights or smuggled via small boats and fishing trawlers. But as cocaine became the disco era's drug of choice and Wall Street's drug of power in the 1980s, ever-larger quantities were required to meet a seemingly insatiable demand.

Drug Routes Through the Decades

Escobar, who started out as a car thief, then small-time trafficker and kidnapper, first saw opportunity in feeding America's cocaine habit by smuggling coca paste into Colombia, refining it and paying "mules" to smuggle it into the U.S. in their luggage or by swallowing condoms stuffed with cocaine.

Escobar shipped much of the cartel's cocaine through the Caribbean, working with Carlos Lehder and George Jung, who were organizing flights into South Florida through the Bahamas. Lehder then broke with Jung and took control of the tiny Bahamian island of Norman's Cay in 1979, using it as a base where planes would land in broad daylight on the 3,300-foot-long airstrip with loads of cocaine from Colombia. The cocaine was transferred to small planes that could fly below U.S. radar and land on dirt roads and berms in Florida's Everglades.

Such out-in-the-open smuggling wasn't going to last long. In 1982, the Bahamian government forced the traffickers off Norman's Cay. The South Florida Drug Task Force, a combination of agents from the DEA, Customs, FBI and other government agencies along with the military, brought a screeching halt to the Colombia-Bahama-Florida route.

But Gaviria Rivero simply shifted the Medellín supply chain. He tapped legitimate cargo shipments, replacing the insulation in refrigerators and insides of TV sets from Panama with cocaine. They also mixed the highly soluble drug into Guatemalan fruit pulp, Ecuadorian cocoa, Chilean wine and Peruvian dried fish-even soaked it into blue jeans-which was removed by chemists upon arrival in the United States.

From Plant To Powder

The Medellín syndicate was involved in every part of the drug trade, from coca farms in Colombia to street dealers in the United States.

In the 1980s, a kilo of cocaine might cost $1,000 to refine, but Escobar's agents could sell it for up to $70,000 in the U.S.

He began moving cocaine through poverty-stricken Haiti instead of the tourist enclaves of the Bahamas. Profits were so big, pilots made one-way trips to the Florida coast, dropping sacks of cocaine, ditching their planes in the sea and then swimming to waiting ships.

The cartel also began moving cocaine through Panama. From there Mexican couriers would take it overland through Mexico and across the border into the U.S. That meant befriending Mexican smugglers, which helped launch the Sinaloa, Juárez and Tampico cartels that have since turned Mexico into a virtual narco-state.

Throughout it all, the Medellín syndicate remained a decidedly wholesale organization. Escobar and his partners used a collection of distributors and retailers, from U.S. organized crime groups to small-town drug barons and Colombian émigrés, to control the majority of the cocaine moving through Southern Florida and over the Mexican border to the streets of America.

The distributors effectively became "franchisees" of the Colombians, says Paul Gootenberg, a historian and SUNY distinguished professor at Stony Brook University in New York. Violence, bribes and loyalty helped the Medellín syndicate control them. In fact, just the promise of violent retribution from Escobar's enforcers if they didn't pay for deliveries made it possible for the syndicate to control the retail side of the drug trade thousands of miles from home.

Even if they had to share the final profits, the riches were vast. A kilo of cocaine might cost $1,000 to refine and up to $4,000 to smuggle to Miami, where Escobar's agents could sell it for $50,000 to $70,000 in the mid-1980s. At its peak, the Medellín syndicate had five to seven flights a day into the U.S., Mexico or the Caribbean, each carrying some 500 kilos of dope, say Peña and his DEA partner at the time, Steve Murphy. Tons of cocaine became billions in profits.

Drug Routes Through the Decades

Wanted:
Dead or Alive

By Peter S. Green

As cocaine use morphed into an epidemic in the early 1980s, and cheap, toxic crack cocaine ravaged America's inner cities, the U.S. stepped up its war on drugs. When seizures of tons of cocaine in the U.S. failed to dent the supply, the U.S. increased pressure on Colombia to capture the drug kingpins and extradite them for trial in the U.S. Escobar made a bold, and in the end foolhardy, effort to fight the U.S. extradition.

"I would rather have
a grave in Colombia
than a jail cell in the U.S."

- Pablo Escobar

Still known locally as a successful and generous businessman, Escobar co-opted the venerable Liberal Party, and won a seat in parliament in 1982 as an alternate representative, where he pressured legislators to renounce a 1979 extradition treaty with the U.S. and funded a campaign to build opposition to extradition. A year later, crusading Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla exposed Escobar as a drug baron, forcing him out of parliament and vowing to bring the Medellín Cartel to justice.

Lara Bonilla would pay for his heroic act with his life. On April 30, 1984, gunmen on a motorcycle ambushed the minister's government limousine, killing him. Escobar was blamed for the assassination, but wasn't convicted. President Belisario Betancur declared war on the drug traffickers, and for the next decade, Colombia was consumed with violence as Escobar, the government, and leftist militias and right-wing death squads fought each other-the country's decades-long civil war stretching beyond politics to control of the increasingly lucrative drug trade.

Facing extradition to the U.S. on drug charges, Escobar vowed never to surrender, telling a meeting of traffickers: "I would rather have a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the U.S."

The cartel took on Colombia, killing Attorney General Carlos Mauro Hoyos Jiménez in a kidnapping attempt near Medellín in January 1988. A few months later, the DEA sent Peña to Colombia to help capture Escobar and extradite him to the U.S. The traffickers struck again and again, blowing up a Colombian airliner in November 1989 and the headquarters of Colombia's intelligence agency, the DAS, a month later. A special police team, the Bloque de Búsqueda (the Search Bloc), was formed to bring in Escobar.

Pressured by police, rival traffickers and a potent militia called the PEPES (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), Escobar negotiated his own surrender in 1991 to a luxury prison he designed and built near his home in Medellín. But a year later, Escobar escaped from the prison as authorities arrived to move him to a secure jail near Bogota.

Within days, Peña and Murphy had a $300,000 price on their heads.

Death Rate Rising

Violence spread across Colombia in the early 1990s, with the murder toll topping 28,000 deaths in a single year.

The Search Bloc was reactivated, and Peña and Murphy were sent to Medellín to join the hunt for Escobar. Within days, they had a $300,000 price on their heads. "We were aware of that, but we didn't think about that; it simply doesn't interfere with the way you're going to do business," Murphy says almost without emotion more than 20 years later. The murder toll in Colombia surged, peaking that year at over 28,000 across the country, with 7,081 in Medellín alone (almost 10 times the number in 1980).

The bounty on Peña and Murphy was the stuff of dreams for the ghetto-born hitmen who were paid a fraction of that sum to kill Colombian cops. To keep out of the sicarios' gunsights, Murphy and Peña were not allowed out on their own in Medellín. They lived with the police unit hunting Escobar in a converted school surrounded by barbed wire fences and patrolled by perimeter guards. If they left the base, an elite corps of bodyguards surrounded them. To get to Medellín from the airport, they were often flown by Colombian police in Huey helicopter gunships.

But just as legal corporations find the roots of their failure in their very success, the violence that Escobar wielded eventually led to his downfall and death. Escobar's obsession with killing his enemies-and increasingly, innocent people-would be his downfall. The murder of two allies turned fellow traffickers against him. The Search Bloc and the PEPES were gradually arresting or killing his trusted aides, and the government pressured Escobar's family. With a bounty of more than $5 million on Escobar's head, tips poured into a police hotline in Medellín.

"What killed the Medellín cartel was clearly the strong violence," says Thomas Pietschmann, a researcher at the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime in Vienna. "Violence was never good for business, and Pablo Escobar clearly overdid it. He no longer took the precautionary measures you would do as a drug trafficker."

A day after his 44 th birthday, he lingered too long talking to his son on a mobile phone, allowing a Colombian police lieutenant, Hugo Martinez, whose father led the Search Bloc, to trace him to a three-story house in Medellín. He was cornered by several hundred police and shot dead as he leapt to a rooftop on December 2, 1993. In the minutes after his death, Colombian commandos posed like big game hunters over Escobar's corpse. "Viva Colombia! We have just killed Pablo Escobar!" a Colombian policeman shouted over his radio as he broke the news.

