Word: calied
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...served flan. Luncheon had been arranged with a caution befitting one of the world's richest fugitives. Nine weeks ago, TIME's reporter in Bogota, Tom Quinn, received a call from a go-between: "The Cali guys have an announcement to make. Do you want to talk to them?" A week later, after an introductory phone chat and a roundabout journey to the rendezvous, Quinn found himself dining in a modest apartment in downtown Cali, a tidy industrial city in the Cauca Valley currently under occupation by 4,000 Colombian antidrug commandos and a CIA anti-crime task force...
Rodriguez Orejuela is a soft-spoken 56-year-old who complains of migraines and an expanding waistline. Since the bloody demise of Pablo Escobar of the competing Medellin cartel last year, Gilberto, in partnership with his brother Miguel and other members of the Cali cartel, has achieved a virtual monopoly on the world cocaine trade. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that along with smaller groups, Rodriguez exports 700 tons of the drug annually. Thus he is a major contributor to America's drug plague and its attendant tragedies: the crack babies, the drive-by deaths, the myriad other lives...
...Recently retired Bogota DEA chief Joe Toft says narcodollars have influenced "from 50% to 75% of the Colombian Congress." The traffickers have also bought an unknown number of prosecutors, policemen and soldiers. But "their most significant victory," claims a U.S. diplomat, was the surrender program for retiring dons. "The Cali cartel dictated the penal-code reform," he says. Under the 1993 code revisions, drug traffickers who turn themselves in can have their sentences reduced by as much as two-thirds at the discretion of a judge or prosecutor. Any pending charges to which they do not plead are dismissed...
Samper, 43, a former economics minister in the government of President Cesar Gaviria Trujillo, quickly denied that he had taken money from drug lords. His contention was supported by Giraldo, a longtime go-between for the Cali cartel, who said the Cali bosses had offered funds to both the Samper and Pastrana campaigns but were turned down. Colombians were not only skeptical, but angry that the tapes, which had come into President Gaviria's hands several days before the election, were not released earlier...
...tapes surfaced June 15, four days before the election, when an unidentified man handed them to Pastrana during a campaign stop in Cali. Exactly who recorded the telephone conversations remains unclear. Pastrana presented them to Gaviria on June 17. The President in turn gave them to Prosecutor-General Gustavo de Greiff, the controversial director of Colombia's antinarcotics effort, to check their authenticity. After his election loss, Pastrana made them public. "Let's bring them out in the open and get to the bottom of it," he said at a news conference. That exercise required some explanation from Pastrana, whose...