Pablo Escobar person
also: Escobar, El Patron
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Related entities (most co-mentioned)
Colombiacountry · 55Medellin Cartelorganization · 28United Statescountry · 26CIAintelligence service · 18Cali Cartelorganization · 16Medellínplace · 7Alan Rayol Ruddperson · 7George H.W. Bushperson · 7FARCorganization · 7Los Pepesorganization · 7Carlos Castanoperson · 7Sandinistasorganization · 6Miamiplace · 6Manuel Noriegaperson · 6Carlos Lehderperson · 6Alvaro Uribeperson · 5Javier Pinaperson · 4Nicaraguacountry · 4Search Blockorganization · 3Contrasorganization · 3Floridacountry · 3National Recovery Administrationorganization · 3Jorge Ochoaperson · 3Colombian National Policeorganization · 2
Claims (33)
Richard Gorge indicted
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“would bury the Contra Support drug case linked the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to drug trafficking by bringing the first of two indictments against Leder and Escobar and a Sandinistan official. For this, he relied on the testimony and controvers…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Drugs, Oil and War Part 7 @ 17:46
Carlos Lehder betrayed by
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“who was accused of links both to the revolutionary M-19 movement and to Fidel Castro, because they all have to be a communist. In February 1987, Leder was captured and extradited to the U.S., having been betrayed by Escobar in connection wi…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Drugs, Oil and War Part 7 @ 19:30
Pablo Escobar member_of
Medellin Cartel documented
“and traffickers in the Medellin, notably Carlos Lader and Pablo Escobar. So let's break that down. The Nicaraguan Sandinistas are the good guys. They were not trafficking drugs. The narco guerrillas are the militia that I just described to …”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner- Drugs,Oil, and War Part 3 @ 37:18
CIA recruited
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“with farms, and it was the only way they could feed their family. And the traffickers in the Medellin and with Pablo Escobar, they all worked for the CIA. This campaign distorted the truth in two respects. It falsely implicated the FARC, an…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner- Drugs,Oil, and War Part 3 @ 37:48
Ivan Ramirez Quintero spied_on
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“Ramirez directed the state's war against Pablo Escobar and provided political protection for the Cali cartel, because we're going to pick the winners and losers, and the losers are always the people that don't support us 100% of the time. A…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads&The War on Terror Part 8 @ 5:58
CIA trafficked
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“Counter Narcotic Center brought together, under CIA's control, every federal agency involved in the drug wars. Former CIA officer Terry Burke, then serving as a DEA Director of Operations, was allowed to send one liaison officer to the cent…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Great Pretense Part 5 @ 2:02
Search Block assassinated
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“in Colombia. It also highlights Pablo Escobar, who was killed in 1993 by members of the so-called Search Block, which was a 600-person task force comprised of Colombian police and intelligence agencies funded, trained, and supported by the …”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Great Pretense Part 5 @ 3:30
Javier Pina covered_up
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“It followed a hunt for the infamous narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar. Look over there, not at us. When questioned by DEA internal affairs investigators in 2002, Pena denied all of the charges. He did concede, however, that he had a relationsh…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Great Pretense Part 5 @ 49:18
United States targeted_for_regime_change
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“which declared a war on drugs, but only Pablo Escobar's network. An Amnesty International report described Colombian state struggle for control of the cocaine cartel. This is an actual quote from the report. The prosecutor general's public …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads and War on Terror Part 4 @ 29:01
Pablo Escobar carried_out_attack
Brigade 2506 guest_asserted
“And when Escobar, who is notorious down in Colombia, got a little ahead of the schedule for the CIA, and he started coming into Miami knocking off their preferred domestic network carriers, which was the Cuban exiles. They began running the…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Corporate Coup Venezuela Part 15 Final @ 1:50:35
CIA targeted_for_regime_change
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“fell out of favor with the CIA. And the CIA never addressed the Cali cartel because it was part of the protection of the state apparatus in Colombia as the designated cartel. And so the taking down of Pablo Escobar was part of his noncompli…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 13 @ 1:44:57
Pablo Escobar member_of
Medellin Cartel host_asserted
“who were close relatives of the Medellin cartel boss, Pablo Escobar. In his 1996 interview, Norwin Menendez confirmed the relationship between the women and Escobar. Guzeta said Torreses were informed that no charges would be filed against …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 15 @ 28:28
Medellin Cartel headed
