HIV Babies Become The Latest Chapter In The Tragedy That Is Drug Abuse In Today's Russia. IRKUTSK, Russia - When the special infants' ward in the Infectious Disease Hospital in Irkutsk opened two years ago, the first arrival was tiny Vanya, who had been abandoned by his mother 12 hours after being born. Next was a desperately underweight child whom the nurses called Dima. Then came Vladislav, newborn son of a 15-year-old heroin addict. Now, the roster numbers 18 children between 4 months and 2 years old who share two traits: having been born infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS, and having been abandoned by a drug-addicted mother. [continues 663 words]
WASHINGTON (AP) Public hospitals cannot test pregnant women for drugs and turn the results over to police without consent, the U.S. Supreme Court said yesterday in a ruling that buttressed the Constitution's protection against unreasonable searches. Some women who tested positive for drugs at a South Carolina public hospital had been arrested from their beds shortly after giving birth. The justices ruled 6-3 that such testing without patients' consent violated the Constitution even though the goal was to prevent women from harming their fetuses by using crack cocaine. [continues 665 words]
In A Public-Relations Campaign, Contestants Undergo Commando-Style Training BOGOTA, Colombia - Contestants on the television game show Comandos wear camouflage, combat boots and helmets as they crawl through mud, swing on ropes, and run obstacle courses at an army training base. "It's lots of dirty fun," said cohost Andrea Serna, whose own tight T-shirts and pants are definitely not army-issue. "Many people have a fantasy of being in the army - for three days, not three years." But Comandos is more than a game show. Sponsored by a Colombian armed forces that admit to feeling isolated as they fight leftist guerrillas and drug traffickers, the program is also a bit of soft-core propaganda aimed at connecting the military with civilian society. [continues 825 words]
Authorities Say He Was Prescribing The Addictive Painkiller OxyContin. Richard Paolino, 57, a longtime Bensalem physician, was jailed under $8 million bond yesterday on charges that he practiced medicine illegally, freely writing thousands of prescriptions for powerful painkillers such as OxyContin, much of it resold at huge profits on the streets of Philadelphia. State Attorney General Mike Fisher and Bucks County District Attorney Diane Gibbons said Paolino, a doctor of osteopathic medicine, was the source of more than 1,200 prescriptions for OxyContin and the sedative Xanax from Nov. 1 through March 1 alone. [continues 934 words]
Despite Revisions, Some Schools Are Opting Out Of DARE To Try Antidrug Alternatives. For 10 years, Collingswood police officers have stood in the town's fifth-grade classrooms, lecturing about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. And for 10 years, they have followed the same DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) workbook used by 36 million children nationwide, giving 17 lessons on topics such as how to resist peer pressure and different ways to say no. But as the DARE graduates ascended through high school, the local police were still hauling in teenagers for drinking on weekends. A survey indicated that the number of students drinking and using drugs in Collingswood had actually increased in the previous five years. And they were starting earlier, with 28 percent of eighth graders reporting they had been drunk in 1998-99, compared with 11 percent in 1995-96. [continues 991 words]
A drug suspect was kept out of his home while officers got a warrant. They thought he would destroy evidence. WASHINGTON - Police who are convinced that a drug suspect will destroy evidence if left alone may hold the suspect outside the home while they get a warrant, the Supreme Court ruled yesterday. In a second case exploring the balance between law enforcement and privacy rights, the court also heard the arguments of a man arrested after police outside his house used a heat-measuring device to detect a marijuana-growing operation inside. [continues 681 words]
A South Jersey case has drawn local attention to the "immensely popular" OxyContin. A five-year-old pill prescribed for cancer patients and others with severe, chronic pain is appearing on the streets as a new narcotic of choice. When chewed, snorted or injected, OxyContin produces a rush like heroin - and an addiction that can be just as hard to break. Although drug agencies do not have a definitive database of OxyContin-related crime and abuse, an anecdotal map compiled by the National Drug Intelligence Center in Washington shows hundreds of incidents of overdose, armed robbery, prescription fraud and theft in recent months in Western Pennsylvania, Ohio, Maine, Kentucky, Virginia and West Virginia. [continues 1069 words]
