(7 of 7)
Even when police do close in, the Cali bosses have escaped jail. When Gilberto was arrested in Spain in November 1984, the Colombian government went to great lengths to prevent his extradition to the U.S. According to a Rodriguez friend, Gilberto's son Jaime Fernando appealed to then President Belisario Betancur for help. Betancur declined comment. The elder Rodriguez says, "If Betancur helped in seeing I was extradited to Colombia and not the U.S., he was simply doing his duty as President, supporting an extradition order issued by a Colombian judge." Back in Cali, Rodriguez was tried on charges identical to those filed in the U.S. and was acquitted -- along with Santacruz, who was tried in absentia. The acquittal protected both men from further extradition to the U.S. on grounds of double jeopardy.
While the Rodriguez and Santacruz clans seem to enjoy considerable respect in Colombia, they are not universally admired. Some intellectuals protest that if the drug mafia's economic power is accepted, its values will eventually be countenanced as well. Critics are especially wary of the dynastic ambitions of the high-profile Rodriguez family. "They invest in the future," says a Bogota businessman. "They are thinking of the next generation, and the one after that."
Gilberto's son Jaime Fernando graduated from the University of Grenoble with a degree in international commerce. Two other sons studied at Stanford University and the University of Tulsa, and a fourth son is learning systems engineering. Gilberto boasts that one of his daughters has a master's in business administration and that a second is an engineer. "Most are now working in our businesses," he says.
Critics fear the proud father is grooming his children for political office as well. "Someday their sons will rule part of this country," predicts Luis Gabriel Cano, who has succeeded his assassinated brother, Guillermo, as publisher of Bogota's crusading newspaper El Espectador. Unless the Colombian government can now break the hold of the cartel in Cali, Cano's warning may have come too late.