Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, one of the drug traffickers who founded the fearsome Cali cartel, has died

Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the head of the Cali cartel, died in the last few hours at the age of 83 in a prison in the United States where he was serving a sentence for various crimes related to drug trafficking.

With his brother Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela and José Santacruz Londoño they started the fearsome cartel in the 1970s.

The former drug lord had been serving a sentence since 2006 30 years in prison in the United States.

“We were very saddened to learn of his death last night. Our thoughts and prayers are with his family right now,” David Markus, Rodríguez Orejuela’s attorney, told EFE.

In April 2020 Markus reported that Rodríguez Orejuela was an elderly person “with several chronic diseases” who was in danger of dying at the beginning of the pandemic.

Rodríguez Orejuela was held in a low-security prison in Butner, North Carolina. He there he was after suffering a heart attack and cancer. According to Colombian media El Tiempo, Rodríguez Orejuela’s relatives had demanded that the United States allow visits that the Donald Trump government had canceled.

From being a messenger in the pharmacy, Rodríguez Orejuela became one of the leading drug moguls in Colombia, coming to control the 80% of the narcotics that were exported to the United States and Europe in the 80s and part of the 90s.

Rodríguez Orejuela was born in Mariquita, a city northwest of Bogotá, on January 31, 1939. He was the second of eight children and when he was very young his parents Carlos Rodríguez Prieto and Ana Rita Orejuela moved the entire family to Cali, where the rest of the children were born.

Known as “The Chess Player”, he took the reins of the family from an early age, forced by the irresponsibility and aggression of his father, to whom he has not spoken since he was about 12, according to his son Fernando Rodríguez. , in an autobiography published in September 2007.

His pseudonym was the product of the ingenious strategies he had implemented in carrying out his business, in which he did not neglect the details.

For his part, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela is being held in a medium-security prison in Pennsylvania.

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