Ya ba (also Yaba, Yaa baa, Ya baa or Yah bah; Thai: ยาบ้า, literally "madness drug") are tablets containing a mixture of methamphetamine and caffeine, typically brightly colored in orange or green and carrying logos such as "R" or "WY". They are sometimes called Bhul Bhuliya in India and Shabu in the Philippines, Indonesia and Japan.
The drug is also known as "Nazi speed" as it was originally created by German scientists during World War II to increase the endurance of their soldiers
Quality varies according to source, most are manufactured for oral administration or "chasing" on foil; there is a brand preferred for injecting from Laos. This illegal drug combination is especially popular in Thailand, where it is imported from neighboring Burma, Laos and Cambodia. In recent years it has also been used by immigrant populations in the United States, and occasionally as a club drug replacing ecstasy. In February 2010 it was reported that increasingly large quantities of Yaba are being smuggled into Israel by Thai migrant workers leading to fears that its use will spread to the Israeli club scene, where Ecstasy use is already common
Yaba tablets were outlawed by the Thai government in 1970; at the time they were sold at gas stations and used by Thai truckers to keep awake. After many horrific long distance bus accidents, and deposed Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's campaign from 2003 onwards to eliminate drug trafficking, use of the drug for bus drivers is not as widespread as it was. Retail prices have risen from 100–150 baht ($3–4) to 250–450 baht per pill as a result of the crackdown, though it remains a popular party drug.
Joaquín Guzmán Loera (born April 4, 1957) nicknamed "El Chapo" (Spanish: "Shorty") is a Mexican drug lord who heads an international drug trafficking organization referred to as the Sinaloa Cartel, named after the Mexican pacific coast state of Sinaloa where it was initially formed. He became Mexico's top drug kingpin in 2003 after the arrest of his rival Osiel Cárdenas of the Gulf Cartel.
During the 1980s, Guzmán was associated with Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (known as El Padrino, or The Godfather), head of the dominant drug trafficking group in Mexico at that time. After Félix Gallardo's capture, Guzmán took control of the organization and soon gained notoriety as director of the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán is wanted by the governments of Mexico, U.S.A. and by the INTERPOL; so far he has evaded operations to capture him.
In 2008, Joaquín Guzmán was listed at 701 on Forbes' list of richest people in the world with an estimated net worth of $1 billion.
In November 2009, Joaquín Guzmán was ranked as the 41st of 67 most powerful people in the world by Forbes.
Guzmán became involved in drug trafficking in the late 1980s as a trafficker and air logistics expert for the once powerful Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. However, during the early 2000s improvements in illegal flights detection prompted Guzman to diversify transportation methods and routes. Guzmán is well known for his use of sophisticated tunnels to smuggle cocaine from Mexico into the United States in the early 1990s. In 1993 a 7.3 ton shipment of his cocaine, concealed in cans of chile peppers and destined for the United States, was seized in Tecate, Baja California.
The Guzman-Loera Organization smuggles multi-ton cocaine shipments from Colombia through Mexico to the United States. The organization uses both air and maritime means to transport these shipments. He has contacts with Colombian sources of supply in Colombia, as well as major Colombian traffickers based in Mexico. He has bases of operation in Sinaloa, Sonora, and Chihuahua, Mexico. The organization has distribution cells throughout the United States, including cells in Arizona, California, Texas, Chicago, and New York. The organization has also been involved in the production, transshipment, storage, and distribution of marijuana and heroin. The Guzman-Loera organization relies on bulk currency shipments to move drug proceeds across the United States-Mexico border.
In May 1993, members of the rival Tijuana Cartel coordinated a failed attempt to assassinate Guzmán in the Jalisco airport, which resulted in the much publicized murder of the prominent Roman Catholic Cardinal Jesús Posadas. Police believe that Tijuana Cartel gunmen thought Guzmán Loera was in the car, and the Cardinal was shot instead. What is unclear to many is the relationship the Catholic Church has with drug cartels in Mexico. In many small towns of Mexico, it is widely known that drug king pins give large donations to the Catholic Church. With these donations, new chapels, and churches are built.
