Until his capture in 1995, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, nicknamed “The chess player”, directed with an iron fist the powerful Cali Callet in Colombia with his brother Miguel, 78, also incarcerated In a prison in the United States.
Le Monde with AFP
The ex-drug baron Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, who has long been considered one of the largest drug traffickers in the world after the death of Pablo Escobar, died at 83 years in an American prison, A Confirmed his lawyer Wednesday June 1 at the France-Presse agency. “We deplore Gilberto’s death last night,” said his lawyer David Oscar Markus in an email that does not specify the cause of death. This rival organization of the Medellin cartel, led by Pablo Escobar, took hold of the white powder market after the death of the charismatic “king of cocaine”, shot down by local police in 1993.
sentenced to 15 years in prison in 1995 in Colombia, Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela had been released after seven years of detention. Again arrested in 2003, he was imprisoned in Colombia until his extradition in the United States in December 2004.
Escobar and Netflix
He had been sentenced with his brother to 30 years in prison each for importing 200 tonnes of cocaine in the United States. The two brothers finally experienced a planetary celebrity with the “Narcos” series of Netflix, which notably staged their rivalry with Pablo Escobar. According to American authorities, the Cali cartel has checked up to 80 % of cocaine traffic to the United States at its peak. He was dismantled in the mid -1990s.
Gilberto and his brother had made a place among the economic and political elites in Colombia. Unlike Pablo Escobar, who offered a reward in exchange for each police officer killed, the Cali cartel brothers preferred bribes.
The Rodríguez family controlled Cali America, the football club which recorded the greatest number of victories at the time, as well as horses of horse breeding, and beauty queens competitions. In the last years of his life, “the chess player”, from a modest family, who had started in life on his bike as a home meal delivery man, was seriously ill. It has been suffering from prostate cancer and colon cancer. He also suffered from a cerebral hemorrhage. His family had tried in vain several appeals so that the drug trafficker could spend his last days in Colombia.
Colombia remains by far the world’s leading producer of cocaine, with the American market as the first export destination.