The Global Impact of the Cocaine Trade

By Mack Gelber

Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Juárez, a Mexican border city of about 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Until recently, violence was a fact of life for most of its citizens, for whom public shootouts and piles of mutilated corpses (messages of retribution from one cartel to another) were part of everyday life.

In fact, even a decline in the murder rate is being attributed to the fluctuations of the drug economy, for which Juárez remains a critical gateway to the world's biggest drug market-the United States.

In 2010, 3,000 people were killed in Juárez (an average of 8.5 people per day), but in 2014 that number dropped sharply to just 434. But the decline isn't being attributed to better police work or the escalation of army troops by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón. Instead, even U.S. authorities see it as a side effect of how Juárez remains in thrall to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, appears to have won the city's drug trade away from the rival Juárez cartel. The decline in deaths comes from one simple fact: The Sinaloa Cartel won the war.

With the decline in deaths, the tourism board has launched a campaign featuring the slogan "Juárez Is Waiting for You"-words that, just a few years ago, would have carried a sinister undercurrent. But whether tourists will be lured to Juárez remains to be seen. It's a haunted place with gravestones and crosses lining the city streets and piles of rusty bullets easily discovered from old shoot-outs.

More than 1,500 miles north, Chicago is a major distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel-affiliated drug rings that move as much as 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month to meet U.S. demand. The organization controls an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics dealt in the area.

The Mexican cartels use the city's location to their benefit. Chicago is within a day's drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. A total of six interstates crisscross the metropolitan area, and then there are the city's ports on Lake Michigan and the rail lines that link it to both coasts.

The city's ethnic makeup may also be making it easy for the Mexican and South American cartels to operate under the radar. Cartel operatives can be found in neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Little Village, according to county law enforcement, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic. Both also are close to two of the city's main interstates.

While it's hard to separate out the full impact of the cartels from the other violence that comes from gang activity and drug use, law enforcement in the Chicago areas say the drug trade likely has contributed to the violence in Little Village, which has been named one of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by Neighborhood Scout.

But the death and destruction the cocaine trade brings is very localized with few outside of the Little Village neighborhood understanding what it is like to live in an area that is home not only to drug cartels, according to law enforcement, but also violent gangs. If Juárez is haunted by its recent past, Little Village is haunted by the present. Residents impose their own curfews and lock down businesses on what should be busy Friday nights to guard against the violence that comes from being at the epicenter of gangs and drugs.

Across the globe, Sierra Leone has become a major player in the European cocaine trade. That became apparent on Sunday, July 13, 2008, when around 3:30 a.m., a small plane touched down at Lungi International Airport near the country's capital, Freetown. According to news reports, a fake Red Cross insignia was painted on the tail, along with the Venezuelan flag. Inside were five AK-47 rifles, 34 containers of aviation fuel and over 700 kilograms of cocaine, valued at nearly $100 million.

Even though thousands of miles of ocean separate Latin America from the West African coast, the country's foreign minister has said in media reports that cartel operations are thriving as drug traffickers take advantage of Sierra Leone's geographical position on the west coast of Africa to supply Europe's growing cocaine market, often through the port city of Naples. They also capitalize on the country's unstable government institutions, say drug enforcement officials.

The country's geography and political instability have helped make the country popular for Mexican and South American drug cartels and has given rise to a cocaine abuse problem that the country had never faced before. Sierra Leone doesn't produce cocaine locally, but local drug handlers are sometimes paid in product-a fact that may have contributed to the rise of cocaine use in West Africa. According to some estimates, up to 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally, and the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report draws a connection between the cocaine trade in South America to the growing abuse of the drug in Sierra Leone and other West African countries.

When Le Vele, the Le Corbusier-inspired housing project in Naples' Scampìa neighborhood, was completed in 1975, its design was intended to suggest a billowing set of sails. That's what the name means- Le Vele di Scampìa (The Sails of Scampìa)-and it spoke to idealism and optimism that has little to do with the place Le Vele has become.

Now reportedly a major hub for the Camorra, a loose-knit collective of crime syndicates operating in Naples, Le Vele's high-rises are more a series of battlements keeping police activity at bay than sails of promise. The people who do live here (some legally, but most as squatters) share space with the local cocaine and heroin business that brings in more than $11 million a month to meet the demand for coke in Western Europe. The European drug trade, rooted in Latin America and shipped through West Africa, has turned these apartments into trenches, residents into co-conspirators and children into soldiers. Meanwhile, Camorra operatives in Latin America and Mexico broker deals with the region's cartels, ensuring that the circuitous route between South America and Naples remains open.

The place's devastation, both social and physical, can be read as a metaphor for the larger devastation of the cocaine trade on Naples. One feud over control of the Scampìa drug market left an estimated 140 dead in 2004. Hundreds of innocent bystanders have been killed by mistake by Camorra assassins since 1980 as well. A crackdown followed, but like the rot eating at the walls and floors of Le Vele, purging the project of cocaine won't be easy.

Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Juárez, a Mexican border city of about 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Until recently, violence was a fact of life for most of its citizens, for whom public shootouts and piles of mutilated corpses (messages of retribution from one cartel to another) were part of everyday life.

In fact, even a decline in the murder rate is being attributed to the fluctuations of the drug economy, for which Juárez remains a critical gateway to the world's biggest drug market-the United States.

In 2010, 3,000 people were killed in Juárez (an average of 8.5 people per day), but in 2014 that number dropped sharply to just 434. But the decline isn't being attributed to better police work or the escalation of army troops by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón. Instead, even U.S. authorities see it as a side effect of how Juárez remains in thrall to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, appears to have won the city's drug trade away from the rival Juárez cartel. The decline in deaths comes from one simple fact: The Sinaloa Cartel won the war.

With the decline in deaths, the tourism board has launched a campaign featuring the slogan "Juárez Is Waiting for You"-words that, just a few years ago, would have carried a sinister undercurrent. But whether tourists will be lured to Juárez remains to be seen. It's a haunted place with gravestones and crosses lining the city streets and piles of rusty bullets easily discovered from old shoot-outs.

More than 1,500 miles north, Chicago is a major distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel-affiliated drug rings that move as much as 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month to meet U.S. demand. The organization controls an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics dealt in the area.

The Mexican cartels use the city's location to their benefit. Chicago is within a day's drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. A total of six interstates crisscross the metropolitan area, and then there are the city's ports on Lake Michigan and the rail lines that link it to both coasts.

The city's ethnic makeup may also be making it easy for the Mexican and South American cartels to operate under the radar. Cartel operatives can be found in neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Little Village, according to county law enforcement, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic. Both also are close to two of the city's main interstates.

While it's hard to separate out the full impact of the cartels from the other violence that comes from gang activity and drug use, law enforcement in the Chicago areas say the drug trade likely has contributed to the violence in Little Village, which has been named one of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by Neighborhood Scout.

But the death and destruction the cocaine trade brings is very localized with few outside of the Little Village neighborhood understanding what it is like to live in an area that is home not only to drug cartels, according to law enforcement, but also violent gangs. If Juárez is haunted by its recent past, Little Village is haunted by the present. Residents impose their own curfews and lock down businesses on what should be busy Friday nights to guard against the violence that comes from being at the epicenter of gangs and drugs.

Across the globe, Sierra Leone has become a major player in the European cocaine trade. That became apparent on Sunday, July 13, 2008, when around 3:30 a.m., a small plane touched down at Lungi International Airport near the country's capital, Freetown. According to news reports, a fake Red Cross insignia was painted on the tail, along with the Venezuelan flag. Inside were five AK-47 rifles, 34 containers of aviation fuel and over 700 kilograms of cocaine, valued at nearly $100 million.

Even though thousands of miles of ocean separate Latin America from the West African coast, the country's foreign minister has said in media reports that cartel operations are thriving as drug traffickers take advantage of Sierra Leone's geographical position on the west coast of Africa to supply Europe's growing cocaine market, often through the port city of Naples. They also capitalize on the country's unstable government institutions, say drug enforcement officials.

