Title: Map: Colombia, Cocaine and Cash ~ Colombia | Wide Angle | PBS
Headings: 
An Honest Citizen
Content: U.S.-backed aerial fumigation of those regions in the late 1990s and early part of this century has pushed growers north and east, and planting has picked up in the northern regions of Arauca, Norte de Santander, Bolivar, and Antioquia. The cultivation, production, and trafficking of cocaine in Colombia remains a major industry, employing — as of 2004 — about 200,000 people and generating annual revenues estimated at 2.2 billion dollars, equivalent to nearly 3 percent of Colombia’s legitimate GDP. The nature of the industry, however, has changed radically over the past few decades. Through the early 1990s, the Medellín and Cali cartels (named after the two major cities in which they were centered) had near complete control over the production and trafficking of cocaine throughout the world. But following Pablo Escobar’s death in 1993 and the arrests of the Rodriguez brothers in 1995, the cartels collapsed, and the drug trafficking industry adapted quickly to a new set of conditions. Instead of recreating the hierarchies of the cartels, traffickers banded together in loose, decentralized alliances, spreading the responsibility and risk of the business among a number of independent operators. In addition, Colombia’s armed groups became significantly involved in the drug trade, first by exacting a “tax” on shipments moving through their territories, hiring outside the cartel to protect smugglers, and eventually becoming only directly involved in the trafficking itself. Today diverse groups working independently in small cells control the traffic and distribution of illegal drugs. Cocaine is smuggled into the United States in a variety of methods, though they rely primarily on land routes through Mexico to reach the markets of the western U.S., and sea routes through the Caribbean to transport drugs bound for the East Coast and Europe. Every trafficker faces the problem of what to do with the money generated by the business.