Guzmán was captured in Guatemala on June 9, 1993, and sentenced to 20 years in prison under crimes against health, criminal association and bribery charges and was jailed in maximum security La Palma (now Altiplano) prison. On November 22, 1995, he was transferred to maximum security Puente Grande prison in Jalisco, Mexico, and was scheduled to be extradited to the U.S.A. The police say Guzmán carefully masterminded his escape plan, wielding influence over almost everyone in the prison, including the facility's director. He allegedly had the prison guards on his payroll, smuggled contraband into the prison and received preferential treatment from the staff.[10] A few days before he was due to be extradited to the United States, Guzmán bribed several guards and on January 19, 2001, he escaped, apparently hidden inside a laundry van; according to officials, seventy-eight people have been implicated in his escape plan.
In November 2004, 300 paratroopers swooped on Guzmán's Sierra Madre stronghold; his voice had been heard on a tapped phone line half an hour earlier. However, Guzmán eluded capture. On December 20, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced a US $5,000,000 reward for information leading to Guzmán's arrest and prosecution.
On March 17, 2007, Mexican federal agents seized USD $205.6 million, and $157,500 pesos in a mansion in Mexico City belonging to Joaquin Guzman.
In March 2008, the Guatemalan government reported that Guzmán's organization may have been tied to a gun battle in their country that left ten gunmen dead. Three days later, the Honduran government reported that they were investigating whether he was hiding out in Honduras franco paz.
On April 18, 2009 in the state of Durango -Roman Catholic Archbishop Héctor Gonzalez- announced that the fugitive drug trafficker was "living nearby and everyone knows it except the authorities, who just don't happen to see him for some reason." A few days afterwards, two military officers were found dead near a bullet-riddled car in the same area the archbishop claimed 'El Chapo' lived in. It is believed that the officers, who were dressed in civilian clothes, were working undercover in the area when they were abducted and executed in the remote village of Cienega de Escobar of the municipality of Tepehuanes in the state of Durango. They were found with their hands tied and their eyes covered with tape. They had been shot a number of times by AK-47 rounds. A message was left near them: “You'll never get El Chapo, not the priests, not the government."
Guzmán is a nephew of the late Pedro Aviles Perez, a founding father of the Sinaloa drug cartel. Guzmán indoctrinated his sons in the drug trade as well. On February 15, 2005, Guzmán's son, Iván Archivaldo Guzmán, was arrested in the city of Guadalajara, Mexico. He was sentenced to 5 years in a federal prison, but was released in April 2008 after a Mexican federal judge declared the case was lacking evidence. In June 2005, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) arrested his brother, two nephews and a niece. They also seized nine houses and six vehicles. They failed, however, to capture Guzmán. Greggory Johnson was the undercover police officer behind all the captures of Guzmans family. Some of the arrests took place in the U.S. in areas such as Chicago, Los Angeles, and Oakland CA. One niece was captured in Lodi, CA.
Guzmán reportedly strolled into a restaurant called "Las Palmas" in Nuevo Laredo, with a fleet of bodyguards. After taking his seat, his men collected the cell phones of approximately thirty diners and instructed them to not be alarmed. "The gangsters then ate their meal and left - paying for everyone else in the restaurant".
In November 2007, Guzmán was married to an 18 year-old in Canelas, Durango, Mexico. That same month, Guzmán was reportedly seen in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico, repeating the restaurant appearance he had in Nuevo Laredo.
The arrest of Guzmán's partner, Alfredo Beltrán Leyva (a.k.a.: El Mochomo) in January 20, 2008 and J.R marked a rift with the Beltrán Leyva brothers, as they blamed their boss Joaquin "Chapo" Guzmán for their brother's arrest and ordered the assassination of Guzmán's son, 22 year-old Édgar Guzmán Moreno, which was carried out in a shopping center parking lot on the north side of Culiacán by at least 15 gunmen using assault rifles and grenade launchers.
Carlos Enrique Lehder Rivas or simply Carlos Lehder (Born 1950 in Armenia, Colombia) is an imprisoned Colombian drugdealer and co-founder of the Medellín Cartel.
Lehder eventually ran a cocaine transport empire on Norman's Cay island, 210 miles (340 km) off the Florida coast in the central Bahamas. Lehder was also a founding member of Muerte a Secuestradores, a paramilitary group whose focus was to retaliate against the kidnappings of cartel members and their families.He was one of the most important operators therein, and is considered to be one of the most important Colombian drug kingpins to be successfully prosecuted in the United States.