The country's geography and political instability have helped make the country popular for Mexican and South American drug cartels and has given rise to a cocaine abuse problem that the country had never faced before. Sierra Leone doesn't produce cocaine locally, but local drug handlers are sometimes paid in product-a fact that may have contributed to the rise of cocaine use in West Africa. According to some estimates, up to 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally, and the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report draws a connection between the cocaine trade in South America to the growing abuse of the drug in Sierra Leone and other West African countries.

When Le Vele, the Le Corbusier-inspired housing project in Naples' Scampìa neighborhood, was completed in 1975, its design was intended to suggest a billowing set of sails. That's what the name means- Le Vele di Scampìa (The Sails of Scampìa)-and it spoke to idealism and optimism that has little to do with the place Le Vele has become.

Now reportedly a major hub for the Camorra, a loose-knit collective of crime syndicates operating in Naples, Le Vele's high-rises are more a series of battlements keeping police activity at bay than sails of promise. The people who do live here (some legally, but most as squatters) share space with the local cocaine and heroin business that brings in more than $11 million a month to meet the demand for coke in Western Europe. The European drug trade, rooted in Latin America and shipped through West Africa, has turned these apartments into trenches, residents into co-conspirators and children into soldiers. Meanwhile, Camorra operatives in Latin America and Mexico broker deals with the region's cartels, ensuring that the circuitous route between South America and Naples remains open.

The place's devastation, both social and physical, can be read as a metaphor for the larger devastation of the cocaine trade on Naples. One feud over control of the Scampìa drug market left an estimated 140 dead in 2004. Hundreds of innocent bystanders have been killed by mistake by Camorra assassins since 1980 as well. A crackdown followed, but like the rot eating at the walls and floors of Le Vele, purging the project of cocaine won't be easy.

The Global Impact of the Cartels

By Mack Gelber

Cocaine still flows through the Medellín Cartel's distribution networks. The routes feed demand for the drug and are paved with death, decay and destruction.

Who Else Profits From The Drug War?

By Mack Gelber

Who Else Profits from the Drug War?

By Mack Gelber

From private prisons to plastic surgery, legitimate industries have benefited from the fight against drug traffickers.

The Global Impact of the Cocaine Trade

By Mack Gelber

Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Juárez, a Mexican border city of about 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Until recently, violence was a fact of life for most of its citizens, for whom public shootouts and piles of mutilated corpses (messages of retribution from one cartel to another) were part of everyday life.

In fact, even a decline in the murder rate is being attributed to the fluctuations of the drug economy, for which Juárez remains a critical gateway to the world's biggest drug market-the United States.

In 2010, 3,000 people were killed in Juárez (an average of 8.5 people per day), but in 2014 that number dropped sharply to just 434. But the decline isn't being attributed to better police work or the escalation of army troops by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón. Instead, even U.S. authorities see it as a side effect of how Juárez remains in thrall to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, appears to have won the city's drug trade away from the rival Juárez cartel. The decline in deaths comes from one simple fact: The Sinaloa Cartel won the war.

With the decline in deaths, the tourism board has launched a campaign featuring the slogan "Juárez Is Waiting for You"-words that, just a few years ago, would have carried a sinister undercurrent. But whether tourists will be lured to Juárez remains to be seen. It's a haunted place with gravestones and crosses lining the city streets and piles of rusty bullets easily discovered from old shoot-outs.

More than 1,500 miles north, Chicago is a major distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel-affiliated drug rings that move as much as 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month to meet U.S. demand. The organization controls an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics dealt in the area.

The Mexican cartels use the city's location to their benefit. Chicago is within a day's drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. A total of six interstates crisscross the metropolitan area, and then there are the city's ports on Lake Michigan and the rail lines that link it to both coasts.

The city's ethnic makeup may also be making it easy for the Mexican and South American cartels to operate under the radar. Cartel operatives can be found in neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Little Village, according to county law enforcement, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic. Both also are close to two of the city's main interstates.

While it's hard to separate out the full impact of the cartels from the other violence that comes from gang activity and drug use, law enforcement in the Chicago areas say the drug trade likely has contributed to the violence in Little Village, which has been named one of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by Neighborhood Scout.

But the death and destruction the cocaine trade brings is very localized with few outside of the Little Village neighborhood understanding what it is like to live in an area that is home not only to drug cartels, according to law enforcement, but also violent gangs. If Juárez is haunted by its recent past, Little Village is haunted by the present. Residents impose their own curfews and lock down businesses on what should be busy Friday nights to guard against the violence that comes from being at the epicenter of gangs and drugs.

Across the globe, Sierra Leone has become a major player in the European cocaine trade. That became apparent on Sunday, July 13, 2008, when around 3:30 a.m., a small plane touched down at Lungi International Airport near the country's capital, Freetown. According to news reports, a fake Red Cross insignia was painted on the tail, along with the Venezuelan flag. Inside were five AK-47 rifles, 34 containers of aviation fuel and over 700 kilograms of cocaine, valued at nearly $100 million.

Even though thousands of miles of ocean separate Latin America from the West African coast, the country's foreign minister has said in media reports that cartel operations are thriving as drug traffickers take advantage of Sierra Leone's geographical position on the west coast of Africa to supply Europe's growing cocaine market, often through the port city of Naples. They also capitalize on the country's unstable government institutions, say drug enforcement officials.

The country's geography and political instability have helped make the country popular for Mexican and South American drug cartels and has given rise to a cocaine abuse problem that the country had never faced before. Sierra Leone doesn't produce cocaine locally, but local drug handlers are sometimes paid in product-a fact that may have contributed to the rise of cocaine use in West Africa. According to some estimates, up to 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally, and the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report draws a connection between the cocaine trade in South America to the growing abuse of the drug in Sierra Leone and other West African countries.

When Le Vele, the Le Corbusier-inspired housing project in Naples' Scampìa neighborhood, was completed in 1975, its design was intended to suggest a billowing set of sails. That's what the name means- Le Vele di Scampìa (The Sails of Scampìa)-and it spoke to idealism and optimism that has little to do with the place Le Vele has become.

Now reportedly a major hub for the Camorra, a loose-knit collective of crime syndicates operating in Naples, Le Vele's high-rises are more a series of battlements keeping police activity at bay than sails of promise. The people who do live here (some legally, but most as squatters) share space with the local cocaine and heroin business that brings in more than $11 million a month to meet the demand for coke in Western Europe. The European drug trade, rooted in Latin America and shipped through West Africa, has turned these apartments into trenches, residents into co-conspirators and children into soldiers. Meanwhile, Camorra operatives in Latin America and Mexico broker deals with the region's cartels, ensuring that the circuitous route between South America and Naples remains open.

The place's devastation, both social and physical, can be read as a metaphor for the larger devastation of the cocaine trade on Naples. One feud over control of the Scampìa drug market left an estimated 140 dead in 2004. Hundreds of innocent bystanders have been killed by mistake by Camorra assassins since 1980 as well. A crackdown followed, but like the rot eating at the walls and floors of Le Vele, purging the project of cocaine won't be easy.

Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Juárez, a Mexican border city of about 1.5 million people across the Rio Grande from El Paso, Texas. Until recently, violence was a fact of life for most of its citizens, for whom public shootouts and piles of mutilated corpses (messages of retribution from one cartel to another) were part of everyday life.

In fact, even a decline in the murder rate is being attributed to the fluctuations of the drug economy, for which Juárez remains a critical gateway to the world's biggest drug market-the United States.

In 2010, 3,000 people were killed in Juárez (an average of 8.5 people per day), but in 2014 that number dropped sharply to just 434. But the decline isn't being attributed to better police work or the escalation of army troops by former Mexican president Felipe Calderón. Instead, even U.S. authorities see it as a side effect of how Juárez remains in thrall to the drug trade. The Sinaloa Cartel, run by Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, appears to have won the city's drug trade away from the rival Juárez cartel. The decline in deaths comes from one simple fact: The Sinaloa Cartel won the war.

With the decline in deaths, the tourism board has launched a campaign featuring the slogan "Juárez Is Waiting for You"-words that, just a few years ago, would have carried a sinister undercurrent. But whether tourists will be lured to Juárez remains to be seen. It's a haunted place with gravestones and crosses lining the city streets and piles of rusty bullets easily discovered from old shoot-outs.