It's big. It's popular. It doesn't work. New money and research may improve it. Science may finally replace good intentions as the driving force behind drug and alcohol education in the nation's schools. It's about time. After years of suppressing criticism and resisting change, the omnipresent Drug Abuse Resistance Education program - known better simply as DARE - is rewriting its curriculum. The changes promise a better chance for more kids to avoid the devastating grip of drug abuse. Last year, research shows, one in four of America's 23.6 million teens had used illegal drugs in the previous 30 days. [continues 401 words]
Parents and police met last night in North Philadelphia to discuss what could be done to stem the illegal use of a powerful painkiller by city teenagers. Capt. Robert Trzcinski, head of the 26th Police District, told about 120 parents and teens at district headquarters, at 26th Street and Girard Avenue, that abuse of OxyContin had resulted in fatal overdose for at least four people in the area in the last few weeks. "It's a police problem, but it's also a community problem and a parental problem," Trzcinski said. [continues 354 words]
It's a lesson learned but not learned: Huffing can kill.Two years ago, huffing - inhaling chemicals from aerosol spray cans - caused a car crash in which five Delaware County teenagers died.On Friday, the Chester County coroner ruled that Morgan Kelly, 17, of Berwyn, who died when her car hit a tree on Feb. 3, had inhaled aerosol fumes moments before the crash and probably lost consciousness.What young people don't know about the dangers of inhalants is killing them, according to bereft parents as well as coroners and substance-abuse experts."Kids don't have the image that [an inhalant] is illegal or harmful to them," Chester County coroner Rodger Rothenberger said Friday."You can go out and get it at the store, so that means it can't be that bad, or they'd take it off market. [continues 883 words]
CAMDEN - Framed by a dilapidated rowhouse, Chris Anderson stands in the growing darkness and talks about the most profound four days of his life: his half-week of homelessness. Anderson, who grew up in Salem County, had a family, a good job, and an $1,100 paycheck every week. After a house fire and his son's death, however, everything slipped away. He lived in motels for a few months, then found himself on the streets of North Camden, his savings depleted. [continues 463 words]
He became the first head of state in the region to do so. He says traffickers would lose their economic incentive. MONTEVIDEO, Uruguay - This small, quiet, slow-moving nation does not make much news. But Uruguayan President Jorge Batlle has figured out a way to get headlines. He has become the first head of state in the region - and one of the few anywhere - to call for the decriminalization of illicit drugs. Batlle, a blunt free-market reformer, questions the costs and effectiveness of a drug war whose primary theater of battle is Latin America. [continues 877 words]
The Government And Rebels Agreed To Resume Peace Talks, But The Same Difficult Obstacles To Ending The War Remain BOGOTA, COLOMBIA Despite optimism generated by an agreement to resume peace talks in Colombia, the government and rebels face an arduous task in negotiating an end to the nation's 37-year war. After a two-day summit in rebel territory, President Andres Pastrana and Manuel Marulanda, chief of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, pledged Friday to continue the peace talks. [continues 554 words]
PIKEVILLE, Ky. - The robber asked for only one thing when he walked into a pharmacy with a mask over his head and an automatic rifle in his hands: OxyContin. The prescription drug, meant to be a painkiller for cancer patients, is being abused throughout the East, authorities say. In Kentucky, about 200 people were arrested and charged this week in what police say was the largest drug raid in state history. All had allegedly been using or dealing OxyContin. "They'll kick a bag of cocaine out of the way to get to 'Oxy,' " said Detective Roger Hall of the Harlan County Sheriff's Department in Kentucky. [continues 385 words]
Negotiations Toward Ending The 37-year-old Civil War Ended In November. The U.s. Is Watching With Interest. LOS POZOS, Colombia - Trying to resuscitate Colombia's shaky peace process, President Andres Pastrana traveled yesterday to rebel territory, where he was embraced by guerrilla chief Manuel Marulanda. But the friendly greeting belied the challenges Pastrana faces in his quest to end Colombia's 37-year-old war. In his third face-to-face encounter with Marulanda, Pastrana was trying to get the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, to return to formal peace talks it abandoned in November. [continues 463 words]
They Often Cannot Secure The Storage Boxes. Some Students Sell The Drug, Used As Speed By Older Children. When Avis Anderson became a school nurse in 1983, she kept students' prescription drugs in a shoe box. They were mostly antibiotics. Since then, Anderson has seen the amount of drugs she must dispense to her students at Neil Armstrong Middle School in Bristol Township, Bucks County, balloon to fill two large, locked cabinets. The growth is mostly in drugs such as Ritalin - a controlled substance meant to treat hyperactivity and attention-deficit disorder but commonly crushed and snorted by students to achieve a speedlike high. [continues 912 words]
