Cocaine Cartel Turns Cali Into Corrupt ‘Sewer’

Every time someone in the United States sniffs cocaine, injects heroin or inhales from a crack pipe, someone here in the global capital of illegal narcotics trafficking gets a bit richer and a bit more powerful.

Cali, Colombia’s third-largest city, was once best known for hot salsa bands, a dance-loving population and a laid-back manner.

But it has become “a sewer of corruption and violence,” according to a local businessman who asked not to be named.

So much so that even the capture Friday of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, reputedly the most powerful of Cali’s drug bosses, is not expected to weaken the narcotics trade that wields such massive influence in the city.

“The narco-traffickers have taken over. They control businesses, politics, everything,” the businessman said of this metropolis, which spreads across a tropical valley about 175 miles southwest of Bogota, the capital.

Officials estimate that between 80% and 90% of the world’s cocaine supply is now controlled by a handful of families in Cali, a city of about 2 million people. They say the so-called Cali cartel is also the world’s second-largest producer and distributor of heroin, a position it is strengthening as U.S. demand for the opium-based narcotic explodes.

Under the leadership of Gilberto Rodriguez and his brother Miguel, the Cali group reportedly has monopolized the illegal drug trade in the past three years, a power grab made possible in part by the December, 1993, death of Pablo Escobar, the violence-prone leader of the Medellin drug cartel.

U.S. and Colombian drug experts say Escobar’s death at the hands of Colombian security forces and the subsequent dismantling of the Medellin cartel was carried out with significant help from the Rodriguez brothers, who were rewarded with a softer, nearly hands-off government drug policy.

“Before the death of Pablo Escobar, Cali distributed no more than 20% of the coke trade,” a U.S. drug expert said, “and had almost no heroin business. Now, they own the world.”

They still do, at least in terms of the global drug trade, some Colombian officials say, in spite of Gilberto Rodriguez’s capture.

“The arrest certainly helps us,” said a U.S. drug expert in a telephone interview from Washington, “but the structure remains. Not only is Miguel still loose, but they have partners and associates who can and do run things.”

According to a Colombian source interviewed before the arrest, “There are 15 or so top leaders and probably another 200 serious traffickers who could keep things going, even if the brothers retire or are caught.”

In fact, said Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, chief of the National Police Force who led Friday’s arrest, “the Rodriguezes have been thinking of retirement and have trained family members and associates to take over.”

Officials of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimate that the Cali operation produced more than 700 metric tons of cocaine last year, racking up a profit exceeding $7 billion from U.S. sales alone.

That figure does not include billions of dollars resulting from Colombian heroin sales, which totaled about 100 metric tons last year; the money kept by Cali-controlled U.S. dealers; or the proceeds from sales to other parts of the world.

The entire Colombian drug industry produces between $20 billion and $30 billion worth of narcotics a year, according to U.S. officials, most of it controlled by the Cali drug lords.

In the beginning--and in stark contrast to the terrorist tactics of the Medellin cartel--the Cali leaders cultivated reputations as sophisticated, sensible, responsible and, most important, nonviolent community leaders.

Of course, there was the occasional bribe of a public official, a contribution to a political campaign, the killing of an overly ambitious competitor or double-crosser. But mostly the cartel leaders curried public favor by spreading the wealth in Cali.

They also penetrated the local economy to such an extent that, U.S. officials in Washington say, almost no sector is free of the cartel’s influence.

The Rodriguezes and their partners are said to have taken over the city’s taxi fleet, most of its hotels and nearly all the area’s private security firms.

The influx of drug money into Cali at first ignited an economic boom, particularly in the construction industry. Dozens of high-rise buildings changed Cali’s skyline, and new shopping centers, hotels and restaurants created thousands of jobs.

The building boom changed the face of what was once a pleasantly slow-paced, if undistinguished, city of low-rise structures. The river that corkscrews through town and once gave Cali a park-like appearance is now so crowded by the buildings--and so polluted--that it is more a smelly annoyance than a pleasure.

