Word: consulate
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...that netted them more than $300 million since 1985. These U.S.-bound refugees paid as much as $10,000 for a tourist visa, plus an additional $10,000 to $15,000 for a Panamanian passport. Among the implicated schemers is Noriega's cousin Ciro Noriega Quintero, the former Panamanian consul general to Hong Kong. "Manuel Noriega was the king of alien smuggling," says Robert Penland, who retired last month as the INS's assistant commissioner for antismuggling. "When he was deposed, there were 12,000 Chinese and 4,000 Cubans just stranded in the pipeline in Panama." Since then, other...
...important witness who has not been charged with any crimes is Jose Blandon, former consul general of Panama in New York and a onetime member of Noriega's inner circle. After breaking with the dictator two years ago, Blandon told a Miami grand jury that in Havana in 1984 he watched Fidel Castro mediate a dispute between Noriega and members of the Medellin cartel after Panamanian troops closed down a drug laboratory that Noriega had been paid to protect...