More than 1,500 miles north, Chicago is a major distribution point for the Sinaloa cartel-affiliated drug rings that move as much as 2,000 kilos of cocaine a month to meet U.S. demand. The organization controls an estimated 70 to 80 percent of the narcotics dealt in the area.

The Mexican cartels use the city's location to their benefit. Chicago is within a day's drive of 70 percent of the U.S. population. A total of six interstates crisscross the metropolitan area, and then there are the city's ports on Lake Michigan and the rail lines that link it to both coasts.

The city's ethnic makeup may also be making it easy for the Mexican and South American cartels to operate under the radar. Cartel operatives can be found in neighborhoods such as Pilsen and Little Village, according to county law enforcement, which are more than 80 percent Hispanic. Both also are close to two of the city's main interstates.

While it's hard to separate out the full impact of the cartels from the other violence that comes from gang activity and drug use, law enforcement in the Chicago areas say the drug trade likely has contributed to the violence in Little Village, which has been named one of the 25 most dangerous neighborhoods in the country by Neighborhood Scout.

But the death and destruction the cocaine trade brings is very localized with few outside of the Little Village neighborhood understanding what it is like to live in an area that is home not only to drug cartels, according to law enforcement, but also violent gangs. If Juárez is haunted by its recent past, Little Village is haunted by the present. Residents impose their own curfews and lock down businesses on what should be busy Friday nights to guard against the violence that comes from being at the epicenter of gangs and drugs.

Across the globe, Sierra Leone has become a major player in the European cocaine trade. That became apparent on Sunday, July 13, 2008, when around 3:30 a.m., a small plane touched down at Lungi International Airport near the country's capital, Freetown. According to news reports, a fake Red Cross insignia was painted on the tail, along with the Venezuelan flag. Inside were five AK-47 rifles, 34 containers of aviation fuel and over 700 kilograms of cocaine, valued at nearly $100 million.

Even though thousands of miles of ocean separate Latin America from the West African coast, the country's foreign minister has said in media reports that cartel operations are thriving as drug traffickers take advantage of Sierra Leone's geographical position on the west coast of Africa to supply Europe's growing cocaine market, often through the port city of Naples. They also capitalize on the country's unstable government institutions, say drug enforcement officials.

The country's geography and political instability have helped make the country popular for Mexican and South American drug cartels and has given rise to a cocaine abuse problem that the country had never faced before. Sierra Leone doesn't produce cocaine locally, but local drug handlers are sometimes paid in product-a fact that may have contributed to the rise of cocaine use in West Africa. According to some estimates, up to 30 percent of trafficked drugs are consumed locally, and the 2012 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime World Drug Report draws a connection between the cocaine trade in South America to the growing abuse of the drug in Sierra Leone and other West African countries.

When Le Vele, the Le Corbusier-inspired housing project in Naples' Scampìa neighborhood, was completed in 1975, its design was intended to suggest a billowing set of sails. That's what the name means- Le Vele di Scampìa (The Sails of Scampìa)-and it spoke to idealism and optimism that has little to do with the place Le Vele has become.

Now reportedly a major hub for the Camorra, a loose-knit collective of crime syndicates operating in Naples, Le Vele's high-rises are more a series of battlements keeping police activity at bay than sails of promise. The people who do live here (some legally, but most as squatters) share space with the local cocaine and heroin business that brings in more than $11 million a month to meet the demand for coke in Western Europe. The European drug trade, rooted in Latin America and shipped through West Africa, has turned these apartments into trenches, residents into co-conspirators and children into soldiers. Meanwhile, Camorra operatives in Latin America and Mexico broker deals with the region's cartels, ensuring that the circuitous route between South America and Naples remains open.

The place's devastation, both social and physical, can be read as a metaphor for the larger devastation of the cocaine trade on Naples. One feud over control of the Scampìa drug market left an estimated 140 dead in 2004. Hundreds of innocent bystanders have been killed by mistake by Camorra assassins since 1980 as well. A crackdown followed, but like the rot eating at the walls and floors of Le Vele, purging the project of cocaine won't be easy.

The Global Impact of the Cartels

By Mack Gelber

Cocaine still flows through the Medellín Cartel's distribution networks. The routes feed demand for the drug and are paved with death, decay and destruction.

Who Else Profits From The Drug War?

By Mack Gelber

Who Else Profits from the Drug War?

By Mack Gelber

From private prisons to plastic surgery, legitimate industries have benefited from the fight against drug traffickers.

Medellín:
A Post-Pablo
Economy By Fara Warner and Christine Sanders
By Fara Warner and Christine Sanders

Medellín is a study in contrasts. Visit the El Poblado comuna (or neighborhood), and the city feels worthy of the "miracle" moniker that's been applied to its comeback economy.

High-rise apartments punctuate the sky. Open-air restaurants are filled with people-an unimaginable scene when gunfights between Pablo Escobar's sicarios and government forces meant sitting outside was a potential death sentence. The Museo de Antioquia rivals any in the world and features more than 188 works by one of Medellín's other famous citizens-sculptor and painter Fernando Botero.

The Miracle of Medellín

After decades of violence, Medellín has become one of South America's most dynamic cities.

Go beyond the upscale El Poblado and the other Medellín-the noise, pollution and chaos of the more notorious comunas -begins to reveal itself.

Poverty, crime and income inequality-systemic problems in the city before cocaine was added to the mix-are still prevalent. Neighborhoods such as Comuna 13 and Comuna 9 are made up of ramshackle houses with tin roofs and stucco-covered brick perched on the steep hills. Here, Medellín's economic comeback feels more elusive. The divide between rich and poor is higher here than the rest of Colombia as defined by the Gini coefficient, which represents income distribution. The lower the Gini number, the more economically equal a society is considered to be. Medellín's Gini number has dropped from .54 to .50 from 2008 to 2012. Colombia's average is .49. By comparison, the United States' Gini number was .41 in 2013.

But stop. Listen closely. You'll hear the distinctive sounds of Spanish-laced hip-hop emanating from Casa Kolacho in Comuna 13. Turn a corner and you'll be met with the riotous beauty of graffiti that has become the community's defiant symbol of rebirth. You begin to see why Medellín is a model for other cities trying to put their violent pasts behind them. It's one of the very few cities torn apart by narco-terrorism to make a comeback.

The local government has begun to contribute to revitalizing neighborhoods where once the illegal economy of drugs and crime were the only ways out of the slums-or at least the only way to make money. An escalator has been built to connect the people at the top of the steep hill with those at the bottom, in an effort to bridge the city's topography.

"I don't want a segregated city that is not one city but 15 different cities," says Medellín's mayor Aníbal Gaviria Correa. "Communities and neighborhoods where the quality of life and security are much worse than others."

He admits that while Medellín has come a long way from the violent, decimated city it was in the 1990s, "there is so much left to do, despite today having historically lower levels of both extreme poverty and violence." The city's murder rate has dropped from 381 per 100,000 in 1991 (almost 40 times higher than the U.N.'s marker for an epidemic of violence), to less than 27 per 100,000 in 2014. That is lower than U.S. cities such as Baltimore, Maryland.

But the deep economic divide that the Medellín Cartel capitalized on still exists. For the city's poorest residents, the illegal economy-the economy of drugs in particular-was and still is a way to rise up and out of extreme poverty.

The intensity of the crisis and the sheer number of people killed in the violence has shaken Medellín to its core. And while no one would want any city to go through what Medellín did, the horrific crisis here has forced the government and social institutions to be more creative in their efforts to bring the city back.

The local government has invested in traditional ways, with money for the escalators, schools, roads and other public works. But it may be the government's willingness to accept that acts of seeming defiance like graffiti and hip-hop are in fact acts of economic power that will move the city forward.

"The movement to make art a part of culture and creating spaces for dance, to sing, to do graffiti and more has given rise to youth engaging in such activities," says Chota, a graffiti artist who goes by a single name. But unlike graffiti artists elsewhere who learned their craft under threat of arrest for defacing property, Chota was actually schooled in the art of graffiti. "When I was in 11th grade, the opportunity to participate in art programs was provided. Because I liked drawing, I became involved with graffiti and fine-tuned my techniques," he says.

