José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha (May 14, 1947 – December 15, 1989), also known by the nicknames Don Sombrero (English: Mister Hat) and El Mexicano (English: The Mexican), was a Colombian drug lord who was one of the leaders of the Medellín Cartel along with the Ochoa brothers and Pablo Escobar . At the height of his criminal career, Rodríguez was recognized as one of the world’s most successful drug dealers. In 1988, Forbes magazine included him in their annual list of the world’s billionaires.
Early years
José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha was born in May 1947 in the small town of Veraguas, near Pacho in the department of Cundinamarca. He came from a poor family of modest pig farmers, and it is said that his formal education did not extend beyond primary school. He left school in the early 1970s and moved to Muzo, Boyacá, the center of Colombia’s emerald exploitation. There he began working under Gilberto Molina Moreno, who at the time was called the “tsar” of the emeralds in Boyacá, as part of his security, and developed a fearsome reputation as a murderer. As he rose through the ranks among Molina’s men, he also encountered drug traffickers. At some point, Rodríguez Gacha decided that the drug trade was more profitable and became independent. He moved to Bogotá and became allied with Verónica Rivera de Vargas, a pioneering drug trafficker known as the “Queen of Cocaine,” by killing the family of her main rival. Rivera introduced him to Pablo Escobar and Mexican drug lord Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo.
Rise of the Medellín Cartel
As he began to prosper in the drug trade, Rodríguez Gacha began purchasing larger amounts of land in the Central Magdalena region in the valley bordering the departments of Antioquia, Boyacá and Santander. After moving to Medellín in 1976, Rodríguez Gacha associated with the Ochoa family, Pablo Escobar and Carlos Lehder in creating an alliance that eventually solidified into what would become known as the Medellín Cartel. The traffickers participated in the production, distribution and marketing of cocaine. In the late 1970s, Rodríguez advanced through the organizational hierarchy and pioneered new smuggling routes through Mexico and into the United States, primarily Los Angeles, California and Houston, Texas. It is often said that he was the first to establish cooperative strategies with drug cartels in Mexico.[3] This, combined with his infatuation with Mexican popular culture, music and horse culture, and his penchant for foul language, earned him the nicknames El Mexicano (the Mexican) and ‘Don Sombrero’. He owned a series of ranches in his hometown of Pacho with Mexican-inspired names like Cuernavaca, Chihuahua, Sonora and Mazatlán.
According to the US Department of Justice, Rodríguez directed the cocaine smuggling through Panama and the west coast (California) of the United States. It is alleged that he helped design a Nicaraguan human trafficking operation that employed pilot Barry Seal (who was murdered on February 19, 1986 after agreeing to testify against the Medellín Cartel).
Rodríguez Gacha based much of his operations out of Bogotá and other areas in the Cundinamarca region, as well as in the Central Magdalena region. It was Rodríguez who first founded Tranquilandia, one of the largest and best-known jungle laboratories where more than two thousand people lived and worked to make and package cocaine. [“The Accountant’s Story”, by Roberto Escobar ].
As he became one of the emerging cartel’s top capos, Rodríguez Gacha began to have problems with the FARC guerrilla, mainly stemming from the rebel army taxing some of his coca plantations, and sometimes robbing some of his men. 5] When the M-19 guerrilla kidnapped Martha Nieves Ochoa, the sister of fellow drug lord Jorge Luis Ochoa, the cartel decided to create one of the first far-right paramilitary groups to fight the guerrillas, the “Muerte a Secuestradores ”. MAS) movement [Death to Kidnappers]. Rodríguez Gacha became one of the group’s main economic supporters. He quickly became the cartel’s de facto military leader and thanks to his enormous wealth, he managed to create the country’s largest paramilitary organization, consisting of approximately 1,000 men, all trained and armed, originally dedicated to his security, but already quickly developed into an anti-communist army that mainly focused on the FARC and subsequently against the political party Unión Patriótica.
Murder of Lara
On March 7, 1984, Colombian police and the DEA destroyed Rodríguez Gacha’s Tranquilandia complex. A few weeks later, on April 30, 1984, Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara, who had been crusading against the Medellin Cartel , was assassinated by gunmen on a motorcycle. In response, President Belisario Betancur, who had previously opposed extradition, made an announcement that “we will extradite Colombians.” Carlos Lehder was the first to be placed 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 as a material witness. In an attempt to deal with the situation, Escobar, Rodríguez and the Ochoa brothers met with former Colombian President Alfonso López at the Hotel Marriott in Panama City. The negotiations collapsed after news of them leaked to the press, provoking open opposition from the United States to an immunity deal.
