Snow Job by Kevin Jack Riley

Author:Kevin Jack Riley [Riley, Kevin Jack]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, Public Policy, General, Social Science, Sociology
ISBN: 9781560002420
Google: dAj1ngEACAAJ
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
Published: 1996-01-15T04:43:03+00:00

Advances

Colombia awoke to the drug industry’s pernicious effects in 1982 when leading Liberal party politicians, including Luis Carlos Galan Sarmiento and Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, decided to challenge the drug industry’s evident influence and immunity. It was during this period that the false image of the traffickers as beleaguered citizens began to unravel. Galan and Lara Bonilla sponsored Colombia’s first official public investigations of the drug industry, moves that threatened the traffickers’ comfortable positions in Colombian society. Several months into office, Lara Bonilla ordered an investigation pertaining to Pablo Escobar’s 1976 arrest and release without trial on cocaine smuggling and bribery charges, and the subsequent murder of the arresting officers. Additionally, Lara Bonilla, under pressure from Galan’s New Liberalism Movement (MNL, or Movimiento Nuevo Liberalismo) colleagues, was investigating drug traffickers’ financial ties to leading politicians. Though Escobar avoided arrest and prosecution over the 1976 case, the publicity and exposure relating to the criminal and financial investigations were sufficient to force Escobar to resign his position as an alternate congressman to the House of Representatives.

In late April, 1984, in retaliation for both Escobar’s political humiliation and for a raid on Tranquilandia, a large cocaine processing laboratory, the Medellin cartel ordered Lara Bonilla’s assassination. Lara Bonilla’s assassination shocked the country by illustrating how vulnerable the government was to the traffickers’ retribution and brought into sharp focus the danger that the cocaine industry presented to Colombian society. True, the cocaine business was violent from its inception. But violence occupies a prominent and peculiar place in Colombian society so that the traffickers’ criminal and violent tendencies did not, at least initially, threaten their social standing. From 1948 to 1966, Colombia endured a civil conflict rooted in left-right political divisions that claimed more than 200,000 lives.11 But Lara Bonilla’s assassination changed the calculus with which Colombians accepted violence, if for no other reason than his murder marked one of the first visible attacks against the national political system by the drug industry. Colombian policies and attitudes about drug trafficking have undergone a number of changes over the years, and opinions continue to wax and wane, but Lara Bonilla’s assassination signaled one of the first times that both the public and the national leadership simultaneously regarded the drug industry as a threat.

One immediate consequence of the Lara Bonilla assassination was a renewal of the Colombian government’s commitment to extradition. Less than a week after Lara Bonilla’s murder, President Betancur signed an extradition order for Carlos Lehder under the terms of a 1982 treaty signed with the United States. Escobar and the other leading traffickers feared the extradition treaty because it gave Colombia the power to extradite subjects to the United States for drug crimes that were organized, originated, and committed in Colombia. The traffickers realized that trial in the United States represented a potent weapon. U.S. courts not only worked much more rapidly than the Byzantine Colombian system, but they also appeared to be much more difficult to influence and intimidate. All things considered, the traffickers were safer if they were held for trial in Colombia.

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