The Study Shows More Money Is Spent On The Problems Created By Addiction Than On Prevention And Treatment. WASHINGTON - States spend billions of dollars cleaning up the wreckage of drug, alcohol and cigarette abuse - about as much as they pay for higher education - but little of that money goes to treatment and prevention programs, according to a private study released yesterday. The three-year, state-by-state study, titled "Shoveling Up: The Impact of Substance Abuse on State Budgets," estimates that states spent $81.3 billion dealing with substance abuse in 1998, about 13 percent of their budgets. Of the total, $7.4 billion was for tobacco-related illnesses. [continues 520 words]
NASHVILLE (AP) - Joe Gilliam, the former Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback, died of a cocaine overdose, the Nashville medical examiner said yesterday. "The cause of Mr. Gilliam's death is cocaine intoxication," Dr. Bruce Levy said. "The manner of his death is accident." Gilliam died on Christmas Day at 49. He had struggled for years after his NFL career with drug problems, living periodically on the streets of Nashville, his native city, where he was lauded as "Jefferson Street Joe" during his heyday as a star at Tennessee State. [continues 156 words]
Janice Hughes spoke with her granddaughter for the last time on Halloween morning. She called from work to tell 16-year-old Heather Morrow where to find the candy, expecting her to empty the bag she had hidden before trick-or-treaters arrived. When Hughes stepped through the door of her Bordentown home that evening, the Snickers bag sat, untouched, on the kitchen table. Hours earlier, Morrow inhaled nitrous oxide from a plastic garbage bag placed over her head. The giddy high might have lasted a few minutes before she passed out. She most likely asphyxiated within five minutes. [continues 1356 words]
It was a gruesome crime scene. The victims had been sprayed with semi-automatics, their bodies sprawled in the dining room. Some were piled atop one another against a door; others were lying on their backs or stomachs. One couple looked as if they were trying to escape - their arms outstretched in an apparent bid to cheat death. Seven people died and three were injured in what authorities are calling a drug-related, execution-style slaughter Thursday night in a boarded-up rowhouse in the Mill Creek section of West Philadelphia. [continues 942 words]
LOS ANGELES - When actor Robert Downey Jr. was arrested last month in a Palm Springs spa, news reports cataloged the woes of the troubled actor, allegedly found once again with illegal drugs after a year in state prison and numerous bouts of drug treatment. Downey's latest arrest may land him in prison again. It happened too early for him to benefit from a new California law that requires community-based drug treatment - not jail time - for most nonviolent drug offenders, even those already on probation or parole. [continues 1240 words]
Two Key Officials Say FARC Guerrillas Are Exporting Drugs Critics See An Effort To Justify U.S. Involvement BOGOTA, Colombia - Senior U.S. officials have begun to accuse Colombia's largest guerrilla force of involvement in cocaine exports, fueling suspicions by critics of U.S. policy of a campaign to pave the way for deeper U.S. involvement in this country's conflicts. U.S. and Colombian authorities have long alleged that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known as FARC, collects "taxes" and protects payments along every step of the domestic cocaine industry, from coca farms to refineries and clandestine airstrips. [continues 784 words]
Chapters In This Series With Links: Chapter 1: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1690/a07.html Chapter 1 (continued): Escobar's Rise To Power http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1692/a04.html Chapter 2: A Top-Secret Electronic Tracking Unit Rejoins The Hunt http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1696/a07.html Chapter 3: With Escobar Eluding Capture, Americans Summon Delta Force http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n1702/a01.html Chapter 4: [continues 596 words]
Final Chapter of a Serial The radio signal pointed Lt. Hugo Martinez straight ahead. The line on his computer screen lengthened and the tone in his headphones grew stronger as his unmarked police surveillance van moved down a street in a middle-class neighborhood of Medellin on Dec. 2, 1993. Electronic surveillance from the air and the ground had traced calls made by fugitive drug trafficker Pablo Escobar to this neighborhood. Hugo and his driver were trying to find the exact house. They drove down the street until the signal peaked and then began to diminish, the line pinching in at the edges of the screen and the tone slightly falling off. [continues 3182 words]
WASHINGTON - Federal agents targeted a violent Mexican drug-trafficking cartel yesterday, executing about 100 arrest warrants in the United States and Mexico as they cracked down on the flow of millions of dollars of Colombian cocaine into south Texas from Mexico. Drugs were concealed on produce trucks carrying limes, carrots, peppers and other vegetables, and were taken to New York, Chicago, Houston, Memphis and Columbus, Ohio, for distribution, a Drug Enforcement Administration official said. The State Department is offering a $2 million reward for information leading to the capture of Osiel Cardenas Guillen, the head of the cartel, who was indicted on criminal charges unsealed in Brownsville, Texas, yesterday for conspiracy to distribute drugs and assault on a federal officer. [continues 100 words]
