I suppose Ian Fleming was somehow ripping off Miami Vice in the 1950s? Licence to Kill may have been a Fleming pastiche, stapled together from various novels, but it was a damned good one...
As you point out yourself Greg, Fleming didn't write Licence to Kill. It's not a Fleming story and Sanchez (although loosely based on Scaramanga) isn't his character. It's Eon's shot at riding the bandwagon of South American drug lord villains that were popular in American TV and movies of the Eighties. Criticism of LTK aside, lets not ignore that without Michael Mann the second Dalton film would probably have had a very different vibe