Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela

Gilberto José Rodríguez Orejuela (31 January 1939 – 31 May 2022) was a Colombian drug lord and one of the leaders of the Cali Cartel.

Orejuela formed the cartel with his brother, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, José Santacruz Londoño, and Hélmer Herrera.

Gilberto José Rodríguez Orejuela was born on Jan. 31, 1939, in Mariquita, about 110 miles northwest of Bogotá.

His family moved to Cali when he was a child.

His father, Carlos Rodríguez, was a painter; his mother, Ana Rita Orejuela, was a homemaker.

After leaving high school at 15, he began working as a drugstore clerk.

He rose to become a manager, and opened his own store at age 25.

While working his way up in the pharmacy business, Rodríguez Orejuela began his criminal career, engaging in kidnapping and then, the drug trade.

During the 1970s, Rodríguez Orejuela and his brother Miguel helped to organize, along with José Santacruz Londoño and Hélmer Herrera, a loose consortium of drug trafficking gangs that came to be known as the Cali Cartel.

Members cooperated in processing, shipping and distribution.

The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, as heads of the most successful of the cartel members, became the cartel leadership.

Gilberto was the strategic planner and visionary, nickname "The Chess Player" for his calculated approach; Miguel oversaw day-to-day operations.

The cartel maintained a low profile, with no flashy parties, no conspicuous displays of wealth, and no unnecessary violence.

They were initially primarily involved in marijuana, and branched out into cocaine during the 1980s.

For a time, it was estimated that the Cali Cartel supplied about 80 percent of the cocaine in the United States through Rodriguez's son, Jorge Alberto Rodriguez, and 90 percent of the European cocaine market.

On November 15, 1984, Gilberto was captured in Spain.

At the time of his arrest, he was accompanied by Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez.

Gilberto had been in Spain to hold meetings with the aim of expanding the cartel business on the European continent.

The cartel began to work with traffickers in Galicia, and established strategic alliances with the powerful Camorra, which would be in charge of the distribution of Cali cocaine throughout Europe.

The Colombian government intervened to stop Spain from extraditing Rodríguez Orejuela to the U.S. He was instead returned to Colombia, where he stood trial on the same charges and was acquitted.

The Cali Cartel was less violent than its rival, the Medellín Cartel.

While the Medellín Cartel was involved in a brutal campaign of violence against the Colombian government, the Cali Cartel grew.

After the demise of Pablo Escobar, the Colombian authorities turned their attention to the Cali Cartel.

The cartel emerged to prominence in the early 1990s, and was estimated to control about 80 and 90 percent of the American and European cocaine markets respectively in the mid-1990s.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Medellin Cartel, the Cali Cartel emerged as the leading cocaine trafficking organization in the world.

Rodríguez Orejuela was captured after a 1995 police campaign by Colombian authorities and sentenced to 15 years in prison.

The police campaign against the cartel began in the summer of 1995.

President Ernesto Samper dispatched a "joint task force" code named "Search Bloc", formed by top police and elite commandos headed by Police General Rosso José Serrano, declaring an all-out war against the drug cartels.

On 9 June 1995, Rodríguez Orejuela was arrested by the Colombian National Police (PNC) during a house raid in Cali.

He was found in a hidden compartment located behind a TV.

He obtained early release in 2002, and was re-arrested in 2003, after which he was extradited to the United States.

There, he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, where he died in 2022.

He was sentenced to 15 years in prison but was freed in October 2002, by a controversial judicial order that cited good behavior and participation in work-study programs, issued by deputy judge Pedro José Suárez.

The Colombian government halted the order, and launched an obstruction of justice investigation into Suárez.

Within days, a second judge upheld the order and Rodríguez Orejuela was released.

In March 2003, Rodríguez Orejuela was rearrested by Colombian authorities in Cali, on new charges, having continued to run the cartel from prison.

Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela was extradited to the United States on 3 December 2004.

His brother Miguel was also arrested.

On 26 September 2006, both Gilberto and Miguel were sentenced to 30 years in prison, after pleading guilty to charges of conspiring to import cocaine to the U.S. In the plea deal, the U.S. agreed not to bring charges against their relatives, in exchange for asset forfeiture.

The brothers' forfeited $2.1 billion in illegal profits, and the U.S. did not charge six of their relatives with money laundering and obstructing justice.