One of his murals, called America and representative of South America as opposed to North America, features a face where the neck is made of leaves, the hair is painted to represent weeds and a lotus flower defines the crown of the head.

"Art has become something that has helped communities resist violence," he says. "But it is also a way for the city itself to gain a different reputation away from being a dangerous and violent place to a place where young people can have a prosperous outlook of the future."

In Comuna 13, hip-hop can provide a path to that future and may protect young people from getting involved in gangs. The irony is that the community has embraced a musical form that is defiant, anti-establishment and born out of despair-and often comes from the very place, the United States, that provided the market for cocaine. Here it is the music of hope. "We work with kids who have never been involved in gang violence," says Jeihhco, a hip-hop artist who helped start Casa Kolacho. "These are kids who are living surrounded by violence, but have been fortunate enough not to be living it. We have become an option here in Medellín. Violence is still rampant. Gangs still exist, stronger than ever. Fortunately, we're also stronger than ever."

Pablo Escobar was a complicated character-a ruthless criminal but also a cunning business entrepreneur. His ability to outthink his competition and deflect attempts to bring him to justice set him apart. Could you have stayed one step ahead like Escobar?

Narcos Now

The power of the global drug trade continues to make headlines around the world.

Previously published Wall Street Journal articles selected by Netflix.

Bolivia Cuts Coca Production for Fourth Consecutive Year, U.N. Says

Study: 'Fair Sentencing' Law Leads to Decrease in Crack Prosecutions

Colombian Coca Crop Increases in 2014, Raising Concern About Cocaine Trafficking

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By Peter S. Green How Cocaine Traffickers from Medellín Transformed the Multibillion Dollar Global Drug Trade The Medellín Cartel was an empire of stunning sweep and unimaginable violence. At its height, it earned as much as $4 billion a year-most of it cash-for its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake.

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As we analyze the Mexican cartels, we recognize that to understand their actions and the interactions between them, we need to acknowledge that at their core they are businesses and not politically motivated militant organizations.

This means that although violence between and within the cartels grabs much of the spotlight, a careful analysis of the cartels must look beyond the violence to the business factors that drive their interests - and their bankrolls.

There are several distinct business factors that have a profound impact on cartel behavior. One example is the growing and harvesting cycle of marijuana in the Sierra Madre Occidental.

Another is the industrialization of methamphetamine production in Mexico and the increasing profit pool it has provided to the Mexican cartels in recent years. But when we are examining the transnational behavior of the Mexican cartels, the most important factor influencing that behavior is without a doubt the economics of the cocaine trade.

The Cocaine Profit Chain

Cocaine is derived from the leaves of the coca plant, and three countries - Colombia, Peru and Bolivia - account for all the coca harvested in the world. Turning coca into cocaine hydrochloride is a relatively simple three-step process. Once the leaves of the coca plant are harvested, they are rendered into what is known as coca paste.

From there, the coca paste is processed into cocaine base, which eventually becomes cocaine hydrochloride. The process involves several precursor chemicals: kerosene, sulfuric acid, sodium carbonate, hydrochloric acid, potassium permanganate and acetone. Most of these chemicals are readily available and easily replaced or substituted, making them difficult for authorities to regulate.

According to figures from the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, coca farmers in Colombia receive $1.30 for each kilogram of fresh coca leaf. In Peru and Bolivia, where the leaf is air-dried before being sold, farmers receive $3.00 per kilogram.

For the fresh leaf used in processing in Colombia, it takes somewhere between 450 and 600 kilograms of coca leaf to produce 1 kilogram of cocaine base, depending on the variety of coca plant used (some varieties have a higher cocaine alkaloid content). At $1.30 per kilogram, this means that it costs somewhere between $585 and $780 to purchase the coca leaf required to produce one kilogram of cocaine base.

One kilogram of cocaine base can then be converted into roughly one kilogram of cocaine hydrochloride, which is commonly referred to as cocaine.

As cocaine progresses from the production site to the end users, it increases in value. According to figures provided by the Colombian National Police, a kilogram of cocaine can be purchased for $2,200 in the jungles in Colombia's interior and for between $5,500 and $7,000 at Colombian ports. But the price increases considerably once it leaves the production areas and is transported closer to consumption markets.

In Central America cocaine can be purchased for $10,000 per kilogram, and in southern Mexico that same kilogram sells for $12,000. Once it passes through Mexico, a kilogram of cocaine is worth $16,000 in the border towns of northern Mexico, and it will fetch between $24,000 and $27,000 wholesale on the street in the United States depending on the location.

The prices are even higher in Europe, where they can run from $53,000 to $55,000 per kilogram, and prices exceed $200,000 in Australia. The retail prices per gram of cocaine are also relatively high, with a gram costing approximately $100-$150 in the United States, $130-$185 in Europe and $250-$500 in Australia.

Along the supply chain there is also quite a bit of "cutting," which is when substances are added to the cocaine to dilute its purity and stretch profit. According to the Colombian National Police, the purity of cocaine leaving the country is about 85 percent. By the time it reaches the United Kingdom, purity is 60 percent, and it drops further to about 30 percent at the retail level, according to the U.N. World Drug Report 2012.

Cartel Behavior

There has been a thriving two-way flow of contraband goods across the U.S.-Mexico border since its inception. Mexican organized crime groups have been involved in the smuggling of marijuana to the U.S. market since the U.S. government began to restrict marijuana in the early 1900s, and Mexican organized criminals profited handsomely during the Prohibition era in the United States.

As U.S. demand for illicit drugs increased in the second half of the 20th century, Mexican organizations branched out to become involved in smuggling other types of drugs, including pharmaceuticals and black tar heroin; poppy cultivation was also introduced to Mexico in the 1930s.

These Mexican organized crime syndicates, such as the Guadalajara cartel, also began to traffic cocaine into the United States in the late 1970s, but for many years the Mexican organizations worked as junior partners for the powerful Colombian cartels in Medellin and Cali. Mexico was a secondary route for cocaine compared to the primary route through the Caribbean.

As a result, the Colombians pocketed the lion's share of the profit made on cocaine trafficked through Mexico and the Mexicans received a fee on each kilogram they transported. (However, they did not assume any of the risk of losing shipments between South America and Mexico.)

In the late 1970s and the 1980s - the early phase of Mexican involvement in the cocaine trade - Central American middlemen such as Juan Matta-Ballesteros were also heavily involved in the flow of cocaine through Mexico. They moved cocaine from South America to Mexico, becoming wealthy and powerful as a result of the profits they made.

As U.S. interdiction efforts, aided by improvements in aerial and maritime surveillance, curtailed much of the Caribbean cocaine flow in the 1980s and 1990s, and as the Colombian and U.S. governments dismantled the Colombian cartels, the land routes through Central America and Mexico became more important to the flow of cocaine. It is far more difficult to spot and seize contraband moving across the busy U.S.-Mexico border than it is to spot contraband flowing across the Caribbean.

This increase in the importance of Mexico allowed the Mexican cartels to gain leverage in negotiations with their Central American and Colombian partners and to secure a larger share of the profit. Indeed, by the mid-1990s the increasing importance of Mexican organizations to the flow of cocaine to the United States allowed the Mexican cartels to become the senior partners in the business relationship.

In a quest for an even larger portion of the cocaine profit chain, the Mexican cartels have increased their activities in Central and South America over the last two decades. The Mexicans have cut out many of the middlemen in Central America who used to transport cocaine from South America to Mexico and sell it to the Mexican cartels. Their efforts to consolidate their control over Central American smuggling routes continue today.

This move meant that the Mexican cartels assumed responsibility for the losses incurred by transporting cocaine from South America to Mexico, but it also permitted them to reap an increasing portion of the profit pool. Instead of making a set profit of perhaps $1,000 or $1,500 per kilogram of cocaine smuggled into the United States, the Mexican cartels can now buy a kilogram of cocaine for $2,200 or less in South America and sell it for $24,000 or more to their partners in the United States.