Paramilitary groups linked to cartels
Paramilitary groups (or self-defense groups, autodefensas as they are often called in Colombia) were founded with the support of landowners and ranchers who were under pressure from the guerrillas, as well as from groups linked to drug traffickers such as the Muerte a Secuestradores Movement (MAS – Death to Kidnappers). As is clear from a 2004 ruling by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, from numerous independent reports and from what the paramilitaries themselves have said, at least in some cases they received support from the state itself. The Medellín Cartel’s top leaders created private armies to ensure their own security and protect the property they had acquired. According to The Washington Post, in the mid-1980s, Rodríguez and Pablo Escobar purchased vast tracts of land in the Magdalena department (as well as Puerto Boyacá, Rionegro and the Llanos), which they used to transform their self-defense groups from poorly trained ones. peasant militias transformed into advanced armed forces. By the late 1980s, Medellin traffickers controlled 40% of the land in Central Magdalena, according to one Colombian military estimate, and also financed most of the region’s paramilitary operations.
Throughout the 1980s, Rodríguez aided the Medellín Cartel’s explosive rise to power by financing the import and implementation of expensive foreign technology and expertise. According to the report by the Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (Colombia’s administrative security department), between December 1987 and May 1988, Rodríguez hired Israeli and British mercenaries to train teams of assassins in remote training camps in Colombia. Yair Klein, a retired Israeli lieutenant colonel, acknowledged leading a team of instructors in Puerto Boyacá in early 1988. It is not clear whether Klein’s mercenary activities in Colombia coincided with those of a group of British mercenaries who allegedly trained paramilitary squads for the cocaine cartels.
U.S. War on Drugs
In 1989, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) estimated that 80 percent of the cocaine consumed in the United States was imported from Colombia by the Medellín Cartel and its rival, the Cali Cartel . The newly elected administration of President George HW Bush was under significant pressure to combat the rising drug use and drug-related violence plaguing dozens of American cities. Much of the government’s strategy focused on limiting the drug supply by extraditing Colombian cartel leaders to the United States for prosecution. On August 21, 1989, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh released a list of the twelve Colombian drug lords (commonly referred to as the “dirty dozen”) most wanted by the United States and said the names would be shared with the Colombian government and Interpol. The list included Pablo Escobar, Jorge Luis Ochoa and José Gonzalo Rodríguez, the leading members of the Medellín Cartel.
Financial Repression
President Bush called money laundering a crucial target in the war on drugs and allocated $15 million to launch a counteroffensive. Just hours after Bush unveiled his anti-drug offensive in September 1989, a federal task force began to take shape. The Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FINCEN) is designed to target money launderers with computer programs that can detect suspicious movements of electronic money. On December 6, 1989, Attorney General Dick Thornburgh announced that authorities in five countries had frozen accounts containing $61.8 million belonging to Rodriguez Gacha. According to the Justice Department, the money represented high-yield, long-term stocks and investments and was held in bank accounts in England, Switzerland, Austria, Luxembourg and the United States. Another $20 million of Gacha’s drug money was suddenly transferred to Panama, where it was protected from U.S. authorities.
The Last Years of Rodríguez Gacha
The growth of Rodríguez Gacha’s criminal empire had allowed him to increase his fortune, but also earned him many enemies. In 1987, hostility against the Cali Cartel, his previous partners in MAS, began when he attempted to enter the New York City market. The hostility turned into an open cartel war in 1988, mainly caused by Pablo Escobar’s personal vendetta against Pacho Herrera. As the cartel’s military leader, Rodríguez Gacha played a major role in many murders and other violent actions against the Cali Cartel.
Moreover, he was already engaged in open war against the FARC guerrilla and was already engaged in a crusade against the Colombian government and the DEA. His drive to join his holdings in his hometown of Pacho and his many lands in the middle Magdalena region soon brought him into conflict with his old allies in the Emerald Sector, while the Emerald Region of Muzo was caught in between. To secure his rule over the country, Rodríguez Gacha became involved in an intense and violent power struggle for control of the emerald mines. On February 27, 1989, he ordered a group of 25 gunmen to kill emerald magnate Gilberto Molina, his former boss, previously considered one of his closest associates, along with sixteen other individuals at a party at Molina’s house . He then went after his former associate Verónica Rivera, the “queen of cocaine”, who was murdered in Bogota on July 1, 1989 by hitmen under his command. He later detonated a bomb in the offices of Tecminas in Bogotá, which were owned by Victor Carranza, the new Emerald Tsar, whose nephew he also ordered the assassination.
El Mexicano or ‘Don Sombrero’ was later indicted in Colombia and the United States for his involvement in a number of murders, including the assassination of the president of the left-wing Patriotic Union party, Jaime Pardo Leal on October 12, 1987, in retaliation for guerrilla attacks. attacks on drug traffickers in the eastern plains area known as the “llanos Orientales”. Rodriguez Gacha begins in 1989 (the year of the horror in Colombia) by massacring twelve judicial officials in order to supposedly remove their judicial files. Pablo Escobar and Rodríguez contracted trained assassins from Jair Klein to assassinate popular presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán on August 18, 1989, who was believed likely to be elected Colombia’s next president. After Galán’s murder, “Don Sombrero” began to play a less active role in the Medellin Cartel’s terrorist attacks.
