Downfall
The approval of the extradition of Colombian encourages Escobar and Lehder to participate in politics. Lehder founded the National Latino Movement (Movimiento Latino Nacional in Spanish), with which is popularized from speeches against extradition and which manages three congressional seats.
The April 30, 1984 assassination of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, the Colombian Minister of Justice, initiated the beginning of the end for Lehder and the Medellín cartel. Lara had campaigned against the activities of the cartel, and his murder marked a change in Colombian politics. President Belisario Betancur, who had previously opposed extraditing any Colombian drug lords to the United States, announced that he was now willing to extradite. Carlos Lehder was the top name on the crackdown list.
Other major Medellín cartel associates fled to the protection of Manuel Noriega in Panama, but when Pablo Escobar discovered that Noriega was plotting to betray him to the U.S. in return for amnesty, they fled to Nicaragua to seek the assistance of Nicaraguan president Daniel Ortega. Escobar had paid some of Noriega's closest colonels to inform him of Noriega's intentions. The downfall of Carlos Lehder was assisted by his blatant bribing of Bahamian officials and the attention the activities on the island were attracting.
Read more about this topic: Carlos Lehder
Famous quotes containing the word downfall:
“Show me one thing here on earth which has begun well and not ended badly. The proudest palpitations are engulfed in a sewer, where they cease throbbing, as though having reached their natural term: this downfall constitutes the heart’s drama and the negative meaning of history.”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)