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For the record, he denied that he was a cocaine trafficker and insisted that he was being persecuted by the U.S. "You think one person, one 'baron,' as you Americans call him, can control all the cocaine being sent from Cali?" he said. "There are kids out there on the streets, 20 or 25 years old, shipping 10 kilos, becoming millionaires. You think one man can control that?"
Rodriguez contended that he lived in mortal fear of Escobar. "Mr. Escobar is sick, a psycho, a lunatic," he said. "He knows he's lost the war against the state. He lives now only to destroy." Their enmity, Rodriguez said, began in 1987 when he refused to help Escobar kidnap Bogota mayoral candidate Andres Pastrana. When Rodriguez declined, Escobar shouted, "Whoever is not with me is against me." Rodriguez blamed Escobar for the August 1989 assassination of presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galan Sarmiento, which ignited the campaign to push the cocaine princes from Colombia. Rodriguez claimed he had warned Galan that his life was in danger. "Galan wouldn't listen to us," he said. "He was too wrapped up in the historic importance of his campaign."
Rodriguez also took credit for tipping off the police last June, when a truck packed with 800 kg of dynamite was disarmed before it could be parked outside the offices of the daily El Tiempo. He knew about it, Rodriguez said, because his people had intercepted a radio-phone call in which Escobar promised a "big, big surprise" for the newspaper.
Rodriguez insisted that Escobar wanted to kill him too. En route to our meeting, he told us, he had changed cars three times. His family celebrates birthdays on the wrong days, and he dares not spend Christmas with his seven grown children lest the target prove too tempting to Escobar. He divides his time among six or seven houses in Cali and maintains round-the-clock security. "God and good intentions aren't enough to shoo away evil," he said. "You've got to have firepower too."
Rodriguez remains in hiding from the Colombian police and army, who until recently would have turned him over to the U.S. The closest he has come to that fate was in 1984 when he and Medellin drug lord Jorge Luis Ochoa Vasquez, who has since turned himself in, were captured in Spain. Both Colombia and the U.S. asked for their extradition. In 1986 the Spanish court, known as Audiencia Nacional, sent both men to Colombia to stand trial, stipulating that they should not be placed in double jeopardy by having to face the same charges in the U.S. Rodriguez was acquitted of drug trafficking despite the testimony of witnesses flown in by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. Two days after his trial ended, the U.S. filed new charges against him.
Rummaging through a sloppy heap of papers, Rodriguez showed us a letter from Ochoa dated January 1990 proposing to mediate his dispute with Escobar, as well as his own reply three days later politely declining the offer. When we asked why a self-proclaimed law-abiding businessman maintains contact with an admitted trafficker like Ochoa, he shrugged and said, "We've been through a lot together."