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“Or a who Ella brothers in the Cali cartel played a vital role in the national coordination of Columbia's narco economy and the cartels representatives in their political system. The cartel system was not simply a group of gangsters who ran …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 8:12
Pablo Escobar funded
Diego Ladondo White host_asserted
“him more popular than them because they were taking all of their profits and investing them in the U.S. One of Escobar's first contacts with the Colombian elite was a property dealer and politician from one of the leading families. His name…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 16:40
FARC targeted_for_regime_change
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“Military targets for kidnapping and extortion by the resistance we now know as the FARC. Escobar made his first trip to Bolivia sometime in early 1980, where he met with Roberto Suarez, then a major single supplier of the cocoa paste. They …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 19:38
Pablo Escobar recruited
Roberto Suarez host_asserted
“Military targets for kidnapping and extortion by the resistance we now know as the FARC. Escobar made his first trip to Bolivia sometime in early 1980, where he met with Roberto Suarez, then a major single supplier of the cocoa paste. They …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 19:38
Pablo Escobar funded
Medellin Civic host_asserted
“A co-founder of the Medellin cartel denounced the extradition treaty as a plot negotiated by the DEA and CIA to target the Medellin cartel for political reasons rather than drug trafficking charges. In a newspaper founded by Escobar's uncle…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 25:40
Pablo Escobar member_of
Liberal Party host_asserted
“Escobar ran on the Liberal Party ticket for the House of Representatives in 1982 for a seat in the local area. His campaign centered largely on civic and social programs. Escobar was elected as an assistant parliamentarian to Hario Ortega, …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 34:30
Pablo Escobar ordered_assassination_of
Barry Seal host_asserted
“Escobar was blamed by Colombian authorities for assassinating three of the five candidates running in the Colombian presidential campaign in 1989. The campaign spread to the U.S., where Escobar's hitmen were suspected of killing Barry Sill,…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 38:34
Manuel Noriega financed_via
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“In 1989, President George Bush authorized a covert operation to track down the Medellin cartel, just like Nixon had done with the Corsican mafia. In the same year, another important relationship in the U.S. was terminated. The U.S. invaded …”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 43:25
Centra Spike spied_on
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“because he, too, was a CIA asset. He just didn't do what they wanted him to do. The codename for the U.S. manhunt for Escobar was called Heavy Shadow. Centra Spike, a top-secret U.S. Army unit that specialized in tracking, monitored Escobar…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 44:49
Delta Force spied_on
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“Escobar soon fled the prison, which compelled Colombian President Cesar Gaviria to ask the U.S. to expand the mission. Bush authorized the clandestine deployment of Delta Force and other U.S. armed forces, which continued as a multi-million…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 45:41
Cesar Gaviria exposed
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“Pablo Escobar stood on top of a powerful mountain and the only way to get him was to take down the mountain, one person at a time, until there was no place to hide. President Graveria was given worldwide credit for Escobar's downfall. He co…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 49:44
Pablo Escobar targeted_for_regime_change
United States host_asserted
“It was just a way of channeling more money down there for their death squads. Pablo Escobar, as a force in Colombian politics and a cartel kingpin, strained relations with the U.S. and Colombia. In a desperate battle waged by Escobar and th…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads & the War on Terror Part 5 @ 52:56
Los Pepes assassinated
Pablo Escobar book_quoted
“drug baron Pablo Escobar. Carlos Castano and his brother were leaders of a death squad, Los Pepes, that tracked and killed members of Escobar's organization. And again, remember me telling you on Alpha's show, Escobar wasn't playing the CIA…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads and War on Terror Part 1 @ 23:44
Pablo Escobar member_of
Medellin Cartel host_asserted
“a complexity far greater than what she said, because she is writing for the CIA. As a result of the cocaine's growing importance in Colombia, Pablo Escobar Graveria, a former petty thief from the outskirts of Medellin, became the most succe…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads and War on Terror Part 3 @ 39:13
Pablo Escobar recruited
Bolivia host_asserted
“with coca producers in both Bolivia and Peru. The Colombian cocaine trade expanded rapidly as a result. The CAPUS, heads of large drug trafficking clans, organized meetings to centralize production, distribution, and commercialization of th…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads and War on Terror Part 3 @ 40:12
Manuel Noriega laundered_money_for
