Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela

Gilberto José Rodríguez Orejuela was born on Jan. 30, 1939, in Mariquita, Colombia, 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.

Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela was married to Myriam Ramirez. His children include Jaime Fernando, a graduate in international commerce at the University of Grenoble, two sons who studied at Stanford University and the University of Tulsa, and a son who studied systems engineering. Rodríguez Orejuela stated that one of his daughters has an MBA and that a second is an engineer.

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

Cali Cartel

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, avoiding flashy parties, conspicuous displays of wealth, and unnecessary violence.

In the early 1990s, after the fall of the Medellin Cartel, the Cali Cartel emerged as the leading cocaine trafficking organization in the world. They were initially primarily involved in marijuana, and branched out into cocaine during the 1980s. During the 1990s, it was estimated that the Cali Cartel supplied about 80% of the cocaine in the US, and 90% 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 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 US. 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 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.