Chapter 35 of a continuing serial Lt. Hugo Martinez drove away from his police surveillance unit's temporary staging area in a Medellin parking lot on Thursday, Dec. 2, 1993. His friend on the switchboard at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota had just alerted him that Pablo Escobar was on the line to the hotel. Escobar's voice had been recognized right away, even though he was still pretending to be a journalist. He had called the hotel several times to speak with his wife and family staying there. [continues 1478 words]
While the war in Afghanistan has been a major cause of concern to the region's former Soviet states, there are other trouble points as well. TURDIYEV, Tajikistan - A field of sun-parched brush separates Sayevali Abdulloyev's land from Afghanistan. He has surveyed this border from his farm in Tajikistan for 40 years, and has never crossed it. It terrifies him. War, drugs, religious strife - to Abdulloyev, it all comes from the other side of the barbed wire. The fighting in Afghanistan this fall has come so close to his village of Turdiyev that he hears the clap of artillery fire at night. [continues 953 words]
Chapter 34 of a continuing serial With the police Search Bloc listening in and recording the conversation, Pablo Escobar chatted on the phone with his wife and family as they holed up in a hotel in Bogota, trying desperately to get out of Colombia. It was Thursday, Dec. 2, 1993. After Escobar had spoken with his wife, his son, Juan Pablo, got back on the line. Juan Pablo had been given a list of questions from a journalist. Often, when Escobar was in trouble, he used the Colombian media to broadcast his messages and demands, trying to whip up public sentiment in his favor. Other times, when he was displeased with the media, he would have reporters and editors killed. Juan Pablo wanted his father's advice on how to answer these questions. [continues 1139 words]
Surveillance Had Pinpointed His Location. This Time, No Dragnet Would Tip Him Off. Chapter 33 of a continuing serial Hugo Martinez got an incorrect fix on the source of the first call Pablo Escobar made to his family at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota on a Tuesday in late November 1993. But by the next day, the American surveillance experts at Centra Spike and the Search Bloc's own fixed surveillance teams in the hills over Medellin had pinpointed Escobar's location in the neighborhood called Los Olivos. [continues 1677 words]
Moving Is Constant. So Is Worrying About His Loved Ones. If They Were Safe, He Could Fight Full-Force. Chapter 32 of a continuing serial After Hugo Martinez's success in tracking down a Medellin drug dealer with his police unit's high-tech gear, his father gave him a few days off to visit his wife and children in Bogota. But on Hugo's first night back, in late November 1993, Pablo Escobar started issuing phone threats, which were traced to a neighborhood in Medellin. [continues 1681 words]
New Threats By Los Pepes Prompt A Bitter Response From The Fugitive. Chapter 31 of a continuing serial When the Lufthansa plane carrying the family of Pablo Escobar finally landed in Frankfurt, Germany, on a Sunday afternoon in November 1993, it was forced to taxi to a remote spot on an alternate runway, out of the view of press waiting in the terminal. Colombian President Cesar Gaviria had been on the phone to officials in Spain and Germany, urging them to refuse the Escobars. He explained that if the family was safely removed from Colombia, there would be another vicious bombing campaign by Pablo Escobar. [continues 1726 words]
WASHINGTON - Western Hemisphere nations this week will judge their strengths and weaknesses in fighting drugs under an Organization of American States analysis that some hope eventually could ease a source of tensions in U.S.-Mexican relations. Thirty-four experts will report to an OAS commission the results of the organization's first country-by-country drug study of the Americas, known as the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism, or MEM. Some U.S. and Latin American officials hope the MEM eventually will replace the U.S. drug certification system, under which this country annually judges other nations on their cooperation in fighting drugs. Those seen as not doing enough can face sanctions. [continues 486 words]