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“killing the Cuban exiles that had been relied upon for decades at that point to do the interior distribution and the mafia and all that. So Pablo Escobar also didn't like laundering all of his money through the U.S., which was basically a r…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner The Great Pretense Part 1 @ 59:22
Devil's Cartel succeeded
Pablo Escobar guest_asserted
“U.S. federal agents with U.S. Customs and DEA. Notice he leaves the CIA out, but we're talking intelligence. The goal of the Devil's Cartel Alliance was to protect the narco-trafficking business. And this basically is the business that they…”
▶ The Colonel's Corner The Great Pretense Part 6 @ 15:37
Pablo Escobar founded
Medellin Cartel host_asserted
“the original Medellin cartel. When Pablo Escobar launched his version of the Medellin cartel in 1982, Uribe Sierra organized an exclusive horse race to raise funds. When he was killed in 1983, his son, Alvaro Uribe, flew to his ranch in Esc…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Cocaine Death Squads and War on Terror Part 4 @ 41:12
CIA recruited
Pablo Escobar guest_asserted
“He did originally, he was using the Cuban exile network that the CIA had dictated, but he decided that he wanted to create his own and get a bigger share of the pie. And so he started importing Colombians and they had a mass gang war down i…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner Safe for Democracy Part 10 @ 1:18:16
CIA assassinated
Pablo Escobar host_asserted
“because none of that was allowed. And of course, we know that they assassinated Pablo Escobar as a result of him not coloring inside the lines as well. This is just what they do. And then if they actually do bring you to trial, they will se…”
▶ The Colonel’s Corner The Great Pretense Part 1 @ 1:00:07
Pablo Escobar trafficked
United States guest_asserted
“began ranting about Bush and his South Florida drug task force, which was making the cartel's delivery to Miami more difficult. Escobar then stated that Bush is a traitor who used to deal with us, but now doesn't want to. Rudd told the fede…”
▶ The Colonels Corner Dark Alliance Part 14 @ 56:28
Mentions (120)
▶ 16:54
We found out in Contra that all of those U.S. agencies was literally involved in the trafficking of cocaine into the United States to raise money for the Contras. So that's a proven fact. But what most people don't know is the Medellin cart…
▶ 17:23
to knock out all of the Cuban exile points of contact where they were supposed to deliver all the cocaine in Miami. So he sent up a bunch of people to kill him. And I mean, literally almost daily, you would find a Cuban exile dead in the st…
▶ 1:30:42
And I'll just go from H.W. Bush onward. Obama, his dad, stepdaddy. And, of course, the Clintons were given the Pablo Escobar situation and the Oliver North situation as well. And they're all connected. And then, of course, Barack Obama conn…
▶ 16:49
claimed that he was a target of an elaborate CIA scheme to force him out of the war, a plot that involved the use of drug dealers working for intelligence agency. This occurred, he said, after he refused CIA orders to unite his forces with …
▶ 19:21
When it came time to dispose of him, Pastora said, the CIA leaked the information that he was getting help from drug dealers, both to drain his support in the U.S. and to make him the fall guy for the cocaine trafficking being done by the C…
▶ 5:17
her manganate companies, transport companies, and private security firms. Again, that keeps coming back over and over again. In contrast to the conventional framework and organized crime model with a centralized hierarchy, what the Colombia…
▶ 6:14
The destruction of the Medellin cartel did not affect the collaboration among the narco elite and the sectors of the ruling class, as well as the military, particularly in the regions where the FARC contested Medellin's control. The cartel …
▶ 9:20
to link together the various components of the industry to a broader drug trafficking organization with opportunities to branch into other markets such as heroin and amphetamines. According to a UN report that was issued in 1994, the year a…
▶ 23:14
In the resulting symbiosis between the military assistance, the FARC, and a flourishing narco economy, the CIA became more and more directly involved in drug trafficking. For example, it is not disputed that in 1993, while working for the C…
▶ 23:44
drug baron Pablo Escobar. Carlos Castano and his brother were leaders of a death squad, Los Pepes, that tracked and killed members of Escobar's organization. And again, remember me telling you on Alpha's show, Escobar wasn't playing the CIA…
▶ 35:18
They just applied it to everything. Win or lose, no matter what. Right. They applied it to everything. During the cocaine decade, tensions also arose in relations to attempts to eradicate Colombian drug cartel leaders, such as the infamous …
▶ 35:47
Drug war critics and human rights groups in the U.S. argued that the Colombian military was using the U.S. funded arms against political opponents. Imagine that. Give me a bunch of guns and I'm going to be the one you like and I'm going to …
▶ 36:15
because he didn't play their end game. He played their game. He didn't play their end game. He was competition. Easiest way to wipe out competition. He wasn't. He was playing their part all the way up to what are you going to do with your p…
▶ 36:44
He was definitely a drug trafficker. Right, right. The growing bad guy. Yeah. He was a bad guy looking out for Colombia. Yeah. He was not a bad guy that was selling out Colombians to invest in America. The growing economic power of the coca…
▶ 38:44