In the 2001 movie Blow, the character Diego Delgado was based on him. Lehder is of mixed Colombian-German descent, his father a German engineer and mother a Colombian schoolteacher. The family owned a semi-legitimate used car business in the Medellin area which Carlos got his start as a criminal in by supplying it with stolen American cars.
Lehder started out as a stolen car dealer, a marijuana dealer, and a smuggler of stolen cars between the US and Canada. While serving a sentence for car theft in federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Lehder decided that, upon his release, he would take advantage of the burgeoning market for cocaine in the United States and enlisted his bunkmate, former marijuana dealer George Jung, as a future partner. Jung had experience with flying marijuana to the US from Mexico in small aircraft, staying below radar level and landing on dry lake beds. Inspired by the idea, Lehder decided to apply the principle to cocaine transport and formed a partnership with Jung. While in prison he set out to learn as much information, that would be useful to him in the cocaine business, as he possibly could. Lehder would sometimes even spend hours questioning fellow inmates on money laundering and smuggling. George Jung allegedly said that Lehder kept countless files and constantly took notes.
Lehder's ultimate scheme was to revolutionize the cocaine trade by transporting the drug to the U.S. using small aircraft. Previously, drug dealers had to rely on human "mules" to smuggle the drug in suitcases on regular commercial flights. In Lehder's vision, much greater quantities could be transported directly by small private aircraft, with far less risk of interception.
After their releases (both were paroled), Lehder and Jung built up a small stream of money through simple, traditional drug smuggling - they enlisted two American girls to take a paid vacation to Antigua, receive cocaine, and carry it back with them to the US in their suitcases. Repeating this process several times, they soon had enough money for an airplane.
Using a small plane and a professional pilot, they began to fly cocaine into the United States via the Bahamas, increasing their financial resources and building connections and trust with Colombian suppliers while spreading money around among Bahamian government officials for political and judicial protection. Their unconventional method of drug-smuggling began to gain credibility.
It was this rapidly growing network that became known as the Medellín Cartel. The partnership of Lehder and Jung handled transport and distribution, while Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar handled production and supply. Other elements of the cartel, such as the Ochoa family, helped deal with political matters in Colombia. Ruthless violence was as integral to the process as cocaine itself.
In the late 70s, the Lehder-Jung partnership began to diverge, due to some combination of Lehder's megalomania, and Lehder's secret scheming to secure a personal Bahamian island as a complete all-purpose headquarters for his operations.
That island was Norman's Cay, which at that point consisted of a marina, a yacht club, approximately 100 private homes, and an air strip. In 1978, Lehder began buying up property and harassing and threatening the island's residents. At one point, a yacht was found drifting off the coast with the corpse of one of its owners aboard. He is estimated to have spent $4.5 million on the island in total.
As Lehder chased away the local population and began to assume total control of the island, Norman's Cay became Lehder's lawless private fiefdom. By this time, George Jung had been forced out of the operation, and international criminal financier Robert Vesco had allegedly become a partner. Jung used his prior connections to take up a more modest line of independent smuggling for Escobar, and stayed out of Lehder's way.
From 1978 through 1982, the Cay was the Caribbean's main drug smuggling hub and a tropical hideaway and playground for Lehder and associates. Cocaine was flown in from Colombia by jet and then reloaded into the small aircraft that then distributed it to locations in Georgia, Florida, and the Carolinas. Lehder was believed to receive 1 kilo on every 4 that was transported through Norman's Cay.
Lehder built a 3,300-foot (1,000 m) runway protected by radar, bodyguards and Doberman attack dogs for the fleet of aircraft under his command.In the glory days of his operation, 300 kilograms of cocaine would arrive on the island every day, and Lehder's personal wealth mounted into the millions.
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 to give Escobar to the U.S. in return for amnesty, they fled to Nicaragua to seek the assistance of 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 blantant bribing of Bahaman officials and the attention the activities on the island were attracting. Also an associate of Lehder's, Jack Carlton Reed purchased a 55 acre farmhouse in Starkville, Mississippi. Reed had a dog that was referred for treatment to the Mississippi State University veterinary school and asked one of the doctors to hold a personal suitcase for him as a small favor. Other persons under the direction of Reed actually purchased the farmhouse which also happened to have a grass air strip on the property.