Closing In, The Drug Lord's Pursuers Received Some Alarming News: Their Quarry Had Escaped To Haiti. By November of 1993, Gustavo de Greiff was becoming a problem. He was the Fiscal General, Colombia's top federal prosecutor, and he was now working in open defiance of President Cesar Gaviria on the matter of Pablo Escobar. De Greiff had told Gaviria that he disagreed with effectively holding the Escobar family hostage. As an elected official - an "independent entity," he called himself - he had decided to help the family leave Colombia in order to complete his deal for the fugitive's surrender. [continues 1780 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia To keep up pressure, U.S. works to keep the family in Colombia. Chapter 29 of a continuing serial On the night of Nov. 26, 1993, the U.S. Embassy in Bogota learned that Pablo Escobar's wife and children were planning once more to flee Colombia. They hoped to fly to London or Frankfurt, Germany . The family was growing increasingly desperate. They had been under round-the-clock protection by agents from the fiscal general, Colombia's top federal prosecutor, ever since a failed effort to fly Escobar's son, Juan Pablo, and daughter, Manuela, to the United States in March. [continues 1198 words]
His Empire In Shambles And Short On Cash, Escobar's Options Begin To Disappear. Chapter 28 of a continuing serial By the autumn of 1993, Pablo Escobar was in bad shape. His lifelong, fabulously wealthy organization had been dismantled and terrorized by the vigilantes of Los Pepes. In a single two-week period, five members of his extended family had been killed, presumably by Los Pepes, and several of his remaining key business associates had been kidnapped and murdered. Others were in prison, on the run or in hiding. [continues 1249 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia The Unit Had A Lot Of Faith In Its Electronic Gear And Hoped To Quiet Critics. Chapter 27 of a continuing serial The special Colombian police squad sent to Medellin with its curious little portable direction-finding kits was having no luck finding Pablo Escobar. The Search Bloc was continuing to provide security for the men, but the unit itself was considered a joke. Things got so bad that Col. Hugo Martinez, the Search Bloc commander, finally sent the unit's leaders back to Bogota. [continues 1473 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia Gen. Jack Sheehan Was Director Of All Special Operations Overseas. Chapter 26 of a continuing serial As the hunt wore on late into the summer of 1993, at least one member of the top brass at the Pentagon began to worry about how far the Americans in Colombia seemed willing to go to get Pablo Escobar. As the operations chief at the Pentagon, Maj. Gen. Jack Sheehan was director of all special operations overseas. Sheehan already suspected that Delta and Centra Spike were overstepping the strict limits of their deployment order, which confined them to the Search Bloc headquarters outside Medellin. There, they were restricted to training, intelligence-gathering and analysis. [continues 1021 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia Chapter 25 of a continuing serial On one of his many visits to the apartment building that housed Pablo Escobar's wife and family in Medellin, the Colombian prosecutor Fernando Correa had noticed several cellular phones. On another visit, he discovered a radio transceiver hidden behind the trap door on the ceiling of the building elevator. This information was relayed to Col. Hugo Martinez at the Search Bloc headquarters outside Medellin. The colonel passed it on to his son Hugo, a member of a Colombian electronic surveillance unit recently dispatched to Medellin to assist in the hunt for Escobar. [continues 822 words]
The New Program Aims To Substitute Conventional Crops For Illegal Ones. The U.S. Will Help Pay For It. BOGOTA, Colombia - Yanking a coca bush from the ground and planting a magnolia tree in its place, officials began an ambitious program to eradicate drug crops in the heart of Colombia's cocaine-producing region. During the weekend ceremony in southern Colombia's Putumayo province - home of nearly half the world's cocaine-yielding acreage - about 700 peasant farmers agreed to destroy their coca plots in return for government aid to adopt alternative, and legal, livelihoods. [continues 450 words]
The new program aims to substitute conventional crops for illegal ones. The U.S. will help pay for it. BOGOTA, Colombia - Yanking a coca bush from the ground and planting a magnolia tree in its place, officials began an ambitious program to eradicate drug crops in the heart of Colombia's cocaine-producing region. During the weekend ceremony in southern Colombia's Putumayo province - home of nearly half the world's cocaine-yielding acreage - about 700 peasant farmers agreed to destroy their coca plots in return for government aid to adopt alternative, and legal, livelihoods. [continues 450 words]
SAN DIEGO - Maybe the smoke is about to clear in the debate over medical marijuana. Few ideas, it seems, are so firmly held by the public and so doubted by the medical profession as the healing powers of pot. But at last, researchers are tiptoeing into this field, hoping to prove once and for all whether marijuana really is good medicine. To believers, marijuana's benefits are already beyond discussion: Pot eases pain, settles the stomach, builds weight, and steadies spastic muscles. And that's hardly the beginning. They speak of relief from PMS, glaucoma, itching, insomnia, arthritis, depression, childbirth, attention-deficit disorder, and ringing in the ears. [continues 1717 words]
