José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha

José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha (14 May 1947 – 15 December 1989), also known by the nicknames Don Sombrero (Mister Hat) and El Mexicano (The Mexican), was a Colombian drug lord who was one of the leaders of the Medellín Cartel along with the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar.

At the height of his criminal career, Rodríguez was acknowledged as one of the world's most successful drug dealers.

José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha was born in May 1947 in the small town of Veraguas, near Pacho in the department of Cundinamarca.

He came from a poor family of modest pig farmers, and it is said that his formal education did not extend beyond grade school.

He left school in the early 1970s and moved to Muzo, Boyacá, the center of the emerald exploitation in Colombia.

There he began to work under Gilberto Molina Moreno, who at the time was called the "tsar" of emeralds in Boyacá, as part of his security, developing a fearsome reputation as a killer.

As he started to go up in the ranks among Molina's men, he also became acquainted with drug traffickers.

At some point, Rodríguez Gacha decided that the drug business was more profitable and became independent.

He moved to Bogotá and became associated up with Verónica Rivera de Vargas, a pioneering drug trafficker who was known as the "queen of cocaine," by murdering the family of her main rival.

Rivera introduced him to Pablo Escobar and to Mexican drug lord, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.

As he started to prosper in the drug trafficking business, Rodríguez Gacha started to buy larger amounts of land in the Middle Magdalena region in the valley bordering the departments of Antioquia, Boyacá, and Santander.

During the late 1970s, Rodríguez advanced in the organizational hierarchy, pioneering new trafficking routes through Mexico and into the United States, primarily Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas.

He is often said to have been the first to establish cooperation strategies with drug trafficking cartels in Mexico.

This, coupled with his infatuation with Mexican popular culture, music, and horse culture, and his fondness for foul language, earned him the nicknames El Mexicano (the Mexican) and 'Don Sombrero'.

He owned a string of farms in his hometown in the locality of Pacho with Mexican inspired names such as Cuernavaca, Chihuahua, Sonora and Mazatlán.

According to the US Justice Department, Rodríguez directed cocaine trafficking operations through Panama and the West Coast (California) of the United States.

After moving to Medellín in 1976, Rodríguez Gacha associated with the Ochoa family, Pablo Escobar, and Carlos Lehder in establishing an alliance that eventually strengthened into what would become known as the Medellín Cartel.

The traffickers cooperated in the manufacturing, distribution and marketing of cocaine.

According to The Washington Post, in the mid-1980s, Rodríguez and Pablo Escobar bought huge tracts of land in the Magdalena Department (as well as Puerto Boyacá, Rionegro and the Llanos) which they used to transform their self-defense groups from poorly trained peasant militias into sophisticated fighting forces.

By the late 1980s Medellin traffickers controlled 40% of the land in the Middle Magdalena, according to a Colombian military estimate, and also funded most of the paramilitary operations in the region.

On March 7, 1984, the Colombian Police and the DEA destroyed Rodríguez Gacha's Tranquilandia complex.

A few weeks later, on April 30, 1984, Colombian Minister of Justice Rodrigo Lara, who had crusaded against the Medellin Cartel, was assassinated by armed men on a motorcycle.

In response, President Belisario Betancur, who had previously opposed extradition, made an announcement that "we will extradite Colombians."

Carlos Lehder was the first to be put on the list.

The crackdown forced the Ochoas, Escobar and Rodríguez to flee to Panama for several months.

A few months later, Escobar was indicted for Lara's murder and Rodríguez was named as a material witness.

In an attempt to handle the situation, Escobar, Rodríguez and the Ochoa brothers met with the former Colombian president Alfonso López in the Hotel Marriott in Panama City.

The negotiation failed after news of it leaked to the press, provoking the open opposition of the United States to any immunity deal.

Paramilitary groups (or self-defense groups, autodefensas as they are frequently referred to in Colombia), were created with the support of landowners and cattle ranchers who had been under pressure from the guerrillas as well as from groups affiliated with narcotics traffickers such as the Muerte a Secuestradores movement (MAS – Death to Kidnappers).

It is claimed that he helped design a Nicaraguan trafficking operation that employed pilot Barry Seal (who was murdered on February 19, 1986, after agreeing to testify against the Medellín Cartel).

Rodríguez Gacha based much of his operations from Bogotá and other areas in the Cundinamarca region, as well as in the Middle Magdalena region.

It was Rodríguez who first set up Tranquilandia, one of the largest and best known of the jungle laboratories where more than two thousand people lived and worked making and packaging cocaine.

["The Accountant's Story", by Roberto Escobar].

As he became one of the main capos of the rising Cartel, Rodríguez Gacha started having problems with the FARC guerrilla, mostly derived from the fact that the insurgent army taxed some of his coca plantations, and that they sometimes robbed some of his men.

When the M-19 guerrilla kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, the sister of fellow drug lord Jorge Luis Ochoa, the cartel decided to create what would be one of the first far-right paramilitary groups to fight the guerrillas, the "Muerte a Secuestradores" (MAS) [Death to Kidnappers] movement.

Rodríguez Gacha became one of the main economic supporters of the group.

He soon became the de facto military leader of the cartel and thanks to his immense riches, he managed to form the largest paramilitary organization in the country, composed of around 1,000 men, all trained and armed, originally devoted to his security but soon becoming an anti-communist army directed particularly against the FARC, and then against the Unión Patriótica political party.

In 1988, Forbes magazine included him in their annual list of the world's billionaires.

As made clear in a 2004 judgment of the Inter-American court of Human Rights, numerous independent reports and from what the paramilitaries themselves have said, in at least some cases they were given support by the state itself.

The top leaders of the Medellín Cartel created private armies to guarantee their own security and protect the property they had acquired.