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Entertainment August 7, 2017
Here's a "Narcos" Season 3 Starter Pack.
Photo by @/thegentsjournal via TwitterThe infamous Cali Cartel, the richest cartel in history, started with betrayal and ended with betrayal. But that’s the business. You finish how you started.
Interest in this cartel has spiked recently due to the Netflix hit series, “Narcos.” Everyone wants to know about the cartel that rivaled Pablo Escobar’s empire. And fittingly, this cartel will become the focus of “Narcos'” season three and season four installments.
Scan through the summary of the conglomerate below to learn about the Cali Cartel before “Narcos” season three premieres on Sept. 1.
Former members of the Medellin cartel founded the Cali Cartel. “At the Devil’s Table: The Untold Story of the Insider Who Brought Down the Cali Cartel,” written by William Rempel, explains that Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela and José Santacruz Londoño didn’t like how much money Pablo was receiving or the way he ran the cartel like a monarchy. Therefore, they created their own cartel and thereby became Pablo’s competition.
This obviously created bad blood between the men, which was dramatized in “Narcos” with the Cali Cartel wedding bomb – that never really happened, by the way. And, while Pablo ran from the authorities, the men realized this would be the perfect time to kill the competition. Literally.
According to one of the chapters from Ron Chepesiuk’s new book, “Escobar versus Cali: The War of the Cartels,” the man who orchestrated Pablo’s demise was none other than Jorge Salcedo, the same man who would later take down the Cali Cartel, too.
The cartel slayer started as a brigadier general in the Colombian armed forces. Then after he retired, he became the leader of the Cali Cartel’s intelligence and security team.
In his role, he hired British mercenaries, wire-tapping spies and closely worked with Colombian security forces in order to take down the Medellin king pin. And on Dec. 2, 1993, the combined forces were victorious in their endeavors by killing Pablo Escobar and dismantling the Medellin cartel.
Then soon after Escobar’s death, many of the remaining cartel members moved to join the Cali Cartel.
Due to hidden assets and whatnot, there hasn’t been a concrete number to pin down the Cali Cartel’s net worth. However, seeing as Cali Cartel members Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, José Santacruz Londoño, Jorge Alberto Rodriguez and Helmer Herrera Buitrago Pacho were billionaires in their own rights, we’re assuming the Cali Cartel’s net worth ranks really high.
In Ron Chepesiuk’s other book on the Cali Cartel titled, “The Bullet or the Bribe: Taking Down Colombia’s Cali Drug Cartel,” he revealed that the cartel initially put together a ring of kidnappers called Las Chemas. This group kidnapped people they knew they could receive hefty randoms for, including high-ranking political officials. According to Chepesuik, they gained about $700,000 in ransom money.
The Cali Cartel believed in equal opportunity drug dispensing. They sold a number of drugs, from weed to cocaine to opium to heroin. Additionally, this belief in equal opportunity mirrored the way they ran their business. Unlike Pablo’s organization, Cali ran their cartel like a conglomerate. Multiple CEOs in charge of multiple parts of the business kept the cartel alive. To understand this dynamic, think of how all our limbs work together to help us achieve our daily activities.
Initially,Jorge Salcedo worked remotely with the Colombian authorities and the DEA. Salcedo’s intel led to many high-stationed Cali Cartel members’ deaths. In response to their people being picked off left and right, the Orejuela brothers became paranoid. In their paranoia, they demanded that Salcedo kill one of their unnamed friends and colleagues.
And at this moment, he knew he had to take down the brothers now or never.
With a couple of failed attempts and one very close call, the Colombian and U.S. government pressured the brothers to turn themselves into the police. With the founding brothers in jail, the remaining leaders of the Cali Cartel followed suit. And after Pacho, the last remaining member, gave himself up, government officials officially dismantled the cartel.
Want to learn more about Pacho’s life in the Cali Cartel? Well, we got you covered. Read our Pacho Herrera article, where we lay everything out, from how he got into the infamous cartel all the way to his last moments.