Robert Downey Jr. is described in the Washington Post as "one of his generation's most brilliant actors" - a ubiquitous cliche, along with "comic genius" - and like many "brilliant" people, his intelligence has failed him in other realms of life. Having been released in August after a year spent in a tough California prison for possession and use of drugs, he was arrested last week at a hotel in Palm Springs. An anonymous tipster telephoned police to check Downey's room for drugs and guns, and there the cops found cocaine, methamphetamines and no guns, but a manifestly zonked-out Downey. He was handcuffed, transported to jail, and bailed out the following morning. [continues 717 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia Pressure Mounts On Escobar Family Equipped With CIA Direction-Finding Kits, A Colombian Tracking Unit Goes To Medellin. Chapter 24 of a continuing serial Lt. Hugo Martinez and his team of electronic surveillance experts started getting better with their funny little boxes. They combined the various components, American, French and German, and developed techniques through trial and error. Even though they still could not trace a signal reliably, their eavesdropping capability alone was exciting. It deprived criminals of privacy. Martinez had listened to so many intercepted conversations by now that he felt he could sense when someone was about to begin discussing something illicit. [continues 1532 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia Chapter 22 of a continuing serial Col. Hugo Martinez did not protest when he learned that his superiors in Bogota were planning to replace him, and had even picked his successor. He offered to step aside. As the first anniversary of Pablo Escobar's escape passed in July 1993, there seemed to be better reasons to leave than to stay. Col. Jose Perez, his proposed replacement, was a respected officer who had been working on a poppy eradication program, which meant he probably had a comfortable relationship with the U.S. Embassy. So Martinez requested a transfer to Bogota, citing stresses caused by long separations from his family, who had been sent back to the capital from Medellin for their protection. [continues 1166 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia Chapter 20 of a continuing serial In the fifth-floor vault at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota, Centra Spike analysts were not missing the distinct pattern in the Los Pepes hits. The death squad was killing off the white-collar infrastructure of Escobar's organization, targeting his money-laundering experts, bankers, lawyers and extended family - names listed on the very charts that Centra Spike's surveillance experts and the CIA had painstakingly assembled over the previous six months. [continues 1186 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia Chapter 23 of a continuing serial Col. Hugo Martinez did not want his son coming to Medellin. Without telling the young man, the colonel had twice intervened to block his transfer to that dangerous city. Now he would block him again. The younger Hugo Martinez was a lieutenant who worked for a special Colombian electronic surveillance unit that used portable devices to track down the source of a radio signal. The unit had been successful in recent cases, and was running tests in Bogota. The colonel believed it might help finally find Pablo Escobar, who was believed to be hiding somewhere in Medellin. [continues 1102 words]
The highly unusual drug case involving marijuana-legalization advocate Edward Forchion came to a conclusion yesterday as he was sentenced to prison for his part in brokering a drug deal for his brother. With Forchion's wife, Janice, and two of his young children in the courtroom, Camden County Superior Court Judge Stephen W. Thompson sentenced Forchion to a 10-year prison term. Forchion will be eligible for parole in slightly less than two years, and he could apply for intensive supervisory parole in six months. [continues 604 words]
Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia 'TACIT SUPPORT' FOR TOUGH TACTICS Despite U.S. Doubts About Los Pepes, The Group's Violent Work Continued. Chapter 21 of a continuing serial Concerned that the manhunt he was leading might somehow be linked to the vigilantes of Los Pepes, U.S. Ambassador Morris Busby wrote a long, secret memo to the State Department in August 1993. Busby explained that he had warned the Colombian government to sever any ties with members of the vigilante group, which had been killing as many as five people a day. [continues 1310 words]
A convicted drug lord testified that the Camden mayor frequented his inner sanctum before taking office. CAMDEN - Convicted drug lord Jose Luis "J.R." Rivera testified yesterday that Mayor Milton Milan accepted a satchel containing $65,000 in cash from him in November 1994, and that Milan knew these were proceeds from Rivera's multimillion-dollar drug syndicate. Rivera, convicted this year for his role in a massive cocaine-distribution conspiracy, said that before Milan became mayor in 1997, he frequently visited the inner sanctum of Rivera's office while drug money was counted and drug dealers were present. [continues 973 words]
