and the erosion of civil liberties. McNamara has
rec-ommended that “we should declare the war over,”
suggesting that “we need to step back,” and appoint a national commission to “see how Americans can be more law abiding.” (McNamara 1997)
Reference: McNamara, Joseph. 1997.“The Drug War; Vio-lent, Corrupt, and Unsuccessful.” Vital Speeches, 15 June.
Medellin Cartel
Named after the Colombian city of Medellin (popu-lation 1.5 million), the capital of Antioquia province, the Medellin Cartel was the country’s most powerful drug-trafficking organization from the mid 1970s to the late 1980s, when it was crippled by the massive manhunt for its godfather, Pablo Escobar Gaviria.
The Cartel kept a high profile in its approach to drug trafficking and, in addition to Escobar, it included a number of godfathers or capos who became world famous in the 1980s: Jose Rodriguez Gacha, Carlos Lehder, and the Ochoa brothers (Fabio, Jorge Luis, and Juan David), among the most prominent.
Historically, Medellin had a reputation as a smuggling center for liquor and cigarettes from the United States and stereos, radios, and television sets from the many ports of the Panama Canal Zone.
Medellin began to play an important role in the in-ternational drug trade in 1973 when Chilean General Augusto Pinochet overthrew Marxist President Sal-vador Allende and either jailed or deported from Chile numerous drug traffickers who had made Chile the center of the emerging U.S. cocaine trade, although at the time the market for cocaine was small. The trade then moved to Colombia, where criminals like Pablo Escobar and Fabio Ochoa, Sr.
(the father of the Ochoa brothers) were eager to ex-pand the cocaine distribution network.
Fabio Ochoa, Sr., who got his start in crime by smuggling whiskey and home electronic appliances, is credited with founding the Medellin cartel around 1978, when Pablo Escobar convinced Fabio to use his well-established and connected smuggling routes for the more profitable drug business. The date of 18 April 1981 may be considered the key date for the Medellin Cartel’s establishment. Several drug traffickers, including Jorge Luis Ochoa, Fabio Ochoa, Jr., Pablo Escobar, and Carlos Lehder met at the es-tate owned by the Ochoa clan to discuss ways to transport cocaine to the United States. By year’s end,
the Medellin cartel had supervised at least thirty-eight shipments to the United States, containing about nineteen tons of cocaine. As business picked up other family members and relatives joined the Cartel. The three Ochoa brothers, for example, took over from their father when he decided to retire.
What the Medellin Cartel needed, though, to ex-pand their operation and stay ahead of the competi-tion was a fast, cheap transportacompeti-tion system. That was provided by Carlos Lehder, a flamboyant, unpre-dictable criminal of Colombian-German back-ground who got his start in crime in the United States. Lehder revolutionized the way drugs were smuggled into the United States and established a monopoly for the Medellin Cartel by retaining a fleet of small cargo planes and high-speed boats that eliminated the middleman or “mule” who had tradi-tionally smuggled cocaine into the United States.
The Cartel established routine air corridors in South and Central America and fuel stops in the islands of the Caribbean and Mexico. Transit sites included the Bahamas, Turks, Caico Islands, Jamaica, Mexico, and Nicaragua, which were protected by Cartel employ-ees or independent organizations, including those headed by local government officials.
The planes blended in with the traffic over the Florida Keys, and upon reaching their destination, they either dropped their drug cargos to waiting boats or landed at clandestine air strips in Florida, Georgia, or Alabama. Lehder directed the trans-portation network from his command post at Nor-man’s Cay in the Bahamas. Once safely in the United States, cocaine shipments were taken to warehouses or stash houses and then distributed and sold to the Cartel’s clients.
For a big “service” fee based on weight of the shipment, independent dealers not affiliated with the Medellin Cartel could use the transportation sys-tem to get their drugs to the United States. Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, a founding member of the Cali Cartel, used his boyhood friendship with Jorge Luis Ochoa to ship an undetermined amount of cocaine through the system to Florida, where he would hire trucks to ship the cocaine to the Cali Cartel’s prime market, New York City.
The Medellin Cartel was not afraid of violent con-frontation with anyone, including the Colombian government, and it would not hesitate to eliminate any threats to its interests. During the 1980s, the
Medellin Cartel used bombings and terrorism and hired and trained hit men known as sicarios to kill thousands of people, including some of the most prominent figures in Colombian politics: Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Colombian justice minister, in 1984;
Jaime Gomez Ramirez, head of Colombia’s National Police Anti-Narcotics Unit, in 1986; Guillermo Cano Isaza, the respected editor of El Espectador newspa-per, in 1986; and Luis Carlos Galan, presidential can-didate, in 1989; among others. The Cali Cartel, on the other hand, diligently cultivated an image as a kinder, gentler mafia that preferred to use the bribe rather than the bullet in doing business. As James Sutton, a Mexico City-based security consultant, ex-plained, “The saying goes that the Medellin Cartel confronts; Cali corrupts.” (Chepesiuk 1999, 144)
Differences aside, the Medellin and Cali cartels helped to revolutionize cocaine trafficking, not just in the way the drug was transported to the United States, but also in how it was distributed within the United States. Both cartels established the drug trade on a business model with efficient, well-oiled smuggling, marketing, and money-laundering net-works operating from coast to coast in the United States. By 1989 an estimated 300 Colombian traffick-ing groups and 20,000 Colombians were involved in the cocaine trade in the United States. At least 5,000 of the Colombians who worked for the cartels lived in the Miami area and another 6,000 in the Los An-geles area.
