Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, an elderly leader of the Cali cartel – and bitter rival of Pablo Escobar – has died in a US prison, his lawyer said on Wednesday.
Sometimes known by his alias ‘The Chessplayer,’ Rodríguez Orejuela, 83, helped lead the Cali cartel, which once controlled 80% of the global cocaine market, according to a report from the US Drug Enforcement Administration.
“The children and wife of Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela regretfully inform that yesterday, Tuesday, May 31 2022, at 6.54 pm, our father and husband died of a lymphoma,” the family said in a statement shared by Rodríguez’s daughter Alexandra.
The family planned to repatriate his remains to Colombia, the statement said.
Rodriguez Orejuela’s arrest by Colombian authorities in 1995 marked the beginning of the disintegration of the Cali cartel, which had smuggled vast amounts of cocaine from Colombia to the United States in the 1980s and 1990s.
He was extradited to the United States in 2004, and was serving his sentence at a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina.
In 2020, a judge denied him early release on compassionate grounds. His attorney, David O Markus, had said at the time that the former drug kingpin was suffering a range of health problems.
“We were very sad to learn about his passing last night,″ Markus said. ″Our thoughts and prayers are with his family at this time.”
Rodríguez Orejuela and his brother, Miguel, built a huge criminal enterprise that fought with Pablo Escobar and his allies in the Medellín cartel for control of Colombia’s drug trade.
Unlike Escobar, who launched an all-out war on Colombian authorities and security forces, the Cali cartel concentrated most of their violence on rival crime operations.
They also confessed to financing political campaigns, including the 1994 run of Liberal Party president Ernesto Samper, who has denied having any knowledge of the donations at the time.
The Rodríguez Orejuela brothers were captured in 1995 and sentenced to 15 years in prison. At that point, Colombian law prohibited the extradition of its nationals, but under pressure from the US, Colombia lifted that ban in 1997.
However, in 2002, Rodríguez Orejuela was unexpectedly released from prison after a controversial court ruling upholding a judge’s decision to release him after just seven years in return for good behaviour and participating in work-study programmes. He was rearrested in 2003.
The brothers were found to have been continuing to traffic from prison and criminal charges were filed in Miami and New York. In 2004, Gilberto was extradited; Miguel was extradited the next year.