sought to capitalize politically on the FARC's alleged links to cocaine trade in Colombia. Their arguments about the FARC as narco-terrorists were drawn from studies by Rachel Efrenfeld, who criticized the FARC links to the Medellin cartel …
▶ 39:13
a complexity far greater than what she said, because she is writing for the CIA. As a result of the cocaine's growing importance in Colombia, Pablo Escobar Graveria, a former petty thief from the outskirts of Medellin, became the most succe…
▶ 39:42
Escobar was a tombstone thief and a dealer who's in stolen vehicles. So he's a petty criminal. Coming from Medellin, he was uniquely positioned to instigate the substitution of cocaine for marijuana in Colombia's growing premier illicit exp…
▶ 40:43
Those who secured control of trade routes into the U.S. became cocaine monopolists. Escobar not only perfected the cocaine refining techniques, but developed ingenious schemes for distributing it. According to Trenton Parker, a former CIA o…
▶ 44:36
You're skipping ahead. That's right. They actually refer to Pablo Escobar as Robin Hood. Repeatedly. Jeez. Yes. Okay. But he's the bad guy. But he's the bad guy. Well, he's the one they killed. Well, yeah. In addition, and this is where it …
▶ 50:08
Now they're dealing in our backyard in Columbia. The Colombian people got a lot smarter because, again, they just live down south, not clear across the world. And they're thinking, hey, I can put my own people there. I don't need your cutou…
▶ 52:12
Well, it started in Pakistan. It ends up being ran out of London. But now you see how all these connections of all these things we've been talking about all play into exactly what we're talking about right now. Yes. And George Bush in the p…
▶ 52:44
He becomes the main man. No, no. He becomes a liability. And that's when we invaded Panama and took him out. And this was the Sandinistas. No, that's Nicaragua. There's just too many of them. Yeah. No, we end up going in and taking out Nori…
▶ 53:31
that the Colombians not only improve profit margins, but also dispose of many Cuban-American informants working with the CIA and other U.S. law enforcement agencies, thereby lowering their risk. The meddling cocaine traders gained a reputat…
▶ 53:58
mounting a military campaign against the Colombian state. By the urban poor, Escobar was viewed as a modern-day Robin Hood, an image born in the slum surrounding Medellin. In a place known as Barrio Pablo Escobar, local residents have gathe…
▶ 54:28
The poor in the barrio Pablo Escobar prefer to forget Pablo's violent reputation. Escobar's brother, Roberto, says they called him El Patron, the boss, out of respect. People began to call him that because he would supply truckloads of food…
▶ 1:05:41
into producers, distributors, and marketing networks was vital to the trade. The traffickers acted on the U.S. government's behalf in a de facto relationship when it financially benefited them. Pablo Escobar's Medellin cartel demonstrated t…
▶ 1:13:45
The Medellin cartel received $10 billion of that sum a year in sales, prompting Ford's magazine to place the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar, and Jorge Octa, his partner, on its list of the world's richest men in 1988. The cocaine decade saw…
▶ 21:12
Major drug traffickers and paramilitary militias of the AUC were integrated in every facet of the Colombian government, its legal system, its political system, and its financial system. The narco elite that enabled this emerged with the ass…
▶ 28:32
This situation created competition among traffickers with connections to the ruling class. The Medellin cartel waged a desperate battle against enterprises that refused to enter into alliance with them. All manner of underhanded methods fro…
▶ 29:01
which declared a war on drugs, but only Pablo Escobar's network. An Amnesty International report described Colombian state struggle for control of the cocaine cartel. This is an actual quote from the report. The prosecutor general's public …
▶ 41:12
the original Medellin cartel. When Pablo Escobar launched his version of the Medellin cartel in 1982, Uribe Sierra organized an exclusive horse race to raise funds. When he was killed in 1983, his son, Alvaro Uribe, flew to his ranch in Esc…
▶ 41:38
Alvaro Uribe's wealth and connections to the underworld through his father practically assured him a place in the new narco state. During Alvaro Uribe's four-month tenure as mayor of the local Medellin area in 1982, the city was known as th…
▶ 42:39
That was available, and it began providing known traffickers such as Escobar and the Ocas and the Castanos access to the cocoa. When Alvaro Uribe's attendance at a Medellin cartel meeting at Escobar's ranch, Napoleon, another one of the dru…
▶ 1:05:49
They did take care of their people. They got medical care and did a bunch of things for them, I guess, to increase their out, to look out for them and protect them if somebody was coming through. But we saw talking to the governors and stuf…
▶ 10:33
So the author goes on and says that despite all of these anti-drug programs, not a single important trafficker ever got arrested. Now, of course, we know they took out Escobar, but they assassinated him. They don't want anybody that has any…
▶ 17:01
was Banco de Occidente, a major financial institution that the Madeline cartel had been using. You know, Pablo Escobar, the guy they don't like, Robin Hood. Yeah, so they pressured that bank that they had been used because they're the compe…
▶ 40:19
because they threaten their families. Growing market competition among the land-owning and national business class, i.e. the narco elite, could lead to cocaine wars of the kind seen during the cocaine decade. The current drug war in Mexico …
