'The war on terrorism is being fought much like the war on drugs'

Daily Star (DS): How did you come to write about the Cali cartel?
Ron Chepesiuk (RC): I've been writing about the Colombia drug trade since 1987, when I first visited Colombia, met my wife, who is from Bogota, and got married. At that time and into the early 1990s, Pablo Escobar and the Medellin cartel grabbed most of the media's attention because of their violence and high profile. I knew, though, that the Cali cartel, the biggest drug trafficking combine of all time, was the real story. The Cali cartel's two primary godfathers, Giberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, were captured in 1996. Five years later there was still no book about the Cali cartel in English, and I knew it was time to write it myself.

DS: How did you go about researching such a complex story?
RC: It was challenge organising the research for Drug Lords, but the Cali cartel's history and impact makes for a great story, so the book was fun to research and write. Many of the government and law enforcement officials, both in the US and Colombia who worked the case were eager to talk because they viewed the investigation to be tremendous success story. So I had plenty of sources to interview.

DS: What was the major breakthrough that brought about the downfall of the Cali cartel?
RC: There is really no one real breakthrough. Chronologically, the discovery of a huge shipment of drugs being smuggled in concrete fence posts from Venezuela in 1991 was the beginning of the end for the Cali cartel. The bust led to the investigation known as Operation Cornerstone.

A number of factors really led to Cali's demise. Killing Escobar and dismantling the Medellin cartel meant the Cali cartel would now be the big target of law enforcement. The cartel could run but it couldn't hide. By the early 1990s the Cali cartel had become too big, making it vulnerable to mistakes. The cartel's management style, while effective earlier in its history, had become a liability. They were a crime multinational that tried to run their international operations from Colombia. Imagine what would happen to Toyota if it ran its company from Japan. Also there was a bribery scandal in Colombia in 1994 in which the Cali cartel financed the election campaign of Ernesto Samper to the tune of a little more than $6 million. The scandal forced Samper to prove that he was honest and to do more to take down the Cali cartel than he probably wanted.

DS: How did the Cali cartel revolutionise the international drug trade? How were they different to other drug cartels?
RC: The Cali cartel operated more like a multinational business than a crime syndicate. The cartel showed that if you want to succeed in drug trafficking, you need to keep a low profile and focus on business. It showed the importance of using technology, building strategic alliances, setting up the crime syndicate on a business model, manipulating the system through bribery, and gathering business intelligence on your rivals and enemies. While the Colombian cartels are not nearly as big today as they were 10 to 20 years ago, they've learned from the Cali experience. Let's hope that other criminal groups don't learn as well.

DS: Pablo Escobar is the most famous drug trafficker out of Colombia. Yet the Cali cartel got the best of him and he was killed in 1993. What was the Cali cartel's role in the downfall of Pablo Escobar?
RC: As former Colombian President Ernesto Samper told me: "The Cali cartel was the key element in taking down Escobar." The cartel gathered intelligence on Escobar's movements as he sought to hide from the authorities, and they helped finance the group called the PEPES (People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar), which was instrumental in Pablo's takedown. Ironically, the Cali cartel had sealed its own takedown, but it was in a life and death struggle with Escobar and had no choice. I describe this vicious struggle in a chapter titled "War of the Cartels."

DS: What does the takedown of Pablo Escobar and the Cali cartel mean for the war against drugs?
RC: It was important to take down the Cali and Medellin cartels because their wealth and power threatened to turn Colombia into a narco-democracy. But in reality, the Colombian drug trade is thriving. The drug traffickers have learned well from the demise of the Cali and Medellin cartels. They've gotten smaller. There are now an estimated 300 baby cartels or cartelitos operating in Colombia. Interdiction is not the prime way to fight the war on drugs. The key to victory, if there can be one, doesn't lie in the coca fields of Colombia but on the streets of the US and the UK, where the demand is.

DS: What links did the Cali cartel forge with drug gangs in the UK and to what extent did they control the European drug market?
RC: The Cali cartel was largely responsible for introducing cocaine to the European market in the late 1980s. Curtis Warren, the UK's biggest drug trafficker, was linked closely to the Cali cartel. The source of Warren's cocaine was Arnaldo "Lucho" Botero, a high ranking Cali boss who, like Warren, was arrested and jailed. The Cali cartel was ingenious in its ability to build strategic alliances with other criminal groups to help them move their product to market.

DS: What is the current legal situation with the trials of the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers in Miami?
The Rodriguez Orejuela brothers face indictments in Miami and New York. It is expected that the Rodriguez Orejuela brothers will first go on trial in Miami in the late fall or early 2006. It's not decided yet whether the brothers will also tried in New York. Like everything Cali cartel, the trial is complicated, so the legal process will be slow. The trial is expected to start this fall or early 2006.

DS: Is this the end of the Cali cartel?
RC: Yes, I would say so, although its legacy will continue and other drug trafficking mafias based in Cali will organise. Given current US policy, the names of bad guys in the war on drugs will change, but the script they follow will be the same.

DS: What comparisons can be drawn between the war against drugs and the current war against terror?
RC: The war on terrorism, unfortunately, is being fought much like the war on drugs -- in both cases, law enforcement is primarily focused on interdiction and supply. You get can get rid of the Bin Ladens and Al Zarqawis and the Pablo Escobars and the Rodriguez Orejuelas brothers, etc. But the supply of drug traffickers and terrorists will not diminish. More attention needs to paid to the demand side of both drug trafficking and terrorism. The demand for being terrorists, the questions of why people use drugs and grow the crops that are used for illegal drugs, and why people become terrorists and support them should be addressed. For instance, both wars can better be served by stopping the spraying of coca crops with herbicides in Colombia and with the closing down of Uncle Sam's Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba.

DS: Are there lessons the US government can learn from the takedown of the Cali cartel?
RC: The Cali cartel takedown shows that law enforcement can only be successful against criminals when its agencies cooperate and share and when the US government pursues a multilateral policy of honesty.