During a recent inspection of Cat Cay, a Bahamian island where the United States has an antidrug outpost, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Paul Yost told a reporter, "This is so much like Vietnam, only worse. The enemy has a thousand safe havens; the rats have a thousand holes. And even when we find them, there's so little we can do, we can't even shoot them down. It's frustrating."
A little later, the admiral--a decorated combat veteran who had inspected a dazzling array of U.S. weaponry aimed at drug traffickers--gave a pragmatic, if pessimistic, view of anti-drug efforts. "The best we can hope for is to raise their odds of getting caught from one in twenty to maybe one in five. Then, maybe in two generations, attitudes will change, and drugs will be taboo."
How did the United States became embroiled in the costly, morally debilitating war on drugs with a collection of ruthless, cunning Colombian bandits, a conflict certain to afflict our society for generations? That question can be, and has been, addressed on cultural, political, and psychological grounds by legions of writers and behaviorists.
Yet, until the publication of Kings of Cocaine, by Miami Herald reporters Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, no one had fully described the development of the cartels that revolutionized drug smuggling into the United States and control as much as 80 percent of the cocaine penetrating our borders. And no one had vividly portrayed the handful of bush-league banditos from the Colombian city of Medellin who would come to rule multibillion-dollar fiefdoms.
It's hot material, a book-jacket writer's dream--full of blood and fear, betrayal and falls from the twisted grace of criminal empire. It begins, appropriately, with a vicious, seemingly senseless machine-gun murder in a Dade Country, Florida, mall.
The book's early chapters describe the painful awakening of U.S. law enforcement officials in South Florida to the notion that a new, terrifying type of criminal was invading their turf. They drip with detail from the perspective of Miami cops, a benefit of the writers' affiliation with the major newspaper covering the first outbreaks of cocaine slaughter. For example, readers learn that the cocaine cowboys, as they have come to be called, have a favorite weapon, the .45-caliber Ingram MAC-10 machine pistol. And that in the early days, the bad guys are universally known as "Lenew," or "Lnu,": last name unknown.
After describing Miami's geographical misfortune (it is closer to Barranquilla, Colombia, than to Atlanta, Georgia), the writers shift the scene to the northeastern Colombian city of smugglers and petty thieves that has become synonymous with cocaine smuggling: Medellin.
Producing cocaine hydrochloride from the leaves of the Andean coca plant had been a small but lucrative business for years in South America before the rise of the Colombian drug cartels. Ironically, the door was opened for the Medellin cartel and other Colombian criminals by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, who cracked the Chilean coke dealers' traditional hold during a successful if brutal campaign to solve that country's drug problem.
The vacuum Pinochet's actions
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