But the expansion of the Mexican cartels did not stop in Central America. According to South American authorities, the Mexican cartels are now becoming more involved in the processing of cocaine from coca leaf in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. There have also been reports of seizures of coca paste being smuggled to cocaine processing laboratories in Honduras and Guatemala. The use of these Central American processing laboratories, which are run by Mexican cartels, appears to be a reaction to the increased efforts of the Colombian National Police to crack down on cocaine laboratories and the availability of cocaine processing chemicals.

U.S. counternarcotics officials report that today the Mexican cartels are the largest players in the global cocaine trade and are steadily working to grab the portion of cocaine smuggling not yet under their control. But the efforts of the Mexican cartels to increase their share of the cocaine profit are not confined to the production side; they have also expanded their involvement in the smuggling of South American cocaine to Europe and Australia and have established a footprint in African, Asian and European countries.

Furthermore, they have stepped up their activities in places like the Dominican Republic and Haiti in an attempt to increase their share of the cocaine being smuggled through the Caribbean to the U.S. market. As seen by recent operations launched by U.S. law enforcement, such as Operation Xcellerator, Operation Chokehold and Operation Imperial Emperor, the Mexican cartels have also been increasing their presence at distribution points inside the United States, such as Chicago, Atlanta and Dallas, in an effort to increase their share of the cocaine profit chain inside the United States.

While marijuana sales have always been an important financial source for the Mexican cartels, the large profits from the cocaine trade are what have permitted the cartels to become as powerful as they are today. The billions of dollars of profit to be had from the cocaine trade have not only motivated much of the Mexican cartels' global expansion but have also financed it. Cocaine profits allow the Mexican cartels to buy boats and planes, hire smugglers and assassins ("sicarios") and bribe government officials.

Cocaine is a product that has a very limited and specific growing area. Consequently, that distinct coca growing area and the transportation corridors stretching between the growing area and the end markets are critically important.

With a business model of selling cocaine at over 10 times the cost of acquisition - and even greater over the cost of production - it is not surprising that the competition among the various Mexican cartels for the smuggling corridors through Mexico to the United States has become quite aggressive.

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From Colombia to New York City: The narconomics of cocaine

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As we analyze the Mexican cartels, we recognize that to understand their actions and the interactions between them, we need to acknowledge that at their core they are businesses and not politically motivated militant organizations.

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Founded by

Pablo Escobar, Roberto Escobar, Gustavo Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder

Founding location

Antioquia Department, Colombia

Years active

1976-1993

Territory

Colombia, México, New York, Florida

Ethnicity

Colombians and international people out of Colombia.

Criminal activities

Drug trafficking, arms trafficking, bombing, terrorism, bribery, kidnapping, extortion, money laundering, murder, racketeering

Allies

Guadalajara Cartel (defunct)
La Corporación (defunct)
Gulf Cartel
Cuba (alleged)
Nicaragua (alleged) [1]

Rivals

Cali Cartel (defunct)
Los Pepes (defunct)
Colombian government
American government
DEA
CIA

The Medellín Cartel ( Spanish: Cartel de Medellín) was a highly organized Colombian drug cartel originating in the city of Medellín, Colombia that was founded by Pablo Escobar. The drug cartel operated throughout the 1970s and 1980s in Bolivia, Colombia, Panama, Central America, Peru, and the United States, as well as in Canada. At the height of its operations, the Medellín Cartel smuggled tons of cocaine each week into countries all over the world and brought in up to US$60 million daily in drug profits. For a time, the Medellín Cartel supplied at least 85% of the United States' cocaine market.

In the late 1970s, illegal cocaine trade became a significant problem and became a major source of profit. Drug lord Griselda Blanco distributed cocaine for the Cartel in New York City and later Miami, establishing a crime network that at its height trafficked around 300 kilos per month. By 1982, cocaine surpassed coffee as the chief Colombian export. Private armies were raised to fight off guerrillas who were trying to either redistribute their lands to local peasants, kidnap them, or extort the gramaje money Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or FARC) attempted to steal.

At the end of 1981 and the beginning of 1982, members of the Medellín Cartel, the Colombian military, the U.S.-based corporation Texas Petroleum, the Colombian legislature, small industrialists, and wealthy cattle ranchers came together in a series of meetings in Puerto Boyacá and formed a paramilitary organization known as Muerte a Secuestradores ("Death to Kidnappers", MAS) to defend their economic interests, and to provide protection for local elites from kidnappings and extortion. By 1983, Colombian internal affairs had registered 240 political killings by MAS death squads, mostly community leaders, elected officials, and farmers.

The following year, the Asociación Campesina de Ganaderos y Agricultores del Magdalena Medio ("Association of Middle Magdalena Ranchers and Farmers", ACDEGAM) was created to handle both the logistics and the public relations of the organization, and to provide a legal front for various paramilitary groups. ACDEGAM worked to promote anti-labor policies, and threatened anyone involved with organizing for labor or peasants' rights. The threats were backed up by the MAS, which would attack or assassinate anyone who was suspected of being a "subversive". ACDEGAM also built schools whose stated purpose was the creation of a "patriotic and anti-Communist" educational environment, and built roads, bridges, and health clinics. Paramilitary recruiting, weapons storage, communications, propaganda, and medical services were all run out of ACDEGAM headquarters.

By the mid-1980s, ACDEGAM and MAS had undergone significant growth. In 1985, the drug traffickers Juan Matta-Ballesteros, Pablo Escobar, Roberto Escobar, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder, and Jorge Luis Ochoa began funneling large amounts of cash into the organization to pay for equipment, training, and weaponry. Money for social projects was cut off and redirected towards strengthening the MAS. Modern battle rifles, such as the AKM, FN FAL, Galil, and HK G3, were purchased from the military, INDUMIL, and drug-funded private sales. The organization had computers and ran a communications center that worked in coordination with the state telecommunications office. They had 30 pilots, and an assortment of fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters. British, Israeli, and U.S. military instructors were hired to teach at paramilitary training centers.

Once U.S. authorities were made aware of "questionable activities", the group was put under Federal Drug Task Force surveillance. Evidence was gathered, compiled, and presented to a grand jury, resulting in indictments, arrests, and prison sentences for those convicted in the United States. However, very few Colombian cartel leaders were actually taken into custody as a result of these operations. Mostly, non-Colombians conspiring with the cartel were the "fruits" of these indictments in the United States.

Most Colombians targeted, as well as those named in such indictments, lived and stayed in Colombia, or fled before indictments were unsealed. However, by 1993 most, if not all, cartel fugitives had been either imprisoned, or located and shot dead, by the Colombian National Police trained and assisted by specialized military units and the CIA.

The last of Escobar's lieutenants to be assassinated was Juan Diego Arcila Henao, who had been released from a Colombian prison in 2002 and hidden in Venezuela to avoid the vengeance of " Los Pepes". However he was shot and killed in his Jeep Cherokee as he exited the parking area of his home in Cumaná, Venezuela, in April 2007.

While it is broadly believed that Los Pepes have been instrumental in the assassination of the cartel's members over the last 17 years,[when? ] it is still in dispute whether the mantle is just a screen designed to deflect political repercussions from both the Colombian and United States governments' involvement in these assassinations.[citation needed ]

Perhaps the greatest threat posed to the Medellín Cartel and the other traffickers was the implementation of an extradition treaty between the United States and Colombia. It allowed Colombia to extradite to the US any Colombian suspected of drug trafficking and to be tried there for their crimes. This was a major problem for the cartel, since the drug traffickers had little access to their local power and influence in the US, and a trial there would most likely lead to imprisonment. Among the staunch supporters of the extradition treaty were Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara (who was pushing for more action against the drug cartels[citation needed ]), Police Officer Jaime Ramírez, and numerous Colombian Supreme Court judges.[citation needed ]

However, the cartel applied a "bend or break" strategy towards several of these supporters, using bribery, extortion, or violence. Nevertheless, when police efforts began to cause major losses, some of the major drug lords themselves were temporarily pushed out of Colombia, forcing them into hiding from which they ordered cartel members to take out key supporters of the extradition treaty.