Government crackdown and narcoterrorism
In response to a wave of drug-related killings, Colombian President Virgilio Barco launched a major offensive against the cocaine cartels and resumed extraditions to the United States. Initially, the Colombian public overwhelmingly supported Barco’s crackdown, which was announced hours after Galán’s assassination on August 18. The government took swift and unprecedented action against the traffickers – seizing expensive homes, ranches, airports, cocaine processing laboratories and large quantities of drugs. cash and medicines. Authorities carried out raids across the country and made thousands of arrests. The Medellin Cartel responded by declaring war on the government, and over the next four months bombings became an almost daily occurrence and dozens of people died.
In October 1989, public support for the crackdown began to wane and the government decided to turn its attention to the arrest of Pablo Escobar or Rodríguez. However, both men managed to stay one step ahead of law enforcement and continued to finance a campaign of retaliatory terrorism that claimed the lives of hundreds of politicians, judges, and citizens. Colombian authorities said Rodriguez Gacha and Pablo Escobar planned the December 7, 1989 bombing of the Federal Investigative Police headquarters in Bogotá, which killed 63 people and injured an estimated 1,000. The two men were also accused of involvement in the bombing of Avianca Flight 203 outside Bogotá on November 27, 1989, which killed all 107 people on board.
Death
At the time of his death, Rodríguez Gacha was simultaneously waging wars against the Colombian government, the Cali Cartel, the FARC guerrillas, the DEA, and the Emerald businessmen led by Victor Carranza. They all started working together to take him down. His organization was infiltrated by the Cali Cartel, Carranza and the Emerald Guild also provided intelligence reports. In August 1989, the Colombian government caught a break when Rodríguez Gacha’s son, Freddy Rodriguez Celades, was arrested during an army raid on one of Rodriguez Gacha’s farms in northern Bogotá. Freddy’s alleged crime of possessing illegal weapons was relatively minor, but police held him longer than most unindicted prisoners, hoping to put pressure on Rodríguez. When no signs of fatherly concern emerged, the police released Freddy and waited.
Jorge Velásquez , alias “El Navegante”, an informant placed in Gacha’s organization by the Cali Cartel, revealed to the police that the drug lord was protected in Cartagena de Indias by 25 bodyguards. When the police arrived there, Gacha fled to Tolú by motorboat. At the destination, the drug lord was accompanied by his son Freddy, Gilberto Rendón Hurtado (alias “mano de yuca” – the alleged number 8 man in the Medellín cartel and who then controlled the network to transport cocaine from the Caribbean coast .), four bodyguards and El Navegante. El Navegante again gave information about Gacha’s location to police after he left in the evening of December 14, 1989. With this new information, police intercepted his motorboat and placed him on one of two Colombian military helicopters prepared for the offensive.
At noon on December 15, 1989, twenty-two police officers (seventeen of them from the elite police) boarded the two artillery helicopters and flew over El Tesoro, a village between Coveñas and Tolú, where police were told that the target was hidden. Speaking over a loudspeaker, police demanded that Rodríguez Gacha surrender, but Gacha and his men, disguised as farm workers, waited for the police to withdraw. Nevertheless, the two helicopters continued to fly above the zone. When the fugitives had the chance, they ran to a red truck parked near the village, drove away and were chased by police.
After several failed attempts to escape from the police, Freddy Gonzalo (armed with a 9mm pistol), Gilberto Rendón and three other bodyguards got out of the truck and while running towards a group of trees, they got into a shootout with one of the planes. , during which two of the fugitives were killed by a burst from the helicopter-mounted machine gun. The helicopter then landed; Five elite police officers engaged in another shootout with the remaining fugitives, two bodyguards and Freddy Gonzalo, ultimately killing them.
Meanwhile, the other helicopter chased the truck with Gacha and one of his men inside. When another police patrol appeared further down the road, Gacha and his bodyguard stopped the truck, got out and ran to a banana plantation on the side of the road. The artillerymen opened fire in an attempt to determine the whereabouts of the fugitives on the plantation. Gacha, armed with a German submachine gun, slowed his pace when he tore his scalp trying to get through a fence. Feeling cornered, he fired his submachine gun at the plane, revealing his whereabouts. In response, police fired a volley from the helicopter’s mounted machine gun at him, wounding one of his legs and causing him to fall. He was then shot in the face, killing him. His last bodyguard was murdered shortly afterwards.
Neighbors deduced from the sound of grenades and the damage to his face that El Mexicano had committed suicide by exploding a grenade against his head. However, police confirmed that he had died from a bullet, citing the destructive effect of a large caliber bullet and the fact that El Mexicano’s hands were not damaged, as would have been the case if he had detonated a grenade.
Funeral
Thousands of mourners crowded the streets of Pacho town for Rodriguez Gacha’s funeral on Sunday, December 17, 1989. Pacho residents said he donated money to renovate buildings, and some considered him a public benefactor. About 3,000 people surrounded the cemetery as access to the funeral was limited to family members. One newspaper estimated the number of mourners at 15,000.