After reading Mittelman’s piece on Global Organized Crime, the first thing that came to mind was Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel. This drug enterprise is a prime example of “The rise of transnational organized crime groups spurred by technological innovations, especially advances in commercial airline travel, telecommunications…allowing for increased mobility of people – some of them carriers of contraband – and the flow of illicit goods.” With the rise of globalization organized crime groups began to expand and the Escobar brothers used the connections of globalization to control 80% of the global cocaine market by the 1990’s.Watch Full Movie Online Streaming Online and Download
Escobar started off as a car thief and then a small-time trafficker, but was a man who saw an opportunity to feed America’s cocaine habit. He smuggled coca paste into Colombia, refining it and paying mules to smuggle it into the U.S. in their luggage or by swallowing condoms stuffed with cocaine. Escobar shipped the cartel’s cocaine through the Caribbean, organizing flights into South Florida through the Bahamas, and even used small planes so that he could fly below U.S. radar into the Florida’s Everglades. The brothers “tapped legitimate cargo shipments, replacing the insulation in refrigerators and insides of TV sets from Panama with cocaine. They also mixed the highly soluble drug into Guatemalan fruit pulp, Ecuadorian cocoa, Chilean wine and Peruvian dried fish—even soaked it into blue jeans—which was removed by chemists upon arrival in the United States.” Organized crime had influence in every industry including politics where officials as well as the police and military forces were paid off. Escobar saw a demand and he became the supplier.
