Colombian drug kingpins in the 1980s flashed their illegal wealth openly. However, the newer generations of Colombian drug lords frown on ostentatious public displays of expensive cars, gold jewelry, large estates, beautiful women and automatic weapons. Many work at legitimate jobs, finance their homes and businesses with legitimately obtained mortgages and bank loans, drive unassuming vehicles and work at passing themselves off as regular middle- or upper-class Colombians. They have also learned how to hide and launder their illegal assets more carefully in Colombia and abroad as well.

The new organizations are also much more specialized than the large cartels that dominated the drug trade only a decade ago. Some now specialize only in obtaining land and cultivating coca or poppies used to make opium. Others handle the production of coca paste and cocaine, the transportation and secure warehousing of drug shipments in export staging areas, the bribery and corruption of government officials and the shipment of narcotics abroad.

These groups associate with each other for the purpose of manufacturing and exporting narcotics but otherwise keep their operations separate and

compartmentalized, making it difficult for Colombian and foreign counter-drug agencies to penetrate and dismantle entire drug networks.

Many of the new Colombian groups have developed southern export routes to ship drugs to North America, Europe and Asia through ports of departure like Chile and Argentina. Colombia's Amazonas department is now the headquarters of several trafficking organizations that export narcotics through Ecuador, Peru and Brazil, a country of 170 million people and the largest, closest potential market for Colombian heroin and cocaine after the United States.