Law enforcement was alerted and surveillance was conducted from the day the property was purchased until the day it was abandoned when someone dressed in camouflage was spotted taking pictures. This was a state agent who never admitted his mistake. The property was eventually searched and valuable evidence was seized. Hidden walls had been built in the house which law enforcement learned later were to be used to conceal hundreds of kilos of cocaine.
The most important evidence seized by the local law enforcement was the suitcase left by Jack Carlton Reed. In the suitcase was Reed's life history. The picture of Carlos Lehder and Steven Yakovac was one contained in the suitcase. The suitcase was a gold mine for the federal officials in the prosecution of the entire organization.
Jack Reed's concern for his dog and his belief he could come into a small Mississippi town and spend $155,000 cash in the early eighties with no raised eyebrows resulted in the seizure of some of the most damaging evidence presented during a subsequent trial in Jacksonville, Florida.
After a report on U.S. television made public the corruption of Bahamian government leaders, Lehder could not return to Norman's Cay. The government had frozen all his bank accounts and taken over his property and possessions. He went from a billionaire to being nearly bankrupt. While he was on the run in the jungle, he got sick with a fever. Pablo Escobar sent a helicopter for him and brought him back to Medellín where he received medical attention to save his life. Even so, he was left very weak. When he recovered, Pablo gave him work to do. He was hired as a trusted bodyguard, although he was given the respect he had earned. Eventually, Lehder wanted to rebuild his fortune, but he was captured at a farm he just established in Colombia when a new employee of his informed the police of his location. In 1987, he was extradited to the United States, where he was tried and sentenced to life without parole, plus an additional 135 years. Now all of the other cartel leaders knew what would happen if they were extradited, and soon after, the Medellín cartel organizations split up, and a violent war began as the cartel leaders tried to protect themselves by fighting back, although they only really wanted to negotiate peaceful resolutions. And individual organization's, especially Pablo's, were later attacked by the Cali cartel, the Colombian police/army, and soon the U.S. became involved as well. (Reference - The Accountant's Story, the True Story of Pablo Escobar, as told by Pablo Escobar's brother, Roberto Escobar)
In 1992, in exchange for Lehder's agreement to testify against Manuel Noriega, this was reduced to a total sentence of 55 years. Three years after that, Lehder wrote a letter of complaint to a Jacksonville federal district judge, complaining that the government had reneged on a deal to transfer him to a German prison. The letter was construed as a threat against the judge.
Within weeks of sending that letter in the fall of 1995, Lehder was whisked away into the night, according to several protected witnesses at the Mesa Unit in Arizona. While many believe he could have been released, others consider that this is not true. There was a brother of Carlos Lehder, Federico Guillermo Lehder Rivas on the periphery of the business who might have been mistaken for Carlos, causing the reports of his being free and overseas.
According to journalist and author Tamara S. Inscoe-Johnson, who worked on the Lehder defense during the time in question, Lehder was simply transferred to another prison and has continued to be held in WITSEC, which is the Bureau of Prisons' version of the federal Witness Protection Program.
Inscoe-Johnson argued that Lehder had not been released, despite Internet rumors to the contrary. Inscoe-Johnson's work on Lehder entitled Norman's Cay: The True Story of Carlos Lehder and the Medellin Cartel, details why the author believes that Lehder will never be released. Allegedly, Lehder would be privy to secret information regarding the CIA's and his own involvement in the Iran-Contra affair.
Carlos Lehder's ongoing legal battles confirm Lehder remains imprisoned in the US, and that he is not likely to be released anytime soon. On July 22, 2005 he appeared in the US Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit to contest his sentence. Lehder appeared pro se, arguing that the United States failed to perform its obligations under a cooperation agreement he had entered into with the United States Attorney's Office, after he held up his end of the deal. (United States v. Lehder-Rivas, 136 Fed. Appx. 324; 2005). In May 2007, he requested the Colombian Supreme Court to order the Colombian government to request from the United States his release because of the violations of his cooperation agreement. In May 2008, Carlos Lehder's lawyer declared to El Tiempo that an Habeas corpus petition had been filed, alleging that there were violations to his cooperation agreement, and that "a court in Washington" has less than 30 days to respond to the notice.
