"Pablo Escobar said to me: 'One shot to the head isn't enough. It has to be two shots, just above the eyes.'"

Jhon Velásquez, nicknamed "Popeye," is sitting on a white plastic chair in the prison yard. "You can survive one shot, but never two. I cut up the bodies and threw them in the river. Or I just left them there. I often drove through Medellín, where I kidnapped and raped women. Then I shot them and threw them in the trash."
Three guards are standing next to him. He is the only prisoner in the giant building. The watchtower, the security door systems, the surveillance cameras -- it's all for him. The warden of the Cómbita maximum-security prison, a three-hour drive northeast of the Colombian capital Bogotá, has given Popeye one hour to tell his story.

The experience is like opening a door into hell.

Popeye was the right-hand man of Pablo Escobar, head of Colombia's Medellín cartel. Until his death in 1993, Escobar was the most powerful drug lord in the world. He industrialized cocaine production, controlled 80 percent of the global cocaine trade and became one of the richest people on the planet. The cartel ordered the killings of 30 judges, about 450 police officers and many more civilians. As Escobar's head of security, Popeye was an expert at kidnapping, torture and murder.

Velásquez acquired the nickname Popeye while working as a cabin boy in the Colombian navy. He kidnapped Andrés Pastrana, the then-candidate for mayor of Bogotá and later president. He obtained the weapon that was used to fatally shoot Colombian presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán in 1989. He was involved in a bombing attack that was intended to kill former Colombian President César Gaviria. Popeye, acting on the orders of Escobar, El Patrón, even had his beauty-queen girlfriend Wendy murdered.

"I've killed about 250 people, and I cut many of them into pieces. But I don't know exactly how many," Popeye says. "Only psychopaths count their kills."
...
"People like me can't be stopped. It's a war. They lose men, and we lose men. They lose their scruples, and we never had any. In the end, you'll even blow up an aircraft because you believe the Colombian president is on board. I don't know what you have to do. Maybe sell cocaine in pharmacies. I've been in prison for 20 years, but you will never win this war when there is so much money to me made. Never."
...
When about 30 national leaders met in Cartagena, Colombia, in April 2012 for the Summit of the Americas, there was only big, behind-the-scenes topic: a new drug policy. Suddenly Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos was saying: "If the world decides to legalize (drugs) and thinks that that is how we reduce violence and crime, I could go along with that."

General Otto Pérez Molina, president of Guatemala, wrote: "Consumption and production should be legalized but within certain limits and conditions."

Uruguayan President José Mujica said: "What scares me is drug trafficking, not drugs".

Vicente Fox, the president of Mexico from 2000 to 2006, wanted to wage the "mother of all wars" against organized crime, sending the Mexican army into the drug war. Today, Fox says that the war was a "total failure."
...
"No product on earth has profit margins as large as cocaine or heroin. Why? Because of prohibition."
...
General Pérez has been a police officer for 35 years. He is likely to be named the head of Colombia's national police force soon. Does he believe that he is winning the war? "Of course, when we chop off one head another one immediately grows in its place," he says.
...
For Nadelmann, November 6 was the most important Election Day he had ever experienced. Elsewhere in the world, people were rubbing their eyes in astonishment. Legalization? In the United States? The biggest of all combatants in the drug war?

Harvard economics professor Jeffrey Miron has calculated that the legalization of marijuana could generate $8.7 billion in annual tax revenues in the United States. And money is an argument that can even sway conservative voters.

The second major argument is the prison population. Some 750,000 people were arrested for marijuana offences in the United States in 2011, most of them merely for possession -- of a substance potentially less addictive than alcohol.

Perhaps there will a day when Nov. 6, 2012 will be considered the beginning of the end of the marijuana prohibition.

This is getting ridiculous, Curtman... ridiculously long.

When Colorado went legal violence soared along the Border. So, no legalization will not help.

Appearing at a Senate Banking Committee hearing Thursday, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) grilled officials from the Treasury Department over why criminal charges were not filed against officials at HSBC who helped launder hundreds of millions of dollars for drug cartels.

“HSBC paid a fine, but no one individual went to trial, no individual was banned from banking, and there was no hearing to consider shutting down HSBC’s activities here in the United States,” Warren said. “So, what I’d like is, you’re the experts on money laundering. I’d like an opinion: What does it take — how many billions do you have to launder for drug lords and how many economic sanctions do you have to violate — before someone will consider shutting down a financial institution like this?”

Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence David S. Cohen, though admitting HSBC’s actions were “egregious,” did not answer Warren’s question. “For our part, we imposed on HSBC the largest penalties that we’ve ever imposed on any financial institution ever. We looked at the facts and determined that the most appropriate response there was a very, very significant penalty against the institution.”

Warren reiterated her question and still got nowhere. “We at the Treasury Department… don’t have the authority to shut down a financial institution,” Cohen said.

Long it is and also annoying as heck considering I am in the thick of that Cartel war on the US-Mexican Border every day. This is way more then a Drug War. It also goes Political and Civil War with many divisions. Also not mentioned is Terrorist via proxy from the middle East allied with the Cartels, providing heavy munitions and RPG's. When Colorado went legal violence soared along the Border. So, no legalization will not help.

Curious exactly where on the border are you. What rise in violence are you speaking of? You say the Border but it is a long border so can you give a state and or city, regional area?