Narcos: why new villains the Cali Cartel make Pablo Escobar look like Snow White
In December 1993, Pablo Escobar was killed on a suburban rooftop in Bogata. The world's most most notorious drug trafficker had, according to one Colombian police official, "slipped up" by making too many calls from the same phone. After a year-long manhunt costing $130 million, Escobar was surrounded by 500 officers and gunned down a day after his 44th birthday. He died wearing his slippers.
This should have been the end of a bloody chapter in the war against Colombia's cocaine godfathers. But Escobar's elimination did little to stanch the flow of narcotics from the jungles of South America to United States and Europe. In the shadows, a second cartel, more circumspect than Escobar’s $55 billion empire but no less ruthless, had quietly carved out a chunk of the global drugs trade. With Pablo gone, the world was its cocaine-dusted oyster.
Though understandably notorious at home, the first many non-Colombians heard of the Cali Cartel was via smash Netflix drama Narcos. In season two, Cali, based in the coastal city of the same name, became an unofficial ally of the Bogota government, and its US backers at the Drug Enforcement Administration and the CIA, in their relentless pursuit of Escobar.
Now, with Pablo's brutal rise and fall chronicled in full, Netflix has turned to his mortal enemies, with Narcos season three recounting the campaign against the four elusive figures behind the one of the biggest ever coke conglomerates.
Cali was everything Pablo was not: cautious, disciplined, actively disinterested in fame or notoriety. A low profile allowed the group penetrate Columbian high society even as Escobar was making himself public enemy number one. Pablo blew up a passenger jet, ran for parliament and fire-bombed Bogota. Cali invested in radio stations and pharmacy chains, quietly greasing the palms of the same politicians, judges and journalists Escobar was trying to assassinate.
Presenting itself as the respectable face of international cocaine trafficking would, in the short term at least, proved a winning tactic. As Escobar’s network imploded with his death, Cali stepped into the breach and was, by the mid Nineties, believed to handle 70 per cent of the US and 90 percent of the European cocaine trade (in 1996 revenues from its New York operation alone were estimated at $7 billion).
"The cartel is the best and brightest of the modern underworld: professional, intelligent, efficient, imaginative and nearly impenetrable," proclaimed a Time cover story from around that period. "The Cali cartel is the most powerful criminal organisation in the world, " Robert Bonner, administrator of Washington’s DEA told the magazine. "No drug organisation rivals them today or perhaps any time in history."
But the respectable image was just a veneer. Cali’s four-man "board of directors" were cold-blooded thugs, no less cutthroat than Escobar. At the head of the cartel were brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, former street criminals who had displayed an uncommon mixture of ruthlessness and guile in ascending Colombia's vicious criminal underworld.
Gilberto, the older sibling, was the more dapper– a soft-spoken and cultivated figure with a fondness for Colombian poetry. He was known as the "chess master" because he always several moves ahead of his opponents. Miguel was, by contrast , feared rather than respected. Where Gilberto served as the figurehead, his brother was a micro-manager, obsessed with the the smallest detail of the operation.
In truth, however, neither was the sort you’d wish to encounter down a dark alleyway. Having grown up in a poor district of Colombia’s third largest city, as teenagers they had forged a reputation as kidnappers, first selecting well-to-do locals before progressing to tourists.
A $1 million ransom secured in exchange for the release of two Swiss citizens bankrolled a move into marijuana smuggling. When the cocaine market exploded in the Eighties, they quickly transitioned to that far more lucrative business. But the brothers were careful to protect themselves and from the start structured Cali so that individual "cells" often had little knowledge of the wider organisation.
They had by then been joined by José Santacruz-Londoño, a school friend widely known as "Chepe". He more than matched his fellow board members for brutality and is said to have killed his first wife when she threatened to leave Colombia with their children. Last to join was Hélmer "Pacho" Herrera, whose gay lifestyle was tolerated by his homophobic companions simply because he was so good at his job.
That job involved being one of Colombia’s most feared criminals. Pacho and his thugs were infamous for their brutality (quite a boast in the Colombian criminal underworld). A murderer with a flair for the dramatic, Pacho would invite enemies to dinner, and afterwards torture them with bags tied over their heads.
His sociopathy is powerfully dramatised in an early scene in season three of Narcos in which Pacho ties an enemy between two motorbikes, pressing on the accelerator until the victim’s head is yanked off .
For all their savagery dealing with other criminals, the Cali quartet were careful never to become prominent in the manner of Escobar (with whom they were initially allies, handling cocaine distribution into New York while he controlled Miami).
Pablo sought to be a folk hero, whereas the worldly Gilberto, especially, understood that the long term sustainability of the cartel was predicated on avoiding the spotlight and not making the authorities in Bogota look incompetent.
Instead, they turned the city of Cali and the surrounding regions into a fiefdom. "The Cali KGB" was the title bestowed half admiringly on their operation by DEA field operatives. With the local telephone company on their books and most of the taxi drivers in Cali in their employ, nothing happened in south west Colombia without the syndicate’s knowledge.
How they acted on that information set them apart from rival criminal entities."Cali gangs will kill you if they have to," Robert Bryden, head of the DEA in New York, told Time. "But they prefer to use a lawyer." Of course, if you didn’t matter then Cali would wipe you out with impunity.
Even as they cloaked themselves in the respectability of their legitimate businesses the cartel pursued a vicious ground-level campaign on their home turf, their death squads eliminating prostitutes, street children, petty thieves and gays.
The fall of Escobar allowed the Gilberto and his compatriots take over virtually the entirety of Colombia’s cocaine market. Yet his demise also laid the groundwork for Cali’s unravelling. With Pablo out of the way the spotlight fell in earnest on their empire. If Colombian high society was willing to tolerate these cultivated godfathers, Washington assuredly was not and under pressure from the United States, police eventually swooped on the four "directors".
What Uncle Sam wants Uncle Sam invariably gets and Gilberto and Miguel were eventually extradited to the United States, where they are serving 30 year jail terms for drug smuggling and laundering (they pleaded guilty in return for immunity for their families).
Chepe, for his part, died in a police shoot-out in 1996 (ironically while fleeing Escobar's old turf of Medellin) and Pacho was killed by criminal rivals in prison in Colombia in 1997. The supply networks they had set up through Mexico had by them metastasised into formidable cartels in their own right – opening new fronts in the unending war of drugs.
That was obviously bad news for drug enforcement agencies. But it means that, even after they are done with Cali, Netflix and Narcos will have many more stories to tell.
Season 3 of Narcos arrives on Netflix on September 1