The Post-Cali Cartel Era
The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, especially Gilberto, and José Santacruz Londoño had provided direction to and cohesion for the Cali cartel. Within the Colombian cocaine industry, their downfall led to increasing fragmentation and intense competition over market share. In general, the larger and more hierarchical and vertically integrated drug organizations have been, the more readily have top leaders been identified for arrest and prosecution, while an array of smaller networks subcontracting many operations has been even more challenging for law enforcement.161 Simply put, pursuing multiple criminal groups can spread resources thin. When asked to comment on the dismantling of the Cali cartel, one Colombian intelligence source analogized: “Hit [mercury] . . . with a hammer and it splatters into tiny drops which are much more difficult to spot, but it doesn’t stop being mercury.”162 By 1999 U.S. intelligence estimated that Colombia alone contained more than three hundred active drug-smuggling networks.163
At first, traffickers from the Northern Valley cartel came to the fore. Initially an offshoot of Cali, this extremely violent organization at its height held sway over much of Colombia’s Pacific coast, smuggling enormous quantities of cocaine while diversifying into heroin.164 And yet even as the configuration of forces in the cocaine trade shifted, bridge-state transit remained vitally important. Not only did Northern Valley traffickers often utilize Central American transshipment routes, but various of their kingpins spent considerable periods in Panama, where certain notable arrests occurred.
As had been true at one point of Medellín traffickers, as it rose to prominence, the Northern Valley cartel sometimes cooperated with Cali. In 1994 Cali kingpins are thought to have persuaded Northern Valley counterparts to contribute along with them to Colombian presidential candidate Ernesto Samper’s election campaign.165 A U.S. Senate 1996 staff report observed that the Northern Valley worked with Cali counterparts to serve common business interests. For instance, for a time the Northern Valley group leased certain airstrips it controlled to Cali.166 Similarly, Castrillón later reported that Cali’s Valencia Trujillo had offered the services of Castrillón’s maritime cocaine-smuggling network to Northern Valley traffickers.167 Nevertheless, when agreements disintegrated, when threatening actions occurred, or when tempting opportunities to gain market share arose, the cartels violently clashed.
As for Northern Valley leadership, in 1992 Colombian authorities arrested initial kingpin Iván Urdinola Grajales. While serving a plea-bargained seventeen-year prison term, he died in a Colombian prison a decade later. In 1995 police gained custody of another kingpin, Henry Loaiza Ceballos, who, harried by Cali rivals and law enforcement alike, turned himself in. The Henao Montoya brothers then rose to the fore. After José Orlando Henao Montoya surrendered to authorities in 1997 and then was murdered in prison the following year, Arcángel de Jesús Henao Montoya stepped up, until his 2003 arrest in Panama. At length, the Northern Valley organization split into three blocs, whose internal strife brought on considerable bloodshed.168 Eventually, Eugenio and Diego León Montoya Sanchez took charge, until their arrests in 2007, and in 2010 Venezuela expelled Carlos Alberto Rentería Mantilla, the last of the Northern Valley kingpins not already imprisoned or killed.169 At its apex the Northern Valley cartel may have controlled as much as 70 percent of the cocaine exported from Colombia annually, but other significant Colombian groups continued to traffic narcotics during Northern Valley’s period of dominance.170 In the early twenty-first century certain Cali traffickers rebounded for a period, and even remnants of the Medellín syndicate, now under Fabio Ochoa’s leadership, carried out major operations in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama.171
In the meantime, the irregular forces in the Colombian civil war took to cocaine trafficking to finance their operations. By the mid-1990s the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), regularly demanded fees for protecting coca crops, while imposing “taxes” on drug enterprises active in southwest Colombia.172 Notwithstanding fundamental ideological differences between the revolutionaries and many leading traffickers, the realities of power distribution in rural Colombia, coupled with the prospect of lucrative profits, overwhelmed conflicting politics.173 A 2001 U.S. government report on foreign terrorist organizations estimated—conservatively, according to later officials—that the FARC was receiving $300 million annually from the drug trade. By this time the FARC was controlling local markets in coca base and had started to supply drug rings with cocaine. Before long its operatives were moving narcotics across Central America, often through its Frente 58 unit. Eventually, FARC arms-for-drugs deals came to light in Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama, while Nicaragua granted asylum to FARC leader Nubia Calderón de Trujillo, termed a drug kingpin by the U.S. government.174
For its part, as the right-wing Colombian paramilitary organization United Self-Defense Groups of Colombia, or Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia (AUC), grew to control sizable tracts in northern Colombia, it too became deeply involved in cocaine trafficking.175 AUC cocaine transshipment first occurred under the leadership of Carlos Castaño, eventually murdered in an internal power struggle.176 In 2003 when the AUC was negotiating with the Colombian government to dismantle nine fronts in exchange for provisional amnesty, the fact that U.S. prosecutors had already indicted three AUC leaders on drug charges complicated negotiations. Although by 2008 the AUC had largely demobilized, many of its former commanders then capitalized on their expertise and connections to continue to traffic cocaine, still sending much of it through Central America.
Just as the connections of the Medellín, Cali, and Northern Valley cartels affected bridge-state trafficking, so too did the repercussions of the Colombian civil war and the increasing involvement of the FARC and the AUC. However, mention of these more prominent drug organizations should not divert attention from the broader trend in twenty-first-century Colombian trafficking. The fewer and somewhat more vertically integrated criminal syndicates of the 1980s and 1990s have given way to numerous drug rings that relate to one another horizontally, with Colombian brokers generating cocaine loads, and numerous so-called offices independently outsourcing activities to specialists in transportation, laundering, and other functions, including another set of brokers in the United States who take charge of arranging distribution.177
The Preeminence of Mexican Cartels
Mexican traffickers, with their unparalleled abilities to move drugs across the border into Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California, had been greatly benefited by the shift away from Caribbean cocaine trafficking. Marijuana, grown in Mexico from the nineteenth century on, had traditionally dominated the Mexican drug trade, with the U.S. market its most lucrative outlet.178 In their efforts to reap the even