Nevertheless, the Medellín and Cali cartels were competitors as well: alternative business entities within a single illegal capitalist industry. They typically utilized separate transshipment with distinctive security, financial, and intelligence arrangements. To gain market share, they sometimes tipped law-enforcement officials to their counterparts’ operations. And, at length, the principal Medellín traffickers lost their grip on the cocaine trade on account of pressure from rivals as well as authorities. Treachery within organizations occurred as well. In 1987 Colombian officials arrested Carlos Lehder Rivas, who had masterminded many transshipment schemes, especially aerial ones, and his own colleagues were thought to have turned him in.148
According to the DEA, Cali traffickers often had better intelligence information on their Medellín counterparts than did the police.149 Early in 1988 Cali kingpin Hélmer Herrera Buitrago instigated a damaging turf war and eventually assisted authorities in tracking down Medellín’s leaders.150 Thereafter, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha was killed in 1989, and the Ochoa brothers—Jorge Luis, Fabio, and Juan David—surrendered in 1990. Then, as the Medellín cartel disintegrated during the intense hunt for Pablo Escobar, Cali kingpins were actively engaged in the so-called People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar (or Los Pepes) death squad that murdered scores of Escobar’s associates, “stripping away the layers of protection around him.”151 Finally, in December 1993 police snipers killed Escobar, definitively ending the Medellín cartel’s reign.
For our purposes, Medellín kingpins were critically important in the decision to shift trafficking operations from the Caribbean to Central America, and Medellín operatives went to work in each of the bridge states that form our case studies. Antidrug officials across the region pointed to the cartel as having opened an array of cocaine-transshipment routes through their countries, with aerial trafficking of particular importance. Thus, the era of Medellín preeminence was closely tied to the rise of Central American bridge-state trafficking.
The Era of Cali Cartel Preeminence
As the principal Medellín smugglers fell, the Cali cartel—best thought of as a “loose association of five major drug syndicates”—grasped the opportunity to grow in scope and stature.152 Cali traffickers eventually initiated even more intensive Central American operations than their Medellín counterparts had. They gained a reputation for conducting their drug-smuggling ventures in a low-profile, businesslike, and less flamboyant style.153 The head of the DEA office in Colombia noted that Cali traffickers “always tried to avoid attention. . . . They killed people left and right—law enforcement, informants and their own people who did not play by the rules—but they always managed to cover it up or make it look as if someone else did it. In Medellín, if Escobar killed someone, he left his calling card as a warning. While Escobar seemed to be concentrating on openly intimidating the government through terrorism, the Cali crowd was penetrating and buying the government while concealing its terrorist-type activity.”154
Under the leadership of the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, Gilberto and Miguel, and José Santacruz Londoño Cali traffickers thus succeeded in becoming the next dominant force in cocaine exporting. Of course, even at the apex of its power, the Cali cartel could not form an entirely unified, multilayered enterprise that set prices or otherwise controlled the cocaine trade. Instead, numerous other groups played significant roles in cocaine trafficking. Nevertheless, by the mid-1990s U.S. law-enforcement officials declared that Cali accounted for 70 percent of the cocaine imported to the United States and 90 percent of that trafficked to Europe.155 In 2000 DEA international-operations chief William Ledwith testified to Congress that the Cali cartel had become “the most powerful organized crime group in history.”156
The very prominence of Cali traffickers, however, caused U.S., Colombian, and Central American authorities to join forces against them, helped along by jealous rivals. In February 1988 the DEA received three anonymous letters, later traced to the Medellín cartel and reportedly to Pablo Escobar’s brother, Roberto, that revealed that the Cali cartel was smuggling cocaine into the United States from the Amazon hidden in hollowed-out lumber. In March 1988 a ship carrying lumber from Leticia, Colombia, in the Amazon docked in New Orleans. U.S. agents intercepted two tractor trailers transporting the cargo and found large quantities of cocaine. Soon thereafter, another ship carrying lumber from the Amazon arrived in Saint Petersburg, Florida. The shipment was transported to a nearby warehouse, where DEA agents watched a forklift separate 701 cedar boards into a separate pile. When agents moved in, 3.3 tons of cocaine were found hidden in those boards. The forklift operator, who also owned the New Orleans and Saint Petersburg warehouses where the cocaine had been found, as well as the ships that traveled from Colombia to the United States, was Mike Tsalickis, a Florida native who had been appointed by the U.S. Embassy in 1967 to serve as U.S. consul in Leticia. Once featured in a National Geographic book, Tsalickis had earned a living in the Amazon running a zoo, hotel, and sawmill, while exporting wildlife. When Cali kingpin Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela was arrested in Spain in 1984, he was carrying an address book containing Tsalickis’s home and work phone numbers. A U.S. federal court eventually convicted Tsalickis of drug trafficking, sentencing him to twenty-seven years.157
Although Tsalickis had declined to cooperate with authorities, law-enforcement operations continued to seize Cali cocaine and arrest Cali traffickers, including in 1992 Harold Ackerman, the cartel’s point person in Miami. Information and evidence accumulated, and in major police operations during the summer and fall of 1995, seven top Cali traffickers were arrested and one killed.158 Behind the scenes, Cali Cartel security chief Jorge Salcedo and Guillermo Alejandro Pallomari González, the chief accountant for the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, fearing for their lives, surrendered to U.S. authorities, providing DEA with key informants prepared to divulge further details of Cali trafficking.159 These law-enforcement moves fractured the efficient logistical systems that had characterized Cali transshipment operations, diminishing the cartel’s competitive edge.
The highly compartmentalized structure of Cali operations, which had long hampered counternarcotics efforts against the cartel, also slowed the transition to the next generation of kingpins, led by Herrera Buitrago and Joaquín Mario Valencia Trujillo.160 In any event, their reign was much briefer, as Panamanian authorities arrested key operator José Castrillón Henao in 1996 and extradited him to the United States two years later. At length, Castrillón became an extraordinarily valuable government