In 1978, cartel co-founder Carlos Lehder started buying up property on Normans Cay, a small island in the Bahamas, which in the early 80s became a key stopover where drug planes could refuel en route to the United States.The Wall Street Journal news organization was not involved in the creation of this content.
At its height, it earned as much as 4 billion a yearmost of it cashfor its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake. 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. 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. 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 Pea. He tracked Escobar from 1988 until the traffickers death in 1993. He built an apartment complex in a neighborhood of Medelln 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 Ivn Hernndez, 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. 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 Medelln. He paid them 100 to 3,000 to kill Colombian copsa huge amount of money in a city where kids from the slums had few options. If we have some money to give to our mama, some money for sneakers and drinking, what else do we want. The bribes were the criminal equivalent of legitimate businesses hiring lobbyists and paying regulatory fines. Of course, the bribes came with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Escobars challenge, oft repeated, was simple: Plata o plomo (literally, silver or lead, as in, take a bribe or take a bullet to the head). The deft use of those tactics made the Medelln syndicate the worlds most ruthless, violent and financially successful criminal organization before it withdrew into the shadows following Escobars death in 1993. Pressured by Colombias police and U.S. Medelln 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. Gaviria Rivero developed and controlled the cartels key smuggling routeswhat would be called logistics in the legitimate world of moving goods around the world. But as cocaine became the disco eras drug of choice and Wall Streets drug of power in the 1980s, ever-larger quantities were required to meet a seemingly insatiable demand. While cocaine was shipped along with marijuana (the more popular export at the time), the decade belonged to Argentina, Brazil and Chile.
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