The cartel issued death threats to the Supreme Court Judges, asking them to denounce the Extradition Treaty. The warnings were ignored. This led Escobar and the group he called Los Extraditables ("The Extraditables") to start a violent campaign to pressure the Colombian government by committing a series of kidnappings, murders, and narco-terrorist actions.

In November 1985, 35 heavily armed members of the M-19 guerrilla group stormed the Colombian Supreme Court in Bogotá, leading to the Palace of Justice siege. Some claimed at the time that the cartel's influence was behind the M-19's raid, because of its interest in intimidating the Supreme Court. Others state that the alleged cartel-guerrilla relationship was unlikely to occur at the time because the two organizations had been having several standoffs and confrontations, like the kidnappings by M-19 of drug lord Carlos Lehder and of Nieves Ochoa, the sister of Medellín Cartel founder Juan David Ochoa. These kidnappings led to the creation of the MAS/ Muerte a Secuestradores ("Death to Kidnappers") paramilitary group by the Medellín Cartel. Former guerrilla members have also denied that the cartel had any part in this event. The issue continues to be debated inside Colombia.

As a means of intimidation, the cartel conducted thousands of assassinations throughout the country. Escobar and his associates made it clear that whoever stood against them would risk being killed along with their families. Some estimates put the total around 3,500 killed during the height of the cartel's activities, including over 500 police officers in Medellín, but the entire list is impossible to assemble, due to the limitation of the judiciary power in Colombia. The following is a brief list of the most notorious assassinations conducted by the cartel:

Luis Vasco and Gilberto Hernandez, two DAS agents who had arrested Pablo Escobar in 1976. Among the earliest assassinations of authority figures by the cartel.[when? ]

Rodrigo Lara, Minister of Justice, killed on a Bogotá highway on April 30, 1984, when two gunmen riding a motorcycle approached his vehicle in traffic and opened fire.

Tulio Manuel Castro Gil, Superior Judge, killed by motorcycle gunmen in July 1985, shortly after indicting Escobar.

Enrique Camarena, DEA agent, February 9, 1985, killed in Guadalajara, Mexico. Tortured and murdered on orders of members of the Guadalajara Cartel and Juan Matta-Ballesteros, a drug lord of the Medellin Cartel.[citation needed ]

Hernando Baquero Borda, Supreme Court Justice, killed by gunmen in Bogotá on July 31, 1986.

Jaime Ramírez, Police Colonel and head of the anti-narcotics unit of the National Police of Colombia. Killed on a Medellín highway in November 1986 when assassins in a red Renault pulled up beside his white Toyota minivan and opened fire. Ramírez was killed instantly; his wife and two sons were wounded.

Guillermo Cano Isaza, director of El Espectador, killed in December 1986 in Bogotá by gunmen riding a motorcycle.

Jaime Pardo Leal, presidential candidate and head of the Patriotic Union party, killed by a gunman in October 1987.

Carlos Mauro Hoyos, Attorney General, kidnapped then killed by gunmen in Medellín in January 1988.

Antonio Roldan Betancur, governor of Antioquia, killed by a car bomb in July 1989.

Waldemar Franklin Quintero, Commander of the Antioquia police, killed by gunmen in Medellín in August 1989.

Luis Carlos Galán, presidential candidate, killed by gunmen during a rally in Soacha in August 1989. The assassination was carried out on the same day the commander of the Antioquia police was gunned down by the cartel.

Carlos Ernesto Valencia, Superior Judge, killed by gunmen shortly after indicting Escobar on the death of Guillermo Cano, in August 1989.

Jorge Enrique Pulido, journalist, director of Jorge Enrique Pulido TV, killed by gunmen in Bogotá in November 1989.

Diana Turbay, journalist, chief editor of the Hoy por Hoy magazine, killed during a rescue attempt in January 1991.

Enrique Low Murtra, Minister of Justice, killed by gunmen in downtown Bogotá in May 1991.

Myriam Rocio Velez, Superior Judge, killed by gunmen shortly before she was to sentence Escobar on the assassination of Galán, in September 1992.

Miguel Maza Márquez was targeted in the DAS Building Bombing, resulting in the death of 52 civilians caught in the blast. Miguel escaped unharmed.

In 1993, shortly before Escobar's death, the cartel lieutenants were also targeted by the vigilante group Los Pepes (or PEPES, People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar).

With the assassination of Juan Diego Arcila Henao in 2007, most if not all of Escobar's lieutenants who were not in prison had been killed by the Colombian National Police Search Bloc (trained and assisted by U.S. Delta Force and CIA operatives), or by the Los Pepes vigilantes.

DEA agents considered that their four-pronged " Kingpin Strategy", specifically targeting senior cartel figures, was a major contributing factor to the collapse of the organization.

La Oficina de Envigado is believed to be a partial successor to the Medellín organization. It was founded by Don Berna as an enforcement wing for the Medellín Cartel. When Don Berna fell out with Escobar, La Oficina caused Escobar's rivals to oust Escobar. The organization then inherited the Medellín turf and its criminal connections in the US, Mexico, and the UK, and began to affiliate with the paramilitary United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia, organizing drug trafficking operations on their behalf.

The cartel is either featured or referenced in numerous works of popular culture.

1. ^ Peñaloza, General Carlos (2014). El Delfín de Fidel: La historia oculta tras el golpe del 4F. p. 195. ISBN 978-1505750331. Arnaldo Ochoa knew that Fidel secretly exchanged weapons with the Medellin Cartel for money and drugs. And this turbulent partnership included the authorization for the landing of planes in Cuba and loaded with cocaine to be transferred then and speedboats to the US. Fidel had appealed to this source of income to compensate for the reduction of the Soviet subsidy. And illegal trade, Castro delivered Kalashnikov rifles, ammunition and other supplies brought as loot of war from Africa.

2. ^ Corben, Billy (director); Cosby, Charles (himself); Blanco, Griselda (herself) (July 29, 2008). Cocaine Cowboys 2: Hustlin' with the Godmother (DVD). Magnolia Home Entertainment. ASIN B00180R03Q. UPC 876964001366.

3. ^ Marc Chernick (March-April 1998). "The paramilitarization of the war in Colombia". NACLA Report on the Americas. 31 (5): 28. doi:10.1080/10714839.1998.11722772.

4. ^ Pearce, Jenny (May 1, 1990). 1st. ed. Colombia:Inside the Labyrinth. London: Latin America Bureau. p. 247. ISBN 0-906156-44-0

5. ^ "Who Is Israel's Yair Klein and What Was He Doing in Colombia and Sierra Leone?". Democracy Now!. June 1, 2000. Archived from the original on March 14, 2007.

6. ^ "'News Of A Kidnapping' A Hit In Iran After Opposition Leader's Recommendation". Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.

7. ^ "M-19 cambió drogas por armas". El País. 6 October 2005. Archived from the original on 27 September 2007.

https://www-independent-co-uk.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mafias-link-to-colombian-cartel-is-revealed-683238.html?amp_js_v=a2&amp_gsa=1&amp&usqp=mq331AQA#referrer=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com&amp_tf=From%20%251%24s&ampshare=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.independent.co.uk%2Fnews%2Fworld%2Feurope%2Fmafias-link-to-colombian-cartel-is-revealed-683238.html

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Founded by Pablo Escobar, Roberto Escobar, Gustavo Gaviria, Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez, José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder Founding location Antioquia Department, Colombia Years active 1976-1993 Territory Colombia, México, New York, Florida Ethnicity Colombians and international people out of Colombia.

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Season two continues where season one ended. Soldiers find Escobar and his entourage right outside the perimeter of La Catedral, but are too petrified by Escobar to make an arrest. At the embassy, the United States sends a new ambassador who brings the CIA into play.

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Cocaine DrugFacts | National Institute on Drug Abuse

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Cocaine is a powerfully addictive stimulant drug made from the leaves of the coca plant native to South America. Although health care providers can use it for valid medical purposes, such as local anesthesia for some surgeries, recreational cocaine use is illegal. As a street drug, cocaine looks lik…

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http://www.latinpost.com/articles/110598/20160122/top-5-richest-latin-american-drug-lords.htm

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The stunning escape of Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán from a maximum-security Mexican prison last Saturday was a timely reminder that the drug trade is not just a colorful background setting for popular American TV shows and movies. It is, in fact, a violent, deadly business populated by men (and even a few women) who kill not only indirectly, through the distribution of their toxic products, but also directly, through hired gunmen who intimidate and murder rivals, government officials, and often, innocent bystanders.