“The Colombians have the momentum by bene-fit of their early involvement in the cocaine trade,”
the President’s Commission on Organized Crime concluded in 1986. “They have evolved from small, disassociated groups into compartmentalized orga-nizations that are sophisticated and systematized in their approach to the trafficking of cocaine in the U.S.” (President’s Commission on Organized Crime 1986, 78) According to law enforcement reports, the Medellin Cartel and other Colombian trafficking groups operate as self-centered cells of about five to fifty members with only a handful of the “man-agers” knowing all the cell’s members. Top level managers, both in Colombia and in the United States, are recruited on the basis of blood and mar-riage, which helps to minimize the potential for theft or disobedience because family member in Colombia are held accountable for drug deals gone bad. Middle managers are placed all over the United States and may include individuals who are not family members, but who are the friends of top-level capos or at least have roots in the same region the capos come from. The third level consists of thousands of workers, both inside and outside the United States—accountants, couriers, chemists, lawyers, stash house keepers, enforcers, body-guards, launderers, pilots, and wholesale distribu-tors—who perform specialized tasks and may work for different groups at different times. Although the cartels are predominantly Colombian in member-134 MEDELLINCARTEL
Pablo Escobar Gaviria, head of the Medellin Cartel and Colombia’s most notorious drug dealer, and three of his lieu-tenants are driven in a convoy of jeeps to the Enviagada prison after they surrendered to authorities. (Corbis/Reuters)
MEDELLINCARTEL 135
ship, they sometimes go outside their group to hire specialists, such pilots or lawyers, and when need be, do cooperate with other criminal groups, includ-ing Mexican, Italian, Jamaican, and Nigerian crimi-nal organizations.
Despite its brilliance in organizing the cocaine trade, the Medellin Cartel’s emphasis on violence and narcoterrorism to fulfill its criminal objectives ultimately led to its decline and fall. From 1984 to 1993 the Cartel engaged the Colombian state in a war of attrition. The terror and death toll was largely of Pablo Escobar’s making. “Every time there is a major assassination in Colombia, they (the Ochoas) send out word that they aren’t behind it,” revealed Maria Jimena Duzan, an investigative journalist and columnist with the Bogotá based El Espectador newspaper. (Chepesiuk 1987)
The Medellin Cartel, however, paid for its violent ways. On 5 February 1987 an elite Colombian police unit captured Carlos Lehder twenty miles outside of Medellin, the heart of Colombia’s cocaine industry and quickly extradited him to the United States, where he was convicted of drug trafficking and given a life sentence plus 135 years in prison. Jose
Gonzalo Rodriquez Gacha, who matched Escobar in ruthlessness, was killed in a shootout with police in December 1989, while all three Ochoa brothers, see-ing the writsee-ing on the wall, turned themselves in and were sent to jail. Medellin’s dominance of the co-caine trade ended when Colombian police killed Pablo Escobar in 1993. That left the Cali Cartel to rule supreme over the Empire of Cocaine, until its organization too began to fall apart in the mid-1990s.
In early 1998 the press began reporting about a revival of organized drug activity in the Medellin region by a number of loosely knit, small drug-traf-ficking groups that—unlike the original Medellin Cartel—shun a high-profile presence, are computer literate, and establish legitimate businesses to front for their illegal operations.Authorities, however, are not calling these organizations cartels. “They go around in taxis, meet in normal places,” said Colombian National police chief Rosso Jose Ser-rano.“You don’t see armed people, or those dressed the way they used to, with rings and big chains.
They are very subtle.” (“Medellin Revives the Drug Trade”)
Famous Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar lies dead in the morgue. (Courtesy of the Colombian National Police)
See also: Bank of Commerce and Credit International;
Blanco De Trujillo, Griselda; Blandon Castillo, Jose; Cali Cartel; Cano Izaza, Guillermo; Carter, James Earl;
Cartelitos; Duzan, Maria Jimena; Escobar Gaviria, Pablo;
Extraditables; Extradition; Galan, Luis Carlos; Guzman Lara, Joaquin; Jamaican Posses; Klein, Yair; Lara Bonilla, Rodrigo; Los Quesitos; Mera Mosquera, Eduardo; Mer-melstein, Max; Money Laundering; M-19; Mule; Nar-coterrorism; Noriega, Manuel Antonio; Norman’s Cay;
Ochoa Vasquez, Jr., Fabio; Ochoa Vasquez, Jorge Luis;
Ochoa Vasquez, Juan David; Ochoa Vasquez, Marta Nieves; Operation Chemcon; Operation College Farm;
Operation Fountainhead; Operation Polar Cap; Pallo-mari, Guillermo Alejandro “Reagan”; Parejo Gonzalez, Enrique; Pinochet, Augusto Ugarte; Ramos, Jose Luis;
Rodriguez Gacha, Jose Gonzalo; Rodriguez Orejuela, Gilberto; Roldan, Benardo; Sicarios; Tranquilandia;
Turbay Ayala, Diana
References: Abadinsky, Howard. 1990. Organized Crime.
Castillo, Fabio. 1988. Los Jinetes De La Cocaina.
Chepesiuk, Ron. 1999. Hard Target.
———. 1987.“Kingpin’s Trial Small Win in Losing War on Drugs.” Orlando Sentinel, 4 October.
Eddy, Paul, Hugh Sabogal, and Sarah Walden. 1988. The Cocaine Wars.
Gugliotta, Guy, and Jeff Leen. 1990. Kings of Cocaine.
Strong, Simon. 1995. Whitewash: Pablo Escobar and the Cocaine Wars.