by Austin Galt
After spending a few days in Bogotá, I felt good having done some solid sightseeing. I didn’t want to settle down as I had done in Cali and was keen to see what else Colombia had to offer. But where would that be? I perused a map of Colombia and the Caribbean coast stared back at me. My next destination was locked and loaded.
7
NORTH COAST CARTEL
The Caribbean coast’s drug trade was under the control of the North Coast Cartel, known in Colombia as the Cartel de la Costa, and which was originally affiliated with the Medellín Cartel. The top boss during the 1980s was José Rafael Abello, known as ‘El Mono’ or ‘The Blonde’, who was considered by many to be the fourth-in-command of the Medellín Cartel after Escobar, Rodríguez Gacha and the Ochoa clan.
El Mono, a samario as the people from Santa Marta are called, took over 50 percent of all their cocaine and had a fleet of planes and boats for transporting the drugs across the Caribbean. He was captured in 1989 while dining with two women at an exclusive restaurant in Bogotá. His attempt to bribe the police into letting him go was unsuccessful and he was subsequently extradited to the United States. After serving 18 years in prison, he returned to Colombia where he was lucky to survive two assassination attempts in 2007 and 2008, both while dining at restaurants in Santa Marta’s tourist sector of El Rodadero.
Based out of the Caribbean coastal city of Barranquilla, the North Coast Cartel had its origins in the ‘bonanza marimbera’ or ‘marijuana bonanza’ of the 1970s. A blood feud between two clans from La Guajira state, the Valdeblánquez and Cárdenas families, raged unabated for 19 years. A dispute arose, allegedly over a woman, which led to José Antonio Cárdenas killing Hilario Valdeblánquez in 1970. In 1989 and around 200 deaths later, the war finally ended with the Cárdenas bloodline all but wiped out. Hugo Cárdenas, 13 years old and the only remaining male heir to the clan, was shot twice in the head as he waited for the school bus one morning.
José Francisco ‘Kiko’ Valdeblánquez had emerged the victor and he ruled from his throne in Barranquilla. He had amassed a huge fortune and was even feted by Colombian salsa and tropical music sensation, Joe Arroyo. The beginning of one of his greatest hits, ‘Amanecemos, Sí’ (‘We Wake Up, Yes’), begins with the salutation, ‘Kiko Valdeblánquez, el Guajiro de Oro, en Barranquilla’. Kiko Valdeblánquez, the Man of Gold from La Guajira, in Barranquilla.
The good times eventually came to an end for Kiko Valdeblánquez in 1994. Having just visited a close friend interned in a hospital in the north of the city, he left alongside one of his bodyguards. As soon as they got into his car, it was surrounded by a group of heavily armed men. He was obliged to get out and they whisked him away.
A couple of months later the police received an anonymous tip-off that he had been killed and his body incinerated before being buried by the side of a road to the west of the city. Valdeblánquez’s brothers-in-law immediately pointed the finger at Alberto Orlandez Gamboa known as ‘El Caracol’ or ‘The Snail’. This snail didn’t muck around, however, and he quickly eliminated one of his accusers, while the rest fled the city fearing for their lives.
Alberto Orlandez Gamboa now controlled a large part of the Caribbean coast’s drug trade. He started out as a mechanic establishing a small auto-parts business. He then bought a small bus which turned into many, becoming Barranquilla’s top transport provider. If someone caught a bus to work, it was likely one owned by the city’s top capo. As for his drug trafficking, he was known to smuggle the cocaine in shipments of cement and ceramic tiles as well as in crates of mustard and cough medicine to hide the smell.
Alberto Orlandez Gamboa was captured in June 1998 after an elite police unit intercepted his car in Barranquilla. Before his captors had a chance to speak, he said, ‘I am the one you are looking for’. He was extradited to the United States in 2000 and, after pleading guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering, he was sentenced to 40 years in prison. Time now moves very slowly for The Snail.
