{"id":286,"date":"2009-07-28T07:20:35","date_gmt":"2009-07-28T11:20:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=286"},"modified":"2009-07-28T07:20:35","modified_gmt":"2009-07-28T11:20:35","slug":"%e2%80%9cthe-best-thing-about-miami-is-how-close-it-is-to-the-united-states%e2%80%9d","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2009\/07\/28\/%e2%80%9cthe-best-thing-about-miami-is-how-close-it-is-to-the-united-states%e2%80%9d\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cThe best thing about Miami is how close it is to the United States\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ryan Grim<\/a> looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade:<\/p>\n

\n

Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel Castro, leaving South Florida with an idle army of welltrained, mostly Cuban-American adepts of the dark arts that would become valuable in the cocaine smuggling business. They knew how to acquire and use weapons, how to hide money, how to surreptitiously pilot planes and boats. A speedboat could zip through any one of the Everglades\u2019 hundreds of little waterways to find a hidden place to unload, or dock elsewhere along Florida\u2019s 3,000 miles of coastline.<\/p>\n

The infrastructure for this multibillion-dollar import business wasn\u2019t created solely for cocaine, or even for marijuana before it. South Florida had a long history of smuggling coffee, tobacco, and other products subject to tariffs. A \u201cmother ship,\u201d either from the Caribbean or directly from Colombia, would anchor near the shore, though not close enough to be seen from land. Yachts or cigarette boats — named for the vessels that smuggled bootleg tobacco — would zip out to the offshore vessel to load up with coke. The drug also came in by air. In the late \u201970s and early \u201980s customs officials estimated that more than 80 cocaine-laden planes landed in the United States every night, mostly in Florida. In 1980 the U.S. Customs Service seized 200 cigarette boats and 50 airplanes, one of which was a World War II\u2013era bomber. It had previously been used by customs agents investigating drug operations. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ryan Grim looks at the (government assisted) rise of Miami’s drug trade: Miami was the perfect base for largescale drug smuggling. By the mid-1970s Coconut Grove was bursting with hippies, the type of smart, anti-authoritarian troublemakers who make the best smugglers. The Carter administration had pulled back on the effort to overthrow Cuban leader Fidel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84,9,13],"tags":[119,120],"class_list":["post-286","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-government","category-law","category-usa","tag-drugs","tag-florida"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4C","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=286"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":288,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/286\/revisions\/288"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=286"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=286"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=286"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}