▶ 7:41
like those that worked in the labs. The profits of cocaine placed an enormous concentration of economic power in the narco elite. To a certain extent, this was centralized power with leadership structure composed of the heads of the dominan…
▶ 13:15
Many regional and local political systems in Colombia became intertwined with the drug trade, especially when individuals from these well-established families served as mayors, senators, and governors and could provide political protection …
▶ 13:46
came from a low economic background, like most traffickers from Medellin. Although investigative journalism tended to dwell on his personality, his political rise illuminates many aspects of the Colombian state's relationship with cocaine. …
▶ 16:11
the schools, and medical clinics. Escobar established the political movement called Good Citizenship on the March, which sponsored various civic programs. These social endeavors were belittled by the U.S. government spokespersons and schola…
▶ 36:56
but the CIA blamed the Taliban. And it's exactly what happened in Southeast Asia, where they were blaming mainland China when it was actually Taiwan doing it. See how that works? That, folks, is what we call a pattern. Okay, the Colombian g…
▶ 38:05
A long and bloody bombing campaign directed by Escobar began immediately. The highly esteemed Colombian author Gabriel Garcia Marquez criticized Escobar, but wrote explaining that Escobar had not forgotten past insults, which fueled his all…
▶ 38:34
Escobar was blamed by Colombian authorities for assassinating three of the five candidates running in the Colombian presidential campaign in 1989. The campaign spread to the U.S., where Escobar's hitmen were suspected of killing Barry Sill,…
▶ 39:03
When forces allied to Escobar blew up an airliner in Colombia, his war with the Colombian narco state in Washington intensified. And that aircraft that was targeted is very suspicious. The CIA and the Bush family had their own reasons for t…
▶ 41:30
including one with a company controlled by a BCCI customer who was later sent to prison for defrauding BCCI and other U.S. banks. But nothing happened to the Bushes. Since support for Escobar was widespread in Colombia, sectors of the state…
▶ 41:58
and other enemies of Escobar in Colombia. The military's reluctance to move against Escobar had social, political, ideological, and pragmatic foundations. Many of the rank-and-file soldiers were drawn from the same social base as the drug t…
▶ 42:29
According to local police forces, Pablo Escobar and some other traffickers in the Medellin cartel were seen by the poor as generous good men, simple, and were persecuted because of their origins from a humble class of people like themselves…
▶ 42:57
also be attributed to the political culture that rose around cocaine trafficking, which accepted contraband and money laundering as normal business practices in Colombia. They knew he was being politically persecuted because they didn't cha…
▶ 43:25
In 1989, President George Bush authorized a covert operation to track down the Medellin cartel, just like Nixon had done with the Corsican mafia. In the same year, another important relationship in the U.S. was terminated. The U.S. invaded …
▶ 43:55
They overthrew Noriega's government because he was side-dealing with Escobar, and that wasn't allowed. Noriega was detained as a prisoner of war and taken to the U.S., where he was convicted under federal charges of cocaine trafficking, rac…
▶ 44:49
because he, too, was a CIA asset. He just didn't do what they wanted him to do. The codename for the U.S. manhunt for Escobar was called Heavy Shadow. Centra Spike, a top-secret U.S. Army unit that specialized in tracking, monitored Escobar…
▶ 45:13
telephone and radio calls, which was covertly sent to Colombian intelligence. The sophistication involved in Escobar's surveillance forced him into hiding and a life on the run. He surrendered to Colombian authorities in 1991 after negotiat…
▶ 45:41
Escobar soon fled the prison, which compelled Colombian President Cesar Gaviria to ask the U.S. to expand the mission. Bush authorized the clandestine deployment of Delta Force and other U.S. armed forces, which continued as a multi-million…
▶ 46:11
and help plan raids for special Colombian police units called search blocks. Morris Busby, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, directed the U.S. effort with assistance from the CIA, DEA, FBI, and NSA. Again, we have an ambassador functioning a…
▶ 46:38
This again is a pattern that we've seen over and over again. The State Department is just as guilty as the CIA in these operations. They know exactly what's going on. They know that Escobar is a threat to the CIA and is being targeted for e…
▶ 47:07
The investigation conducted by Amnesty International in 2001 led to a lawsuit to obtain CIA records of Las Pepas peoples persecuted by Pablo Escobar, a vigilante group set up by Carlos Castano and backed by the Cali cartel. So again, the co…
▶ 47:31
Its findings pointed to, quote, an extremely suspect relationship between the U.S. government and the Castano family at a time when the U.S. government was well aware that the family's involvement in paramilitary violence, i.e. death squads…
▶ 47:59
Castano was instrumental in bringing down Escobar by collaborating with the CIA while working directly as the leader of the Cali cartel. By 1989, the Cali cartel had become the principal source of information to all of the Colombian securit…
▶ 49:15
