chataly sandyton kamuelah
Herminia Remmen
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.
The market moved north to Colombia in 1973, and Pablo Escobar seized the opportunity to corner the expanding U.S. market. By 1975, the country was exporting 4,000 kilograms of cocaine to the U.S. a year.
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, Jurez and Tampico cartels that have since turned Mexico into a virtual narco-state.
Throughout it all, the Medelln 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 migrs, to control the majority of the cocaine moving through Southern Florida and over the Mexican border to the streets of America.
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 Medelln Cartel to justice.
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 Medelln. But a year later, Escobar escaped from the prison as authorities arrived to move him to a secure jail near Bogota.
Wars between two rival drug cartels have nearly destroyed Jurez, 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.
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.
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 Jurez 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.
Aerospace companies have made hundreds of millions of dollars manufacturing helicopters used to combat Colombian drug cartels. Last year, the Mexican military signed a deal to spend $680 million on American-made helicopters to be used in anti-trafficking operations.
Profits from the cocaine trade helped keep some U.S. and European banks in business during the recession of the late 2000s. Several large banks have been found guilty of or investigated for allowing traffickers to launder money using their services.
U.S. government agencies have spent hundreds of millions to revamp their computer systems in an effort to gain further insight into the financial crimes of drug cartels. Voice recognition technology was critical to the arrest of one Colombian cartel leader.
The intensity of the crisis and the sheer number of people killed in the violence has shaken Medelln to its core. And while no one would want any city to go through what Medelln did, the horrific crisis here has forced the government and social institutions to be more creative in their efforts to bring the city back.
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.
The Legend of Cocaine Island follows construction company president Rodney Hyden, inspired to search out a bag loaded with bricks of cocaine after hearing the story from his friend, a hippy named Julian, who claims to have found the bag washed up on a beach in Puerto Rico and, unsure what to do, buries it.
By the end of The Legend of Cocaine Island, Rodney (and the documentary itself) ponders a police conspiracy theory that could mean the bag is still buried in the same spot, ready to be dug up by any enterprising treasure hunter with the right connections to smuggle multiple kilos of cocaine into the United States. The documentary ends by zooming into satellite map images of the exact location, followed by coordinates: 18.308281 degrees North, -65.282656 degrees West.
The Legend of Cocaine Island opens with an unverifiable campfire story. While walking the beach in Culebra, Puerto Rico, Julian found a duffle bag with waterproof wrapping. Inside was 32 kilos, or 70 pounds, of cocaine, which the documentary values at around $2 million. Unsure of what to do, Julian buried the bag in a succession of holes. Ten years later, Julian would tell the story in a new town, where construction company president Rodney Hyden heard it.
After the 2008 financial crash, Hyden's family moved from their house with a pool and three-car garage to a double-wide trailer outside of Gainesville, Florida. The possibility of digging up the buried drugs intrigued him. "Julian's story was probably the most fascinating story I've ever heard in my life," he says in The Legend of Cocaine Island, which recreates many of the subsequent events, with Hyden and others playing themselves.
Unprepared for drug trafficking shenanigans, Hyden and Andy's search for the cocaine turns into a comedy of errors. After two failed missions to Puerto Rico, Rodney hands off the map to Carlos, trusting that the smuggler wouldn't cut him out of the deal.
Later, after Carlos meets Hyden with the drugs, Hyden is arrested for possession of five kilograms or more of cocaine, with the intent to distribute. Overcome with dreams of buried treasure and easy wealth, Hyden had fallen right into a joint Homeland Security and Alachua County Sheriff's Office sting.
Hyden's wife isn't too far off when she compares the police sting to the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden: "Just give me a map. You don't have to do anything," she says in the documentary, mimicking the police pitch to her husband. "We're a casualty of bulls**t."
Looking back on his arrest and trial, Hyden and Andy point toward a number of deficiencies in Alachua County and Homeland Security's version of events. To lure Hyden, the undercover investigators emailed him a single photo of a handful of wrapped bricks in a hole in the ground. Later, they pass actual bricks of cocaine in a duffel bag to Hyden, in order that he may incriminate himself.
"For those people who believe we never actually went to Culebra and never dug up the cocaine, they're 100 percent wrong," an anonymous Homeland Security official says in Cocaine Island. "We went to Culebra. We dug up the cocaine and we admitted that cocaine into trial."
"If you knew where $2 million was buried in the ground, would you go get it?" Andy asks at the end of The Legend of Cocaine Island , streaming now on Netflix. It's a blatant provocation, wryly described in the documentary as "the American Dream."
On these lines, Indigo has gone quite the extra mile to save on fuel costs. A couple of days ago, they actually got permission from the DGCA (Directorate General of Civil Aviation) to do away with piles of technical paper manuals from their cockpits. Precisely about 40 kilos per aircraft.
In fact, back in 1987, American Airlines was able to save up nearly $40,000 a year just by removing one olive from each of its in-flight salads, reducing not just fuel costs but also grocery shopping spending.
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