![stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup](https://file.hstatic.net/1000282067/article/07_2226249432119390419_n-1079x675_4022f7de7f14418ba9df033d46d7ed6a_bcae58fc489d46b8b0dace02d20142f2_large.jpg)
![stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup](https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-5twMfMju6DI/XmbB3qSGJhI/AAAAAAAADBw/ODzQKgCw8hsDIqi5EG4kChseXqAlF20ZACLcBGAsYHQ/s1600/U2%2B-%2BThe%2BJoshua%2BTree%2B%25281987%2529%2Bfront%2Bback%2Balbum%2Bcover.jpg)
The business model has thrived where the state is weak and police corrupt, most notably with Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel, led by Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.Įscobar, who started out as a car thief, then small-time trafficker and kidnapper, first saw opportunity in feeding America’s cocaine habit by smuggling coca paste into Colombia, refining it and paying “mules” to smuggle it into the U.S. law enforcement, today’s Medellín 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. In Colombia, a limited version of the business model lived on for another couple of decades through the Oficina de Envigado, whose members included surviving Medellín traffickers and some of Escobar’s former associates, and the Urabeños, the largest surviving criminal organization in Colombia. The deft use of those tactics made the Medellín syndicate the world’s most ruthless, violent and financially successful criminal organization before it withdrew into the shadows following Escobar’s death in 1993. Loyalty, violence, bribery: For two decades, that lethal mix gave the Medellín syndicate a stranglehold on nearly every aspect of the global cocaine trade, from coca farms in Colombia to street dealers in Chicago. Escobar’s challenge, oft repeated, was simple: “Plata o plomo” (literally, “silver or lead,” as in, “take a bribe or take a bullet to the head”). Of course, the bribes came with a not-so-subtle threat of violence. Although it meant handing over “a very sizeable share of their income” in bribes, Heymann says, it was simply a line item on the cartel’s profit and loss statement. The bribes were the criminal equivalent of legitimate businesses hiring lobbyists and paying regulatory fines. If loyalty didn’t work, then the syndicate turned to brutal violence.Įscobar’s challenge was simple: “Plata o plomo” (“Take my silver or take my lead”).įinally, the Medellín organization used vast amounts of money to bribe law enforcement and government officials. “While he was alive, everyone respected him, everybody managed themselves well in the neighborhoods and comunas.” Escobar paid to build hundreds of homes in the impoverished area that had previously been a vast garbage dump. “There were tugurios, what we call houses of cardboard and wood,” remembers Iván Hernández, a community leader in the Barrio Pablo Escobar. He built an apartment complex in a neighborhood of Medellín that still bears his name, where even today people praise him for what he did for their families and community. “He was considered a Robin Hood in Colombia.”Įscobar rallied support among Colombia’s poorest citizens by stepping in where the government couldn’t or wouldn’t. He tracked Escobar from 1988 until the trafficker’s death in 1993. Drug Enforcement Agency officer Javier Peña. “Escobar was the CEO, very charismatic, very powerful, very demanding,” says former U.S. Escobar was a master at wielding loyalty to get what he wanted. The loyalty, often laced with violence, replaced the courts that a legal corporation would use to enforce contracts. That first element was fierce, almost irrational, loyalty to the syndicate’s leaders, especially Escobar.
![stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup](https://file.hstatic.net/1000282067/article/sb-janoski-flyleather-classic__1__7217b57c32614eb59bed10ab16835745_19446dda73e74e2aa06b4541c55d613a_large.jpg)
“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.” “What the Medellín cartel did is exactly what any global pharmaceutical firm has to do,” says Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor who fought the drug cartels as a deputy U.S. 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. 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. At its height, it earned as much as $4 billion a year-most of it cash-for its members and controlled 80 percent of the cocaine supply in the United States, leaving tens of thousands of corpses in its wake.
![stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup stranglehold bullet the blue sky mashup](https://i.pinimg.com/originals/60/05/89/600589b493e1febaea55c8a00305ce5d.jpg)
The Medellín Cartel was an empire of stunning sweep and unimaginable violence.