Meanwhile, the cartel leaders established a sophisticated money-laundering system that reaches as far as New York City and built a worldwide narcotics distribution system that does business in Russia and most of Western Europe.

They learned the heroin trade by hiring experts from Thailand and Pakistan and then created demand by producing what U.S. drug experts say is the purest form of that drug ever made.

But even as the cartel leaders continue amassing their billions, the Cali economic boom is threatening to collapse under the weight of increasing violence, which has reduced demand--and prices--for housing, commercial construction, and other products and services.

Murders average more than one a day here, robberies are on the rise, and battles involving police and army troops are increasing.

This upsurge in violence has brought thousands of security forces into the city, emptying streets and driving out businesses--both legitimate enterprises and those used as drug fronts.

Although the city has the look of a mechanical-bird sanctuary, with giant construction cranes looming on the skyline, “most of these buildings are empty,” said the businessman, who acknowledges that he too enjoyed enormous profits from selling office and home furniture to new hotels and high-rise apartment complexes.

“The building boom created enormous inflation, with prices of apartments that should have cost maybe $100,000 going up to two and three times that much. There just isn’t that much money among ordinary people in Cali, and the drug guys can only buy so many properties. Building has already slowed down, and workers are being laid off.”

Normal investment has fallen off, and even agricultural production has dropped because drug lords have bought up as much as 75% of the area’s farms and taken them out of production.

In place of the sugar plantations and other food-producing farms in the fertile Cauca Valley that surrounds this city are fields covered with weeds or blighted by the huge, often-garish mansions of drug profiteers.

One multi-acre field is now the site of an enormous amusement park, built by a businessman with close connections to the Rodriguez brothers, according to Colombian police sources.

Corruption, which used to be quiet here, has spread and become more obvious.

U.S. drug experts say city and provincial officials are on narcotics payrolls, and hundreds of police officers and government security agents have been suspended or are under investigation for corruption.

That kind of pressure seems to have had little effect. In late May, for instance, an executive plane confiscated and supposedly destroyed by police in an anti-drug operation here turned up in Bogota repainted and re-registered, and containing more than $6 million, which authorities believe came from drug sales.

A police official, who said it was too dangerous for him to speak on the record, said the plane was stolen by other police officers and used to transport cocaine.

The matter is under investigation, federal authorities said, but the suspected officers have disappeared.

U.S. officials have been suspicious of President Ernesto Samper’s anti-drug commitment because of U.S. and Colombian intelligence reports alleging that the Cali cartel made contributions to his campaign.

And government programs to curtail the drug trade have not killed Cali’s high life.

This, according to several Cali residents, is because the easy money has infected the city’s culture, particularly youth.

“Nobody wants to work, not even the educated ones,” a Cali police official said. “All they want to do is do drugs, drink and dance.”

A couple of recent nights at Cali’s famous dance clubs confirmed this. Young people, most in their late teens and early 20s, crammed the clubs, dancing endlessly to salsa bands.

Gold jewelry dangled from nearly every limb. No one seemed to mind paying $10 for a glass of imported whiskey, and many party-goers made frequent trips to restrooms or to dark corners, returning invigorated, sniffling and red-eyed.

Pistols protruded from the waistbands of many of the loudest and most drunk, with the 9-millimeter Glock said to be the weapon of choice.

Violence here has not yet reached the level of viciousness seen in Medellin. That city’s drug cartel was blamed for the deaths of nearly 300 police officers, the assassination of four presidential candidates throughout the country in 1989 and the killings of thousands of others caught in bombings and shootings. The violence continued in Medellin over the weekend, with at least 29 people killed and more than 200 wounded in a bomb blast. Police speculated that the bomb was planted by leftist guerrillas or by drug traffickers angered by Friday’s arrest.

But Cali is moving in Medellin’s direction, U.S. and Colombian drug experts say. “It’s not reported,” the police official said of Cali today, “not all of it. We have drug-related killings every day. Some of it is just the result of drunken club disputes, but more and more it is part of the cartel’s way of doing business.”