and concrete with Marines at the ready, could have been plucked from another era and dropped off here by that last helicopter out of Saigon.^[41]

On September 5, 1989, George Bush gave his first prime-time speech to the nation. Speaking from the Oval Office, grim and determined, the President promised the Colombians he would stand with them in their struggle against these “cocaine killers” and he pledged $2 billion in aide to the Andean nations. He demanded the death penalty for kingpins like Escobar and called for the largest budget increase in the history of the drug war. To emphasize the danger America was facing, the President held up a small plastic bag. “This is crack cocaine, seized a few days ago by Drug Enforcement Agents in a park just across the street from the White House.”^[42]  It was a chilling reminder of how this insidious plague touched everyone. But an old-time Chicago newsman like Studs Terkel would note the larger irony.  After a seventy-year battle against illegal narcotics, it was now possible to walk out the front door of the White House and do a drug deal across the street.^[43]

In Colombia, the Extraditables responded to the Bush speech with a series of explosions, then promised to turn up the heat. A few days later the mayor of Medellin was gunned down after leading an anti-drug rally.  The following weekend—Colombia’s Valentine’s Day—was kicked off with three bombs in the nation’s capitol that wounded scores of shoppers and left two policemen dead. By Sunday the tendrils of fear had reached all the way to the Washington, and Secret Service protection was extended to President Bush’s five grown children.^[44] 

Mónica de Greiff, the 32-year-old Minister of Justice of the Barco regime, happened to be in Washington at the time. She had flown in two weeks earlier asking for a quick $14 million to help protect her country’s terrified judges, and she proved to be a hit on Capitol Hill. Whisked around town in a security cordon normally reserved for heads of state, she impressed everybody with her iron resolve. Despite the fact that two of her