José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1988, Forbes magazine put José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha on its annual list of the world's billionaires. He was a Colombian drug lord, and most people knew him by the alias El Mexicano, which means The Mexican. Together with the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar, he led the Medellín Cartel. Few traffickers anywhere were thought to have done better than he did.

  Why would a Colombian carry a Mexican nickname? How does a man climb from the Colombian countryside onto a billionaires' list? And what happens when a man makes enemies faster than he can count them?

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• 2. Emerald Country

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  José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha was born in May 1947 in Veraguas, a small town near Pacho in the department of Cundinamarca. His family was poor and sold cheese for a living. It is said that his formal schooling went no further than grade school.

  In the early 1970s he went to Muzo, in Boyacá, the center of Colombia's emerald trade. There he joined the security men of Gilberto Molina Moreno, who was then called the tsar of emeralds in Boyacá. Rodríguez built a fearsome reputation as a killer. As he rose through Molina's ranks, he also got to know drug traffickers.

  At some point he decided that cocaine paid better than emeralds, and he went into business for himself. In Bogotá he became a partner of Verónica Rivera de Vargas, a pioneering trafficker known as the queen of cocaine. He won his place at her side by murdering the family of her main rival.

  Rivera then introduced him to Pablo Escobar and to the Mexican drug lord Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo. Mexico would soon give Rodríguez the name by which he is best remembered.

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• 3. The Mexican Connection

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  In 1976 Rodríguez Gacha moved to Medellín, where he teamed up with the Ochoa family, Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder. Their alliance hardened over time into what became known as the Medellín Cartel. The partners shared the work of manufacturing, distributing and marketing cocaine.

  By the late 1970s Rodríguez was moving up the organization and opening new routes through Mexico into the United States. Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas were the main destinations. He is often said to be the first to build working arrangements with Mexican cartels. His fascination with Mexican popular culture, music and horse culture, plus a fondness for foul language, earned him the nickname El Mexicano.

  The farms he owned around Pacho carried Mexican names, among them Cuernavaca, Chihuahua, Sonora and Mazatlán.

  According to the US Justice Department, Rodríguez directed cocaine operations through Panama and into California on the West Coast. He based much of his work in Bogotá, elsewhere in Cundinamarca and in the Middle Magdalena region.

  Tranquilandia was one of the largest and best known of the jungle laboratories, and Rodríguez was the one who first set it up. More than two thousand people lived and worked there, making and packaging cocaine.

  It is also claimed that he helped design a Nicaraguan trafficking operation that employed the pilot Barry Seal. Seal was murdered on the 19th of February 1986, after agreeing to testify against the Medellín Cartel.

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• 4. Private Armies

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  When the M-19 guerrillas kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, sister of the drug lord Jorge Luis Ochoa, the cartel decided to answer with force. It created one of the first far-right paramilitary groups, called Muerte a Secuestradores, or MAS, which means Death to Kidnappers. Rodríguez became one of its main financial backers.

  He had his own quarrel with the FARC guerrillas. The insurgent army taxed some of his coca plantations, and its fighters sometimes robbed his men. Thanks to his enormous wealth, Rodríguez became the cartel's de facto military leader. He assembled the largest paramilitary organization in the country, about 1,000 men, all trained and armed. It began as his personal security, then became an anti-communist army aimed first at the FARC and later at the Unión Patriótica political party.

  Paramilitary groups, known in Colombia as autodefensas, had first grown out of support from landowners and cattle ranchers squeezed by the guerrillas. A 2004 judgment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, along with many independent reports, shows that in at least some cases the state itself gave them support.

  According to The Washington Post, Rodríguez and Escobar bought huge tracts of land in the mid-1980s. The land lay in the Magdalena Department, Puerto Boyacá, Rionegro and the Llanos. With it they turned poorly trained peasant militias into sophisticated fighting forces. A Colombian military estimate said that by the late 1980s the Medellín traffickers controlled 40 percent of the land in the Middle Magdalena and paid for most paramilitary operations there.

  A report by Colombia's Administrative Security Department, known as the DAS, describes how Rodríguez also bought expertise from abroad. Between December 1987 and May 1988 he hired Israeli and British mercenaries to train teams of assassins at remote camps. Yair Klein, a retired Israeli lieutenant colonel, acknowledged leading a team of instructors in Puerto Boyacá in early 1988. Whether his work overlapped with that of the British mercenaries who allegedly trained squads for the cocaine cartels remains unclear.

