Bogotá.- Thirty years after the fall of the Cali cartel, one of the most powerful drug trafficking organizations in the world, Miguel Andrés Rodríguez Moreno, son of Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, one of its founders, rejects the stigma that his surname carries.
“I have disassociated myself,” states Rodríguez Moreno in an interview with EFE. His 82-year-old father is serving a sentence in a United States prison, while his uncle Gilberto died in May 2022, also in a prison in that country.
Rodríguez Moreno, 49, insists that he was never part of the criminal organization and that he has dedicated his life to building his own career as a lawyer and business consultant. He also created the podcast ‘Punto de Quiebre’ (Breaking Point), focused on stories of people who managed to reinvent themselves after moments of crisis.
The Cali Cartel, led by brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, came to control a large part of the global cocaine trade during the 80s and 90s of the last century and established itself as one of the main Colombian groups dedicated to drug trafficking.
The end of one of the most powerful cartels
The arrests put an end to the command structure of an organization that for years disputed control of drug trafficking with Pablo Escobar’s Medellín cartel and maintained a violent confrontation with the State.
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For Rodríguez Moreno, that episode marked a turning point. On August 6, 1995, when he was 17 years old, he left his room and found his mother and other relatives crying in the living room of the house.
“The first thing that came to my mind was: ‘My dad was killed.’ When they told me he had been captured, I felt relieved, because for me it was like being reunited with him, even if it was in a prison,” she recalls about the operation in which the authorities arrested her father after he had been in hiding for several months to evade capture.
He asserts that, although the pursuit by the authorities and some news reports had already aroused suspicions within the family, it was the capture that finally made him understand the scope of his father’s activities.
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“Glass ceiling”
“We were people in a glass dome,” he states, recalling that both he and his seven siblings grew up distanced from the family business and that his mother tried to keep them on the sidelines of what was happening: “It wasn’t as easy to access information as it is today.”
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Paradoxically, he says that his capture ended up bringing him closer to his father. During the months in which Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela remained in hiding to avoid the authorities, they could barely see each other. Meanwhile, the nearly ten years he spent imprisoned in Colombia, before being extradited to the United States in 2005, allowed them to build a relationship they had not had before.
“It was when he was in prison that we really got to know each other. We shared much more than when he was free,” he recalls.
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In 2006, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela pleaded guilty in the United States to charges related to drug trafficking and money laundering, and today, at 82 years old, he is serving a sentence at the low-security federal prison in Big Spring, Texas.
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“Disconnected” from drug trafficking
Rodríguez Moreno states that he maintains telephone contact with his father, although he explains that he cannot visit him because he does not have a visa to enter the United States.
According to him, the former head of the Cali cartel has some memory problems typical of his age, but he considers that his state of health does not differ from that of other people of his generation.
Thirty years after the dismantling of the Cali cartel, Rodríguez Moreno points out that he prefers not to comment on the organization’s operations or on current drug trafficking because, he insists, he was never part of that history.
“I have distanced myself from something because I am very clear about my self-respect and my clear conscience that I never participated in a criminal act,” he concludes.