and gave one of them a gold watch. Escobar's last stand was on December 3, 1993, on a rooftop in the home city of Medellin. Gun blazing, Escobar was easily outnumbered. He was shot by a train of bullets and plummeted from the rooftop onto t…
▶ 49:44
Pablo Escobar stood on top of a powerful mountain and the only way to get him was to take down the mountain, one person at a time, until there was no place to hide. President Graveria was given worldwide credit for Escobar's downfall. He co…
▶ 50:12
he was a threat to the state. That's actually a quote. The level of terrorism he had to live with was something awful. So he became a threat to the narco state, so they took him out with help from his competitor. Miguel Antonio Gomez Padill…
▶ 5:58
Ramirez directed the state's war against Pablo Escobar and provided political protection for the Cali cartel, because we're going to pick the winners and losers, and the losers are always the people that don't support us 100% of the time. A…
▶ 25:45
Alvaro Uribe Vales, a Colombian politician and senator dedicated to the collaboration with the Medellin cartel at high government levels. Uribe was linked to a business involved in narcotic activities in the U.S. His father was murdered in …
▶ 26:13
and is a close friend of Pablo Escobar. He has participated in Escobar's political campaign to win a position as assistant parliamentarian. Uribe has been one of the politicians from the Senate who has attacked all forms of extradition trea…
▶ 1:27:04
Right. I agree with that 100 percent. And that's why, like the the accusation at the very beginning of this book, when they were talking about how Pablo Escobar was specifically sought out for assassination, you know, the accusation, as Ill…
▶ 1:28:00
the connections of who Pablo Escobar's enemies were inside of Colombia. They were all of the people that had known ties to the CIA. And there's extensive footnotes in this guy's book using people like the New York Times, the Washington Post…
▶ 1:28:28
Not that the Washington Post is reputable, but to Illini's point, they even covered Castano, the guy that was basically behind Pablo Escobar's, his ties to the narco elite and to the CIA. And Pablo Escobar was his competition, along with th…
▶ 1:28:55
to not to be adamantly against any of the drug traffickers that was using U.S. banks to launder their money, leaving their money outside of Colombia. I would never, ever suggest Pablo Escobar was not a drug trafficker, was not doing bad thi…
▶ 1:31:49
than manufacturing of cocaine. And that really should be the big takeaways from this book. We learned how cocaine was made. We learned that we were lied to about the FARC. We learned that we were lied to about Pablo Escobar. And that is not…
▶ 1:50:35
And when Escobar, who is notorious down in Colombia, got a little ahead of the schedule for the CIA, and he started coming into Miami knocking off their preferred domestic network carriers, which was the Cuban exiles. They began running the…
▶ 2:13:45
And Medellin is pretty secure. I mean, of all the years I've been coming to Colombia, I have no problem going out for a walk in the neighborhood I live in, which is not the top. It's not poblado. But I'll go for a walk at 2 in the morning w…
▶ 1:44:30
the port. So he is addressing the drugs coming into America. Yeah, but I was going to say, you do know that they said record drug busts, just like you're describing under Obama, as they were working with the Sinaloa cartel, right? You're aw…
▶ 51:47
told him that he once took a Salvadoran Air Force bomber and leveled a warehouse full of metalene cocaine on behalf of the state-owned Cali cartel. Another time, he made plans to bomb the prison where Pablo Escobar was imprisoned. Agordo al…
▶ 55:57
into the United States. Rudd told the officials that in the spring of 1987, he'd met in Medellin, Colombia, with cartel boss Pablo Escobar to arrange a drug deal in the course of their conversation at Escobar's home. Rudd said the cocaine l…
▶ 56:28
began ranting about Bush and his South Florida drug task force, which was making the cartel's delivery to Miami more difficult. Escobar then stated that Bush is a traitor who used to deal with us, but now doesn't want to. Rudd told the fede…
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which resulted in planes similar to C-130s, but smaller, with guns to the cartels in Colombia. According to Budd, Escobar stated that the cartel then offloaded the guns, put cocaine on board the planes, and the cocaine was taken to the U.S.…
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The guns were delivered and sold to the Contras in Nicaragua and to the cartels. Escobar, Rudd said, explained that it was a swap of cocaine for drugs or for guns. Rudd has stated that while Escobar did not say the CIA was involved in the e…
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Because, of course, Vice President George H.W. Bush was still performing CIA roles as vice president. Rudd has stated that Escobar and the rest of the cartel members are very supportive of the Contras and dislike the Sandinistas. Rudd claim…
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being unloaded in Colombia, but he claimed to have a picture of Bush posing with meddling cartel leader Jorge Oca in front of suitcases full of money. After Escobar talked about the photograph, Rudd said that the photograph was not genuine …
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photoshopped in order to try to discredit it. In response, Escobar stated that the photograph was genuine. It would stand up to any test of its authenticity. Escobar stated that the photo would be made public at the appropriate time. Rudd i…