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• 5. Extradition and Money

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  On the 7th of March 1984, the Colombian Police and the DEA destroyed Rodríguez Gacha's Tranquilandia complex. Barely seven weeks later, on the 30th of April 1984, armed men on a motorcycle assassinated Rodrigo Lara, Colombia's Minister of Justice. Lara had crusaded against the Medellín Cartel.

  President Belisario Betancur had previously opposed extradition. Now he announced, "we will extradite Colombians." Carlos Lehder was the first name on the list. The crackdown forced the Ochoas, Escobar and Rodríguez to flee to Panama for several months. A few months later Escobar was indicted for Lara's murder, and Rodríguez was named a material witness.

  The traffickers tried to bargain. Escobar, Rodríguez and the Ochoa brothers met the former Colombian president Alfonso López at the Hotel Marriott in Panama City. News of the talks leaked to the press, and the United States came out openly against any immunity deal. The negotiation collapsed.

  By 1989 the DEA estimated that 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States came from Colombia, imported by the Medellín Cartel and its rival, the Cali Cartel. The newly elected administration of President George H. W. Bush faced heavy pressure over drug use and violence in American cities. Much of its strategy centered on extraditing Colombian cartel leaders for prosecution. On the 21st of August 1989, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh released a list of the twelve Colombian kingpins most wanted by the United States, often called the dirty dozen. Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis Ochoa and Rodríguez were on it, as leading members of the Medellín Cartel.

  The money came next. President Bush named money laundering a critical target and set aside $15 million for a counteroffensive. Hours after he unveiled the plan in September 1989, a federal task force began to take shape. It became the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, known as FINCEN, which used computer programs to spot suspicious movements of electronic money.

  On the 6th of December 1989, Thornburgh announced that authorities had frozen accounts in five countries holding $61.8 million belonging to Rodríguez Gacha. The Justice Department said the money sat in long-term, high-yield stocks and investments, in bank accounts in England, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and the United States. A further $20 million had been moved to Panama just in time, and there it was out of American reach.

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• 6. Wars on Every Front

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  By 1987 Rodríguez Gacha was feuding with the Cali Cartel, his former partners in MAS, because he was trying to move into the New York City market. The feud became an open cartel war in 1988, driven mostly by Pablo Escobar's personal vendetta against Pacho Herrera. As the cartel's military leader, Rodríguez was instrumental in many assassinations and acts of violence against Cali.

  His ambitions at home created another enemy. He wanted to join his properties around Pacho to his lands in the Middle Magdalena, but the emerald region of Muzo lay between them. That pushed him into conflict with his old allies in the emerald trade and into a violent struggle over the mines.

  On the 27th of February 1989, he directed a group of 25 gunmen to kill Gilberto Molina, the emerald magnate who had once been his boss. Sixteen other people died with Molina at a party in his home. On the 1st of July 1989, hitmen under Rodríguez's command killed Verónica Rivera, the queen of cocaine, in Bogotá. He also had a bomb detonated in the Bogotá offices of Tecminas, a company owned by Víctor Carranza, the new emerald tsar. Rodríguez ordered the murder of Carranza's nephew as well.

  His name was attached to political killings too. He was charged in Colombia and the United States over several killings. One was the assassination on the 12th of October 1987 of Jaime Pardo Leal, president of the leftist Patriotic Union party. It was described as retaliation for guerrilla attacks on traffickers in the eastern plains known as the llanos orientales.

  Colombians call 1989 the year of horror. Rodríguez began it by massacring 12 judicial officials, allegedly to remove them and the files they held. On the 18th of August 1989, Luis Carlos Galán, a popular presidential candidate considered likely to be Colombia's next president, was assassinated. Escobar and Rodríguez contracted hitmen trained by Yair Klein for the killing.

  After Galán's murder, Rodríguez Gacha took a less active role in the cartel's terrorist attacks.

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• 7. Narcoterrorism

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  President Virgilio Barco announced his offensive against the cocaine cartels hours after Galán was killed. He also re-established extraditions to the United States. At first the Colombian public overwhelmingly backed him. The government made quick and unprecedented gains, seizing expensive homes, ranches, airfields, cocaine labs and large amounts of cash and drugs. Raids swept the country, and thousands of people were arrested.