Today, we take a brief look at five of the most notorious drug traffickers of our time.

1. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán

Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, the man who became known as "El Chapo" ("Shorty"), certainly looks unassuming: 5'6" tall, middle aged, average looks. But his unremarkable appearance is deceptive. Guzmán is the kingpin of the Sinaloa Cartel, the source of the largest percentage of drugs imported into the United States every year: cocaine, marijuana, methamphetamine, and heroin, all delivered by the ton through elaborate land and air distribution channels.

Guzmán seemed fated for the drug trade. His uncle was one of the original Mexican drug smugglers, and young Joaquín was soon involved in the family business. He rose to prominence in the cartel quickly, as internecine fighting claimed rivals both within the cartel and without. In 2006, violating a pact between cartels, Guzmán ordered an assassination that spurred what has come to be referred to as the Mexican Drug War. This conflict between cartels has resulted in over 60,000 deaths and 12,000 kidnappings. Along the way, Guzmán has become a billionaire and one of the most powerful men in the world.

The law caught up with Guzmán from 1993 to 2001 when he was arrested and imprisoned. But he made himself comfortable in jail, through bribery and intimidation, until his eventual escape (which involved the bribing of 78 people and cost him over $2 million to engineer). Arrested again on February 22, 2015, it wasn't long before El Chapo made his second escape from a maximum-security prison on July 11. How did he do it? He slipped through a hole under the shower in his cell and escaped through a mile-long tunnel that led to a construction site on the outside.

Following Guzmán's headline-grabbing escape, headline-grabbing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump didn't waste any time tweeting about it. "Mexico's biggest drug lord escapes from jail. Unbelievable corruption and USA is paying the price. I told you so," Trump tweeted, alluding to controversial remarks about Mexican immigrants that he made during his presidential campaign launch.

El Chapo allegedly responded to The Donald through what is believed to be the drug lord's official Twitter account. The profanity-laced tweet read: "Keep f**king around and I'm going to make you swallow your f**king words. . ."

While Trump beefed up his security and said the FBI is investigating the threat, El Chapo was busy on the run and Mexico was offering a $3.8 million reward for information leading to his capture.

UPDATE: On January 8, 2016 Mexican president Enrique Peña Nieto announced via Twitter that authorities recaptured the drug lord.

2. Pablo Escobar

If one man could be said to represent the idea of a "drug kingpin," that one man would be Pablo Escobar. While running the Medellín Cartel out of Colombia in the 70s and 80s, Escobar's ruthless tactics ensured a steady flow of cocaine into America. Some sources estimate that 80% of the cocaine imported into this country came through Escobar's enterprise, some 15 tons per day at its peak.

Escobar became one of the world's richest men (with an estimated worth of nearly $10 billion) through eliminating rivals and fostering corruption within the Colombian government. Officials who didn't bow to bribery often met violent ends. He assassinated candidates for office, judges, police officers, and reporters. He planted a bomb on an airplane to kill a candidate for president; the candidate was not on the plane, but 110 innocent people were. Ultimately, Escobar would be responsible for the deaths of over 4,000 people.

Escobar's acts of domestic terrorism eventually turned public opinion against him, despite his attempts to court public favor with philanthropic activity. By the time he was gunned down while fleeing across rooftops from government soldiers, his reputation was as riddled with holes as his dead body. His fame, however, has outlived him. Last week, Netflix announced plans to film a TV series based on his life, and upcoming films featuring Benicio Del Toro and John Leguizamo as Escobar are already in production.

3. Griselda Blanco

Not all drug kingpins are men. One of the most ruthless drug "queenpins" of all-time was Griselda Blanco, nicknamed "La Madrina," or "The Godmother." Blanco was one of the key figures in the Medellín Cartel and has been credited with being a mentor to Pablo Escobar, who would eventually become her enemy.

Blanco first made her name by developing bras and girdles designed to hide smuggled cocaine. She left Colombia in the early 70s and settled in Queens, New York, where she set up a large-scale operation. In 1975, she was indicted when the government intercepted a huge cocaine shipment. Blanco fled back to Colombia, but it wasn't long before she returned, this time to Miami.

In the 80s, Blanco painted Miami white and red: white with cocaine and red with the blood of drug rivals. One favorite method included drive-by shootings via motorcycle. Miami experienced a wave of Blanco-related crime, including a submachine-gun attack at a mall. Blanco instigated anywhere between 40 and 250 murders, including a few personal ones (she shot one of her husbands at point-blank range over a drug deal). Eventually, Blanco was imprisoned, but that didn't stop her; on the inside, she plotted to kidnap John F. Kennedy, Jr. in a plan that was foiled only by an insider's betrayal.

Blanco reveled in her "godmother" status, going as far as naming her youngest son Michael Corleone after the character in The Godfather. Like a character in a movie, however, she would have an ironic end. She was gunned down in front of a butcher's shop by an assassin on a motorcycle, murdered by the very same method she had so often used to dispatch her own enemies.

4. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén

Like certain mafiosos, it helps to have a memorable nickname if you're going to be a drug kingpin. Osiel Cárdenas Guillén has one of the grimmer ones: "El Mata Amigos," or "The Friend Killer." Cárdenas earned the sobriquet by murdering his friend Salvador Gómez, who was in line to assume control of the Gulf Cartel in 1996. Needless to say, the Gulf Cartel soon had a new top man.

The U.S. Border Security Handbook describes the Gulf Cartel as "particularly violent," and under Cárdenas's leadership, it expanded its reach. He infiltrated the formerly incorruptible Mexican Special Forces branch of the military and amassed a private mercenary army that protected his interests and enforced his will. This army eventually became known as Los Zetas ("The Zs"), a brutal group more likely to behead an official than bribe him. With such an organization at his beck and call, Cárdenas' cartel became one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world.

Cárdenas seemed to be unstoppable until he threatened a pair of DEA agents sheltering an informant. The might of the U.S. government was provoked, and in 2003, Cárdenas was captured and extradited to the U.S., where he still resides in a Texas prison. Los Zetas have since broken off from the Gulf Cartel, and their role in Mexico's drug war has only intensified since Cárdenas' arrest.

5. Frank Lucas

Although a large proportion of drug traffickers come from Central America, the United States has had its share of homegrown drug kingpins. There was "Freeway" Ricky Ross, one of the men most behind the crack epidemic of the mid-80s; "Nicky" Barnes, known as "Mr. Untouchable" (he wasn't); and Jemeker Thompson, the "Queen Pin." Possibly more notorious than all of them is Frank Lucas, who during the early 70s distributed his "Blue Magic" heroin throughout Harlem.

Originally from North Carolina, Lucas arrived in New York and soon got involved with local gangster "Bumpy" Johnson. After Johnson died, Lucas saw an opportunity to move into the drug trade that had up to that point been dominated by the Italian mafia. Using military contacts overseas, he established a distribution network directly from Southeast Asia. Poppies were grown and processed into heroin and flown in military planes back to the U.S. (Lucas himself has asserted that heroin was sometimes packed into the coffins of soldiers being flown back from Vietnam). The purity of the heroin, combined with the violent tactics of Lucas towards competitors and the corrupt New York City police force of the early 70s, ensured that Lucas was soon making millions of dollars a month.

Police corruption would lead to a probe, which would eventually lead to Lucas. He went to jail, but turned government informant, which lessened his sentence. He lost all of his money, but he gained his freedom. His story was later told by Hollywood in the movie American Gangster, starring Denzel Washington. Although the film isn't very accurate, and some have accused it of making Lucas seem noble, it stands as evidence of America's fascination with its most well-known drug kingpin.

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Thug Life: The 5 Most Notorious Drug Kingpins

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With the recent prison escape of El Chapo, one of the world's most notorious criminals, we're taking a look at a rogues' gallery of drug lords, whose brutally violent and ruthless lives are much dirtier than Hollywood could ever depict.