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Aug 22, 2001
The multi-million dollar trade route
One of British American Tobacco's exclusive distributors was smuggling at least $12m worth of cigarettes a month into Latin America from Aruba in 1998.
Mar 03, 2001
In Latin America, Big Tobacco partners with money launderers, smugglers
Twenty miles off the northern coast of Venezuela lies a tiny, sunbaked island called Aruba. Like so many self-governing Caribbean islands that cling to the coast of the Americas, it has been a smugglers' paradise since colonial times. For decades, it also has been a linchpin in an illegal tobacco trade that Colombian authorities claim comprised as much as 90 percent of cigarettes sent into Colombia.