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By 1993, Escobar was dead. Well, that's what happens when you try to blackmail somebody like Bush. Purely coincidence. I'm sure it had nothing to do with Bush. Absolutely. Rudd's story is very similar to one told by a Miami FBI informant, W…
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who reported in 1986 that she had witnessed Southern Air Transport planes being loaded with cocaine and then loaded with guns in Colombia in 1983 and 1989. Palaos, the wife of a Colombian trafficker, said she had accompanied Pablo Escobar i…
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who were close relatives of the Medellin cartel boss, Pablo Escobar. In his 1996 interview, Norwin Menendez confirmed the relationship between the women and Escobar. Guzeta said Torreses were informed that no charges would be filed against …
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and then deported as undesirable aliens and never allowed back into the United States. To the rest of the world, it would seem like the brothers had sacrificed their women to save themselves. That would have been their Latin culture. Even w…
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Umberto Ortega of Nicaragua were among officials the source had implicated. All of that's a lie. A day later, McManus co-author Ronald Ostro reported that U.S. intelligence sources have obtained a photograph standing next to Pablo Escobar, …
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It helps to have cars that you don't own if you're going to traffic in drugs. The other dealers of cocaine in LA called them the trees because they were six foot six and built like a tree trunk. They lived with two sisters and the sisters w…
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Escobar and his Colombian pals, Jorge Oca, which we talked about in our last book, and Carlos Lader, were then firmly in control of the Miami cocaine market, having wrestled it from the Colombian Americans after a long-running cocaine war. …
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The Cubans had been using the city as their base of operation for cocaine, and they had been distributed throughout the United States. But we know that Pablo Escobar specifically mounted the war in Miami to take over that network, which is …
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The Federal Reserve in Miami and the one in L.A. had the largest amounts of cash of any of the Federal Reserve networks. Miami was convenient. The Colombians could blend in with the large Hispanic population and move through the city unnoti…
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narco-trafficking. You have the narco elite. We talked at Nauseam about this. You have the Cali cartel, which never makes the news because it's basically state-sponsored. And to a certain extent, the Medellin cartel, now that they got rid o…
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one year after the discovery by Occidental Oil of the billion-barrel Kenyo Limon oil field in 1983. A concerted U.S. propaganda campaign was mounted in 1984 against alleged drug trafficking by conspiracy involving Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Co…
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with farms, and it was the only way they could feed their family. And the traffickers in the Medellin and with Pablo Escobar, they all worked for the CIA. This campaign distorted the truth in two respects. It falsely implicated the FARC, an…
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affected U.S. drug policy overall and particularly in Colombia. A concerted U.S. propaganda campaign was mounted in 1984 against alleged drug trafficking by a conspiracy involving Nicaraguan Sandinistas, Colombian narco-guerrillas, and traf…
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would bury the Contra Support drug case linked the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to drug trafficking by bringing the first of two indictments against Leder and Escobar and a Sandinistan official. For this, he relied on the testimony and controvers…
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Thus, the indictments named, in addition to five traffickers in the Medellin cartel, Pablo Escobar and Carlos Leder, it also named Federico Vaughn, an alleged assistant to Thomas Borge.…
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who was accused of links both to the revolutionary M-19 movement and to Fidel Castro, because they all have to be a communist. In February 1987, Leder was captured and extradited to the U.S., having been betrayed by Escobar in connection wi…
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Castano collaborated with the CIA and the Colombian police to bring down the fugitive drug baron Pablo Escobar. Carlos Castano and his brother were leaders of a death squad called Los Pepes that tracked down and killed members of Escobar's …
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They did so on the basis of information from the CIA, which was transmitted via special squads of the Colombian National Police, trained by the same CIA. The U.S. Embassy had intelligence reports that, in fact, Los Pepis had been created by…
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and gave one of them a gold watch. Escobar's ability to run his drug operations while nominally in prison ended only with his death. It seemed for a while that the traffic would be dominated by more accommodating Holly Cartel, whose style w…
