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If a cartel becomes large enough and powerful Further Reading
enough, its interests may come to be affected by a
Dorn, Nicholas, Karim Murji, and Nigel South. Traffickers:
vast array of political issues not specifically related to
Drug Markets and Law Enforcement. London and
drug production. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, New York: Routledge, 1992.
the Medellín cartel of Colombia engaged in a series Ehrenfeld, Rachel. Narco-Terrorism. New York: Basic
of spectacular political assassinations in an effort to Books, 1990.
change Colombia’s extradition laws. Culminating with Jamieson, Alison, ed. Terrorism and Drug Trafficking in the
the August 1989 murder of Luis Carlos Galan, a popu- 1990s. Aldershot, UK, and Brookfield, VT: Darmouth,
lar presidential candidate, the violence of the cartel’s 1994.
campaign and the cartel’s demonstration that even the McCoy, Alfred W., Cathleen B. Read, and Leonard Palmer
country’s highest officials were not safe prompted a Adams. The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in
the Global Drug Trade. Rev. and exp. ed. New York:
series of concessions. Columbia’s government amended
Lawrence Hill, 1991.
its extradition laws and offered amnesty to drug dealers
Smith, G. Davidson. “Terrorism and the Rule of Law:
who would lay down their arms. The head of the
Dangerous Compromise in Colombia.” Commentary,
Medellín cartel, Pablo Escobar, negotiated a 1991 sur-
No. 13, October 1991. http://www.csis-scrs.gc.ca/eng/
render that included a specially built prison to house comment/com13_e.html.
him, a say in the choice of his guards, and various other “Target America: Traffickers, Terrorists, & Your Kids.”
concessions that, many observers believe, allowed him National Symposium on Narco-Terrorism Transcript.
to run the cartel from inside prison as effectively as he U.S. Department of Justice Drug Enforcement Admini-
had outside it. stration, December 4, 2001. http://www.usdoj.gov/dea/
deamuseum/symposium.html.
COMBATING NARCOTERRORISM
One problem that confronts security forces when NASRALLAH, SHEIKH HASSAN
fighting narcoterrorism is its dual nature: narcoterror- (1960– )
ism bridges fundamental divisions between the crimi-
nal and the political, the domestic and the foreign.
Law enforcement agencies combating criminal vio- General secretary of the Lebanese Shiite Muslim
lence within a country (U.S. examples would be local movement Hezbollah since 1992, Sheikh Hassan
and state police and the FBI) do not usually share Nasrallah presided over Israel’s 2000 withdrawal from
information or conduct investigations in conjunction southern Lebanon. Nasrallah is said to be Hezbollah’s
with agencies that monitor outside threats to a country most diplomatic leader, and is known for guiding the
(military intelligence, the CIA, and the U.S. State organization into a more political, rather than violent,
Department). This lack of coordination and reluctance role in Lebanon.
to share information leads to inefficiency, hampers the The son of a poor vegetable vendor and a descendant
ability to gather and integrate intelligence, and inter- of the Prophet Muhammad, Nasrallah fled his home in
feres with making arrests. eastern Beirut in 1975 at the start of the Lebanese civil
The terrorist attacks on the United States of war. He later traveled to Iraq to study theology in the
September 11, 2001, and the continuing war on terror- holy Shiite city of Najaf. Like many Shiite leaders,
ism may lead to the removal of bureaucratic obstacles Nasrallah left Iraq by decree of President Saddam
in the fight against narcoterrorism. However, narcoter- Hussein. When just 21, Nasrallah helped to found the
rorism is the product of a marriage of convenience militant Lebanese Shiite movement Hezbollah, or Party
between two larger social problems—the tremendous of God. During the 1980s, when Hezbollah made head-
appetite of Western societies for illegal drugs and lines by taking a number of Western hostages, Nasrallah
political grievances of various groups—whose solu- served as a commander in Lebanon’s Bekaa region.
tions are very different. When the Lebanese civil war ended in the early
See also AL QAEDA; LIBERATION TIGERS OF TAMIL EELAM; 1990s, most of the country’s militias disarmed;
Hezbollah, however, continued to fight Israeli troops
REVOLUTIONARY ARMED FORCES OF COLOMBIA; SHINING
PATH; TALIBAN; UNITED SELF-DEFENSE FORCES OF occupying southern Lebanon. In 1992, Israeli forces
COLOMBIA assassinated Nasrallah’s predecessor, Sheikh Abbas