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The chess player had been arrested in 1995 and released by Uribe to be arrested again and extradited to the United States.
Immersed in the hasty race for the definition of the second electoral round, on June 19, Colombians today turned their eyes to one of the chapters of their past upon learning of the death in a United States prison of the drug trafficker Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuelanone other than one of the heads of the Cali Cartel. the chess playeras he was known in his moments of greatest territorial dominance, died at the age of 83 in a North Carolina prison, where he was serving a 30-year sentence.
The reign of El Ajedrecista was powerful, bloody and intimidating, but at the same time limited by the medellin cartel and the exhausting “war” that both organizations had started for the predominance of the drug business. With the death of Pablo EscobarIn 1993, at the hands of the police, the drug traffickers of Cali seemed to have all the business in their hands. Some specialists estimate that they moved to the 80% of world cocaine production.
The Rodríguez Orejuela tried to make their victory over their rivals in Medellín dearly worth it to the point of ordering Pablo Escobar’s widow to travel to Cali to accept a kind of unconditional surrender: there they warned her that the Medellín Cartel had to compensate the drug traffickers who had clashed with her husband.
The fall
Rodríguez Orejuela was, however, captured mid 1995 and in Cali during the presidency of Ernest Samper, whose Government was marked by the suspicion of having received donations from that criminal faction. Strictly speaking, the Cali cartel had relations with different political formations, as Rodríguez Orejuela himself acknowledged in a letter to former president Andrés Pastrana at the beginning of this century. “As you and the people who know us know, we are red-bone liberals, but first and foremost, we are Democrats. For this last reason we helped in the last 50 years of the last century both Liberals and Conservatives“.
The chess player was sentenced to 15 years in prison, but the “good conduct” in the penitentiary unit and a series of informations that he provided to the security forces worked the miracle of a reduction of the sentence. In 2002, almost as soon as the president Alvaro Uribe, was released. They locked him up again four months later to extradite him to the United States for a crime he had not confessed to: sending 150 kilos of cocaine to that country in 1990. “A sentence of 25 years at my age is life imprisonment,” he told him. told the magazine Week before he was put on a plane bound for the United States. The sentence contemplated that he would leave the North American prison in 2034 and at the age of 95. As soon as he arrived in that country he suffered a heart attack.
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Last April, El Ajedrecista’s legal defense had asked for his freedom, alleging his advanced age and the existence of “several chronic diseases” that put his life at risk. His brother Miguel is locked up in another US prison. Both had reappeared on Colombian screens six years ago when a trial was aired against their relatives for money laundering. The Chess Player was seen as a sort of caricature of himself: elderly, with ashen hair and clear signs of physical deterioration.
The weight of drug trafficking
Although the Cali Cartel is part of a past drama, drug trafficking continues to be a problem of proportions in Colombia. This was demonstrated in the middle of the electoral campaign, when the so-called Clan del Golfo launched an armed strike in different regions of the country to express their rejection of the extradition to the United States of their boss, Dairo Antonio Úsuga, alias Otoniel. The degree of violence spread in many municipalities showed to what extent this group, derived from the far-right paramilitaries, is a real headache for the State.