Unlike Their Medellin Brethren, They Shun Open Violence : The Cali Cartel: Colombia’s Gentlemen Cocaine Traffickers

Ciudad Jardin, Cali’s most exclusive suburb, boasts a dazzling array of walled mansions on hillsides entwined with curving streets and blooming with satellite dishes. This is the neighborhood of choice for the dons of the Cali cartel, Colombia’s gentlemen cocaine traffickers.

Like the more savage and notorious Medellin cartel, the Cali traffickers use Colombia as a base for smuggling huge amounts of cocaine into the United States. But the Cali cartel prefers whenever possible to avoid the open violence, including assassinations of high officials, that has focused world attention on the Medellin gangsters.

“According to the philosophy of the Cali cartel, it is preferable to bribe than to kill,” said a Colombian investigative reporter.

The Cali traffickers try to blend peacefully with the wealthy elite in this clean and prosperous city of 1.5 million people, seeking respect and security through investments and carefully cultivated contacts.

‘Strong Influence’

“They have ‘levers,’ as we say here,” said a Roman Catholic priest in Cali. “They have strong influences in all sectors.”

When murder is required to assert their illicit power, the Cali dons also try to use discretion, said Col. Jose Pelaez, chief of Colombia’s judicial police. “They abduct their victims and make them disappear,” he said.

Thus, the Cali-based cocaine trade has thrived in relative obscurity, drawing less attention than the Medellin cartel from both news media and law enforcement officials.

“We definitely know a lot less about the Cali people than we do about the Medellin people,” said an agent of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But the low profile of the Cali traffickers is deceptive.

“I think they are very big, maybe not as big as the Medellin people, but I think they have been gaining ground steadily,” the DEA agent said.

Perhaps the most famous residents of Ciudad Jardin are brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela. Together, they are said to dominate the Cali cartel.

The two grew up in a poor section of Cali, far from the luxury of Ciudad Jardin. As youths, they took low-paying jobs as drugstore clerks. Miguel earned a law degree from Cali’s prestigious San Buenaventura University, which is run by Franciscan priests. Gilberto never finished high school.

At one point, Gilberto allegedly tried his hand at kidnaping, a lucrative industry in Colombia.

Through the years, the brothers built up an impressive business empire, including a national chain of discount drugstores, a pharmaceutical laboratory, a radio network, a bank, a Chrysler Corp. agency, a bus fleet, a professional soccer team and ranches and other real estate.

Anti-drug officials say there is no doubt that much of the Rodriguez Orejuelas’ investment capital has come from cocaine and that millions of dollars in trafficking profits have been laundered through their other businesses.

Gilberto’s reputation as an astute strategist has earned him a nickname: The Chess Player. Heavy jowled and well dressed at 50, his looks fit the role of successful business executive.

Miguel, 45, is said to be equally shrewd. He enjoys local popularity as vice president of Club America, the soccer team controlled by the brothers.

People in Cali hear and read about the cocaine cartel, but many tend to overlook its sinister implications.

“It is like the Holy Spirit, which exists but isn’t seen,” said a Cali newspaper editor. A senior partner in the Rodriguez Orejuelas’ organization is Jose Santacruz Londono, 45. He has invested heavily in Cali real estate and construction projects and currently is said to be the main financier behind a large shopping center being built on a prime Cali site once occupied by Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Called Don Chepe, Santacruz Londono is nearly 6 feet tall and weighs more than 250 pounds. According to local lore, he once tried to join Cali’s exclusive Club Colombia but was blackballed, so he built a mansion in Ciudad Jardin that resembles the club building.

Another leading member of the loosely linked Cali Cartel is Francisco Herrera. A young man known as Don Pacho, Herrera is the son of Benjamin Herrera Zuleta, a pioneer trafficker who began moving cocaine in the early 1970s.

The father, nicknamed the Black Pope, was convicted this year on drug-trafficking charges in Las Vegas.

Several anti-drug officials admitted in interviews that they have little information about other major cartel figures.

“There are so many we don’t know about,” lamented a DEA investigator, adding that investigative manpower and resources cannot keep up with the cartel’s burgeoning activities.

Before Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela was well known, DEA agents documented a cocaine trafficking trip he made in 1981 to Los Angeles, where he was later indicted in federal court. He also has been indicted on drug-trafficking charges in New York, Miami and New Orleans.

He was arrested in Spain in November, 1984, using a false Venezuelan passport. Also arrested was his traveling companion, Jorge Luis Ochoa, a leader of the Medellin cartel.

The United States tried to extradite both Rodriguez Orejuela and Ochoa, but competing extradition requests from Colombia were honored by the Spanish judge who heard the case. Allegations that the judge took a bribe later sparked a scandal in Spain.

Ochoa was released without trial in Colombia, causing another scandal, but Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela was tried on his home turf, Cali, along with Santacruz Londono.

Fernando Navas, who served as prosecutor late in that case, said the charges against Rodriguez Orejuela were hastily concocted to keep him from being extradited by the United States.

“That business wounds the dignity of this country,” Navas said. He said he believes that bribes were paid in the case--”many bribes, I have no doubt”--but he added that he had no proof.

The trial judge refused to consider evidence submitted by the DEA from cases in New York and Los Angeles. Rodriguez Orejuela and Santacruz Londono were acquitted, and the Colombian Supreme Court is now considering a government appeal in the Rodriguez Orejuela case.

Except for the appeal, Rodriguez Orejuela is free of charges in Colombia, as is Santacruz Londono. Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela and other major members of the Cali cartel have never been charged with trafficking here.

They circulate freely in Cali, and police leave them alone.

“We have no arrest order,” said Col. Rosso Navarro, metropolitan police chief. “If there were proof, we would have moved against them.”

Colombia has invalidated a 1979 extradition treaty with the United States, so cartel leaders are currently not threatened by U.S. charges against them. Nevertheless, the gentlemen traffickers are not at ease. When they move around their city, they do so under heavy security because of a blood feud with the Medellin cartel.

A year and a half of the so-called War of the Cartels has cost dozens of lives on both sides.

According to a police tally, the Medellin cartel has dynamited 47 drugstores in the Drogas La Rebaja chain owned by the Rodriguez Orejuelas. In some of the bombings, innocent employees and bystanders have been killed.

Six radio stations in the Grupo Radial Colombiano network have been bombed. A friend of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela said the family has sold the radio network to broadcast evangelists for $9 million but cannot find a buyer for the drugstores.

“Who would buy them?” the friend asked.

Investigators and analysts have different theories on the cause of the war between the two cartels, which used to cooperate. Some say it is a fight over cocaine markets in the United States. Others say it has grown from successive betrayals--members of one cartel informing to law enforcement officials against the other.

But most observers agree that it is a power struggle between two greedy groups that are natural rivals in the same immensely profitable business.

Most of the casualties have been low-ranking cartel soldiers, and little of the violence has taken place in Cali, where the hometown traffickers have a tight security system with hundreds of bodyguards. But in February, Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela’s chief of security was shot to death on a downtown Cali street.

And so the mannerly camouflage of the Cali cartel is coming unraveled. In Ciudad Jardin, Spanish for Garden City, there is a disturbing new reminder of the cartel’s sinister presence: the crumbling ruins of a large corner house destroyed by a mysterious bomb several weeks ago.