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and by August 1995, the three major leaders of the Cali cartel had been arrested. Apparently, the Cali leaders, like Escobar before them, continued to oversee their drug trafficking from prison. According to the DEA, the drug trade in Colom…
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Like Pablo Escobar. If you think that you're not going to use the distribution network you're told to use inside the United States, and he did not.…
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He did originally, he was using the Cuban exile network that the CIA had dictated, but he decided that he wanted to create his own and get a bigger share of the pie. And so he started importing Colombians and they had a mass gang war down i…
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And I mean, this is documented in the BCCI investigations. He had an account there as did George H.W. Bush. They had been allies for a very long time in narco trafficking. But what you find in around the same timeframe is people like Pablo …
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Break out of the CIA controlled network of narco trafficking. So in Pablo Escobar's perspective, instead of using just only the U.S. approved couriers inside of the U.S., he dispatched a whole bunch of his narco traffickers up here and was …
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killing the Cuban exiles that had been relied upon for decades at that point to do the interior distribution and the mafia and all that. So Pablo Escobar also didn't like laundering all of his money through the U.S., which was basically a r…
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because none of that was allowed. And of course, we know that they assassinated Pablo Escobar as a result of him not coloring inside the lines as well. This is just what they do. And then if they actually do bring you to trial, they will se…
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I have seen lots of evidence on the banking accounts, the narco thing, him being on the CIA's payroll that directly relate and the evidence of him helping Pablo Escobar get outside of the CIA approved system in several different books. So t…
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in Colombia. It also highlights Pablo Escobar, who was killed in 1993 by members of the so-called Search Block, which was a 600-person task force comprised of Colombian police and intelligence agencies funded, trained, and supported by the …
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Two of the DEA agents involved in the hunt for Escobar as part of search block penned a book about their experiences. It was called Manhunters, How We Took Down Pablo Escobar. It was written by Stephen Murphy and Javier Pina. Their exploits…
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streaming series called Narcos. From an NSA archive, quote, US espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 93 provided key evidence linking the US-Colombia task force, the search block, charged with tracking down fu…
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published today by the National Security Archives. The affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narco-traffickers every bit as dangerous as Escobar himself. The docum…
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paramilitary leaders in Las Pepes, which was basically peoples persecuted by Pablo Escobar, a clandestine terrorist organization that waged a bloody campaign against Colombian civilians and property associated even tangentially to Pablo. Ba…
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Later told DEA internal affairs investigators that the U.S. federal agent identified as Gomez Bustamante as being on the payroll of Javier Pina, who at the time was the assistant special agent in charge of the DEA station in Bogota. Years l…
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It followed a hunt for the infamous narco-trafficker Pablo Escobar. Look over there, not at us. When questioned by DEA internal affairs investigators in 2002, Pena denied all of the charges. He did concede, however, that he had a relationsh…
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His body was later found in 2006 in a shallow grave. His death ended the dark dealings that he had cultivated with the Colombian underground. Ruthless paramilitary killers, narcos, and even the CIA. In fact, it appears the CIA, Bogota DEA a…
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Here's the memo. It's dated February 17, 2008. U.S. espionage operations targeting top Colombian government officials in 93 provided key evidence linking the U.S. Colombian task force charged with tracking down fugitive drug lord Pablo Esco…
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Published today by the National Security Archives, the affair sparked a special CIA investigation into whether U.S. intelligence was shared with Colombian terrorists and narco-traffickers every bit as dangerous as Pablo Escobar, which of co…
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That was reported as early as February 93, when it was reported that the Pepe's attacks would be the work of rogue policemen taking advantage of a rash of bombings to give Pablo Escobar a taste of his own medicine. The memo goes on. A secre…
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Around the same time, the CIA reported that the Colombian defense minister, Rafael Pardo, was, quote, concerned that the police are providing intelligence to Los Pepes, unquote. Colombian extralegal steps against Pablo Escobar. Agency analy…