Escobar, who started out as a car thief, then small-time trafficker and kidnapper, first saw opportunity in feeding America’s cocaine habit by smuggling coca paste into Colombia, refining it and paying “mules” to smuggle it into the U.S. in their luggage or by swallowing condoms stuffed with cocaine.  Escobar shipped much of the cartel’s cocaine through the Caribbean, working with Carlos Lehder and George Jung, who were organizing flights into South Florida through the Bahamas. Lehder then broke with Jung and took control of the tiny Bahamian island of Norman’s Cay in 1979, using it as a base where planes would land in broad daylight on the 3,300-foot-long airstrip with loads of cocaine from Colombia. The cocaine was transferred to small planes that could fly below U.S. radar and land on dirt roads and berms in Florida’s Everglades.  Such out-in-the-open smuggling wasn’t going to last long. In 1982, the Bahamian government forced the traffickers off Norman’s Cay. The South Florida Drug Task Force, a combination of agents from the DEA, Customs, FBI and other government agencies along with the military, brought a screeching halt to the Colombia-Bahama-Florida route.  But Gaviria Rivero simply shifted the Medellín supply chain. He tapped legitimate cargo shipments, replacing the insulation in refrigerators and insides of TV sets from Panama with cocaine. They also mixed the highly soluble drug into Guatemalan fruit pulp, Ecuadorian cocoa, Chilean wine and Peruvian dried fish—even soaked it into blue jeans—which was removed by chemists upon arrival in the United States.  The Medellín syndicate was involved in every part of the drug trade, from coca farms in Colombia to street dealers in the United States.  In the 1980s, a kilo of cocaine might cost $1,000 to refine, but Escobar’s agents could sell it for up to $70,000 in the U.S.  He began moving cocaine through poverty-stricken Haiti instead of the tourist enclaves of the Bahamas. Profits were so big, pilots made one-way trips to the Florida coast, dropping sacks of cocaine, ditching their planes in the sea and then swimming to waiting ships.  The cartel also began moving cocaine through Panama. From there Mexican couriers would take it overland through Mexico and across the border into the U.S. That meant befriending Mexican smugglers, which helped launch the Sinaloa, Juárez and Tampico cartels that have since turned Mexico into a virtual narco-state.  Throughout it all, the Medellín syndicate remained a decidedly wholesale organization. Escobar and his partners used a collection of distributors and retailers, from U.S. organized crime groups to small-town drug barons and Colombian émigrés, to control the majority of the cocaine moving through Southern Florida and over the Mexican border to the streets of America.  The distributors effectively became “franchisees” of the Colombians, says Paul Gootenberg, a historian and SUNY distinguished professor at Stony Brook University in New York. Violence, bribes and loyalty helped the Medellín syndicate control them. In fact, just the promise of violent retribution from Escobar’s enforcers if they didn’t pay for deliveries made it possible for the syndicate to control the retail side of the drug trade thousands of miles from home.  Even if they had to share the final profits, the riches were vast. A kilo of cocaine might cost $1,000 to refine and up to $4,000 to smuggle to Miami, where Escobar’s agents could sell it for $50,000 to $70,000 in the mid-1980s. At its peak, the Medellín syndicate had five to seven flights a day into the U.S., Mexico or the Caribbean, each carrying some 500 kilos of dope, say Peña and his DEA partner at the time, Steve Murphy. Tons of cocaine became billions in profits.
You can't even bring a bottle of water on a plane today. How did billions of dollars worth of cocaine end up in the United States?