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Las Tangas ranch

The Power of the Dog

Las Tangas ranch is a northern Colombian location associated with Fidel Cardona’s operation of a right-wing death squad. The ranch’s significance in the account rests on that association: it connects the cocaine economy and paramilitary violence to Cardona’s later cooperation with U.S. intelligence and entry into politics.

Setting and Association

The account identifies Las Tangas ranch as the place from which Cardona, a cocaine lord from Death to Kidnappers (MAS), operated a right-wing death squad. It gives no further description of the property or its day-to-day use, so the ranch is defined by its role as a base for Cardona’s activity rather than by its physical features.

Cardona’s Changing Position

Cardona later turned against Pablo Escobar and helped the Central Intelligence Agency track him down. In return, Cardona’s cocaine crimes were forgiven, and he moved into politics full-time. The sequence places the ranch at the earlier end of a striking change in status: a setting linked to a drug lord’s paramilitary operations precedes his transition into political life under the protection of an intelligence relationship.

Narrative Significance

The ranch’s brief mention anchors a wider account of how criminal power could cross into official politics. Cardona’s trajectory links cocaine trafficking, right-wing armed violence, intelligence cooperation, and political rehabilitation, while the ranch itself remains a specific point of origin rather than the focus of a separate episode. The text does not describe later events at the property or establish that it became a base for the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia; it identifies Cardona as a founder of that organization and separately records his earlier operations from the ranch.