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Got it. Good article - it's going in the syllabus.

Merry Christmas

Rob Norton
+ 1 202 403 4548

On Dec 24, 2012, at 4:07 PM, Hunter Biden <hbiden@rosemontseneca.com> wrote:

> THINGS THAT WORK - L.A. Times 2-col. lead, "Colombia fights drugs: U.S.-style Special units rely on American technology and training, racking up impressive successes at a relatively low cost," by Special Correspondent Chris Kraul in Cartagena, Colombia : "Informants working for a top-secret group of Colombian agents, trained and equipped by U.S. counter-narcotics agencies, ... penetrated the smugglers' inner circle. ... The cops who broke the case are members of a 45-person Cartagena cell of a U.S.-vetted force called the Sensitive Investigative Unit ... Using the 'crown jewels' of American technology and training to make the crucial connections in the drug gangs' spider-web chains of command, the force has racked up impressive successes in the drug wars, and at a fraction of the cost of the $8-billion U.S. initiative called Plan Colombia. ... [DEA] has set up SIUs in 11 other mostly Latin American countries, including Mexico, but also Afghanistan, Thailand and Ghana. ...
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> "The Cartagena agents spend much of their time in a nondescript office in this Spanish colonial city sitting before computer screens monitoring wiretaps, the time-consuming foundation of most major drug busts. ... The Colombian SIU agents, who total more than 300 countrywide, are direct descendants of the bloques de busqueda, or search blocks, set up in the early 1990s with U.S. help to hunt down the notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar. But the drug gangs, under pressure from inside and outside Colombia, aren't the vertically integrated cartels they were in Escobar's day. The rising power of Mexican mafias and their control of U.S. distribution have in effect turned Colombians into their suppliers." http://lat.ms/Tgxcks
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> RHB
> 202.333.188