Colombia

The country that processed and shipped it got its own version of the phrase.

It is the less common variant of Bolivian marching powder, which Jay McInerney's 1984 novel Bright Lights, Big City made famous, and it is recorded in the New Partridge Dictionary of Slang. Through the 1980s Peru and Bolivia grew most of the coca while Colombian organizations refined and exported the product. Colombia only became the leading grower as well in the 1990s.

It was a message left on a body, not a method of murder.

Spanish calls it the corbata colombiana, and it was used as a warning to others during La Violencia, the Colombian civil conflict of roughly 1948 to 1958 that killed some 200,000 people. The English phrase is first recorded in 1981, by which time English speakers associated it with the cocaine trade rather than with the civil war. The name comes from the tongue hanging over the chest.