Word: calied
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Despite having bank accounts that have ranged as far afield as Hong Kong, in the past few years Josa Santacruz Londono has rarely ventured outside Cali, Colombia's cocaine capital. In recent weeks, though, word leaked that the reputed mastermind behind the world's No. 1 drug cartel had fled to Bogota, flushed from cover by an elite government strike force that had been chasing him for months. Santacruz is sometimes called "El Gordo" -- the Fat One -- and knowing he likes to eat, General Rosso Josa Serrano Cadena, chief of the Colombian National Police, ordered his men to stake...
Understandably so. The police crackdown has now put most of the Cali cartel's alleged leaders behind bars. Some have been arrested, while others have felt the pressure and surrendered. After Santacruz's capture, Phanor Arizabaleta Arzayuz turned himself in. Known as a particularly violent cartel leader, he is suspected of, but not yet charged with, involvement in the murder of a police intelligence officer. Arizabaleta says he is innocent, and gave himself up only to clear his reputation...
...about $7 billion last year, and say that they have also begun to make deep inroads into the heroin market, previously dominated by Southeast Asian drug lords. Although Miguel remains at large, the Colombian government crowed over Gilberto's arrest. "This is the beginning of the end of the Cali cartel," announced President Ernesto Samper Pizano. A press conference at police headquarters in Bogota, where Rodriguez was paraded about like war booty, had the air of a New Year's Eve party, with confetti and streamers floating through the air. "Rodr?guez was arrested in his stronghold," says a pleased...
Since the demise of the Medellin cartel in 1993 with the death of Escobar, Cali has had a stranglehold on the cocaine market. Unlike the Medellin operatives, the Cali drug lords preferred bribery to violence for controlling state officials. The Rodriguezes' counterintelligence operations have been impressively sophisticated as well. In 1991 DEA and U.S. Customs Service agents watching fence posts filled with cocaine being off-loaded in Miami were stunned to discover that Cali agents were watching them watch the fence posts. Last year Colombia seized a cartel computer with an unbreakable code encrypting its files. The computer was being...
Just three days before the arrest of Cali chieftain Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela in Colombia, Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo discussed his nation's involvement in the drug war with a group of TIME journalists. Meeting with Zedillo in his office at the Los Pinos presidential residence were managing editor James R. Gaines, editor at large Karsten Prager and Latin American bureau chief Laura Lopez...