  The Medellín Cartel declared "war" on the government. Over the next four months, bombings became an almost daily event and scores of people died.

  By October 1989, public support for the crackdown was beginning to wane. The government turned its attention to capturing either Pablo Escobar or Rodríguez. Both men stayed one step ahead of the law, and both kept financing retaliatory terrorism. It claimed the lives of hundreds of politicians, judges and civilians.

  Avianca Flight 203 was bombed outside Bogotá on the 27th of November 1989, and all 107 people aboard died. Colombian authorities accused Escobar and Rodríguez of involvement. They also said the two men planned the bombing of the secret investigative police headquarters in Bogotá on the 7th of December 1989. It killed 63 people and injured an estimated 1,000. Eight days later, Rodríguez Gacha was dead.

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• 8. The Last Chase

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  In August 1989, an army raid on one of Rodríguez Gacha's ranches north of Bogotá led to the arrest of his son, Freddy Rodriguez Celades. The alleged crime, possession of illegal weapons, was relatively minor. Police nonetheless held Freddy longer than most unindicted prisoners, hoping to pressure his father. No sign of fatherly concern emerged, so they released him and waited.

  By then Rodríguez was at war with the Colombian government, the Cali cartel, the FARC guerrillas, the DEA and the emerald businessmen led by Víctor Carranza. All of them began working together to bring him down. The Cali cartel infiltrated his organization, and Carranza and the emerald guild supplied intelligence reports.

  Jorge Velásquez, alias El Navegante, was an informant the Cali cartel had placed inside Rodríguez's organization. He was allegedly after the government reward. Velásquez told police that the drug lord was in Cartagena de Indias, guarded by 25 bodyguards. When police arrived, Rodríguez fled by motorboat to Tolú. With him were his son Freddy, four bodyguards, El Navegante, and Gilberto Rendón Hurtado, alias mano de yuca. Rendón was the alleged number eight man of the Medellín Cartel. El Navegante again passed on the drug lord's location after the group left on the evening of the 14th of December 1989.

  At noon on the 15th of December 1989, twenty-two policemen boarded two artillery helicopters, and seventeen of them were from the elite police. They flew over El Tesoro, a village between Coveñas and Tolú. Over a loudspeaker they demanded that Rodríguez Gacha surrender. He and his men, disguised as farm workers, waited for the police to withdraw. The helicopters kept circling. When they saw a chance, the fugitives ran for a red truck parked near the village and drove away, with the police in pursuit.

  After several failed attempts to escape, Freddy, armed with a 9 mm pistol, got off the truck with Rendón and three other bodyguards. They ran toward a group of trees and exchanged fire with one of the aircraft. A burst from the helicopter's machine gun killed two of them. The helicopter landed, and five elite policemen fought the survivors. The two remaining bodyguards and Freddy were killed.

  The other helicopter chased the truck carrying Rodríguez and one of his men. Another police patrol appeared ahead on the road. The two men stopped, jumped out and ran into a banana plantation. Gunners fired to flush them out. Rodríguez, armed with a German submachine gun, slowed down after he tore his scalp on a wire fence. Cornered, he fired at the aircraft, which gave away his position. A burst from the helicopter wounded his leg and brought him down. He was then shot in the face and killed. His last bodyguard died soon after.

  Neighbors heard grenades and saw the damage to his face, and they concluded that El Mexicano had killed himself by detonating a grenade against his head. Police disagreed. They said he died from a bullet, citing the destructive effect of a large-caliber round. They also pointed out that his hands were undamaged, which would not have been so with a grenade.

  On Sunday, the 17th of December 1989, thousands of mourners filled the streets of Pacho for his funeral. Residents said he had donated money to renovate buildings, and some saw him as a public benefactor. Because only relatives were allowed in, about 3,000 people surrounded the cemetery. One newspaper put the number of mourners as high as 15,000.

  Television has returned to him many times. In Netflix's 2015 thriller-drama Narcos, the actor Luis Guzmán plays him, opposite Wagner Moura as Pablo Escobar. Other Colombian series renamed him. Escobar, el Patrón del Mal calls him Gustavo Ramirez Rocha, nicknamed El Mariachi. Tres Caínes, from 2013, calls him Gonzalo Mahecha.

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