Drug Trafficking Colombia

The best, and probably the last, hope for bringing the heads of the Cali drug cartel to trial in the United States languishes in Colombia's notorious Modelo prison. This prisoner's lawyers insist that he is a Colombian named Jose Luis Caicedo. U.S. and Colombian authorities are convinced that he is really Fernando Flores, a Venezuelan who may be the key to proving that Miguel and Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela continued to run their narcotics empire from a Colombian prison.

Nearly a year ago, Haitian public security chief Robert Manuel warned of "macabre plots" by international drug cartels to infiltrate his impoverished nation, co-opt its politicians, corrupt its nascent U.S.-built police force and foment disorder. The occasion: A large shipment of Colombian cocaine destined for the United States had been abandoned in the village of Aquin on Haiti's south coast. Peasants began to divide the spoils.

Mexican authorities said Wednesday that they have launched an investigation into whether Raul Salinas de Gortari was a major drug-trafficking figure during his brother's presidency, as Swiss officials have charged. The Mexicans announced their probe after Swiss officials moved Tuesday to seize $114.4 million in European bank accounts, charging that it had come from drug trafficking.

After the most extensive money-laundering investigation in Swiss history, officials on Tuesday publicly accused Raul Salinas de Gortari, brother of Mexico's former president, of being a kingpin in the cocaine trade and pocketing at least $500 million in illicit profits.

This is the end of the road, the place where nature defeated technology. The mid-20th century vision of a thoroughfare linking the Americas, from Alaska to southern Chile, foundered here in the mud, mountains and dense jungle of Panama's Darien province 35 years ago. The final 67-mile segment of the Pan-American Highway was never built, leaving a wilderness where the rivers are the highways.

The U.S. government has made its position clear: 1) The United States will do all it can to support Colombia's war on drugs. 2) The United States will not become involved in Colombia's other war: its long, internal conflict. The Colombian army has been fighting leftist guerrillas for three decades and is increasingly coming into confrontation with right-wing private armies. What is not clear is where one war ends and the other begins. "You really can't draw the line," one U.S. official admitted.

The scores of Colombians, including civilians, killed during ongoing battles last week between the army and guerrillas in this nation's southern, cocaine-producing region are an unfortunate aspect of war, the defense minister said Saturday. "Colombia . . . has to understand that what is occurring is part of a confrontation where all of us must decide whether we are going to support democracy . . .

The lukewarm U.S. endorsement of Colombia's drug-fighting efforts, announced Thursday, is another sign that neither international shame nor domestic angst can change an entrenched political system tainted by narcotics money, skeptics said. After two years of being classified as a pariah in the war against drugs--along with Iran and Myanmar (formerly Burma)--Colombia was categorized by the U.S.

Suspected drug traffickers have kidnapped President Ernesto Samper's press secretary and a radio reporter, a radio network said. The RCN network said two people describing themselves as members of "the Extraditables" telephoned to say they were holding the spokesman, William Parra, and an RCN reporter, Luis Eduardo Maldonado. "The Extraditables" was the name of a shadowy group formed by late Medellin drug lord Pablo Escobar.

When Luis Cano was arrested outside his $561,000 home in suburban Miami Lakes last year, the Texas-born businessman had been out of the United States for more than a year, according to one of his lawyers. Cano had divided that time between Mexico and the Dominican Republic, where he was setting up a casino business, defense attorney Emilia Diaz-Fox told a federal judge here a month after Cano's arrest on drug charges.