Word: bogota
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...contended that he lived in mortal fear of Escobar. "Mr. Escobar is sick, a psycho, a lunatic," he said. "He knows he's lost the war against the state. He lives now only to destroy." Their enmity, Rodriguez said, began in 1987 when he refused to help Escobar kidnap Bogota mayoral candidate Andres Pastrana. When Rodriguez declined, Escobar shouted, "Whoever is not with me is against me." Rodriguez blamed Escobar for the August 1989 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan Sarmiento, which ignited the campaign to push the cocaine princes from Colombia. Rodriguez claimed he had warned Galan that...
...Colombia, they are not universally admired. Some intellectuals protest that if the drug mafia's economic power is accepted, its values will eventually be countenanced as well. Critics are especially wary of the dynastic ambitions of the high-profile Rodriguez family. "They invest in the future," says a Bogota businessman. "They are thinking of the next generation, and the one after that...
Critics fear the proud father is grooming his children for political office as well. "Someday their sons will rule part of this country," predicts Luis Gabriel Cano, who has succeeded his assassinated brother, Guillermo, as publisher of Bogota's crusading newspaper El Espectador. Unless the Colombian government can now break the hold of the cartel in Cali, Cano's warning may have come too late...
Although the Medellin cartel is experiencing a meltdown, there is no guarantee that Escobar will not continue to deal in drugs from behind bars. "Ironically, coming out of hiding could help him to reorder a business that became difficult to manage on the lam," says a Bogota-based U.S. narcotics expert. Skeptics say that Escobar could be free in as little as three years. That may be just the rest a tired don needs to resuscitate himself and his cartel...
Meanwhile, TIME's Latin America bureau chief, John Moody, and Bogota reporter Tom Quinn had been angling for an interview with cartel patriarch Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela. Finally, word came in April that the "Chess Player" was ready to talk. Moody and Quinn flew from Bogota to Cali and waited tensely for a phone call. "We began to worry: Had Rodriguez changed his mind or, worse, was this some elaborate trap?" John recalls. About 50 journalists have been killed in Colombia since 1980. But the call eventually came, and they were driven to meet Rodriguez. The Cali chief talked calmly. "There...