Two other major North Coast traffickers were the Durán brothers, Jairo and Álex. They were based in the municipality of Fundación in Magdalena state. Jairo Durán, known as ‘El Mico’ or ‘The Monkey’, was a rancher and owner of African palm plantations. However, in 1990 he was accused of being part of an international cocaine smuggling network after a big load of cocaine was captured in the Canary Islands.
A vessel, Good Look, was seized with half a ton of cocaine destined for Spain. It was a bad look for Jairo who had been in charge of loading the boat and seeing it off from Cartagena. He had an associate who worked in a Cartagena shipyard who would hide the illicit merchandise on the boat. Jairo’s brother Alex, a Colombian congressman representing Magdalena, was accused of being the mastermind of the operation and arranging for the safe passage out of Colombia. He allegedly paid $80,000 to the government authorities in Cartagena to facilitate the boat’s departure.
The Durán brothers would never face justice. Well, not the legal kind. In 1992, a massive shipment containing 6 tons of cocaine destined for Europe was lost around the Caribbean island of St Vincent. The cartel members had an agreement that if anything went wrong with a shipment, whoever sent it would be responsible for it. In this case, that person was Jairo Durán who went crazy. It was a $4 million loss and he didn’t think it was fair that he should have to cop the lot. He fled the coast making his way to Medellín before landing in Bogotá.
Orlandez Gamboa put out a hit on Jairo but his brother Alex intervened and offered to pay the debt in two separate payments. After the first payment was made, The Snail was too slow in cancelling the hit, which was carried out as originally planned. In October 1992, a car carrying Jairo Durán and his bodyguards was stopped at a fake police checkpoint set up by the sicarios in north Bogotá. The car’s occupants were ordered to get out of the vehicle whereby one bodyguard was instantly taken out. The Monkey tried to make a run for it but another gunman had blocked off the exit and he was executed then and there.
When being interviewed by authorities, Alex Durán blamed his brother’s death on the FARC guerrillas, stating it was likely retaliation for helping the Colombian army in Magdalena and even providing information to the right-wing paramilitaries who operated in the region. However, this was just a smokescreen to hide the fact that Jairo’s death was related to drug trafficking, in which Alex was also involved.
Alex then sought refuge at his home base in Fundación. At Jairo’s funeral, he swore revenge for his death. This obviously didn’t sit well with Orlandez Gamboa, who ordered his men to see that Alex met the same fate as his brother. In February 1993, they dynamited the entrance to Durán’s fortress before mowing down anything that moved with machine guns as well as lobbing in some grenades. The battle, which took place in a nice residential area, lasted half an hour after which Alex and four of his bodyguards lay dead. His wife was also injured while the house was completely ruined. Another brother, Carlos, was assassinated the following year in what was regarded as an extermination of the family.
The most prominent member of the North Coast Cartel was the Nasser Arana clan headed by Julio Nasser known as ‘El Turco’ or ‘The Turk’. His parents were actually Lebanese immigrants. Together with his ex-wife, Sheila Arana, and their three children, they had graduated from marijuana to become a family of cocaine kingpins.
The family first came to the attention of government authorities in 1979 when 50 trucks laden with 170 tons of marijuana were confiscated. It was believed to be the property of Julio Nasser, who had his own fleet of trawlers which he used to smuggle marijuana to the United States via The Bahamas. These activities helped Julio gain the moniker ‘The Lord of Marijuana’.
The money was rolling in and soon became too much for them to handle. They attempted to buy a South Florida bank, but pulled out of the deal after federal regulators began sniffing around. Instead, they turned to Panama and Switzerland with their secretive banking customs.
As cocaine began to boom in the 1980s, Julio met with Pablo Es
cobar in Medellín to arrange a supply line. After the US coastguards seized one of his trawlers with 5 tons of cocaine aboard, he was added to the list of Colombian drug traffickers wanted for extradition to the United States. He stopped travelling outside of Colombia after this.
Julio and Sheila divorced in 1984 but it is suspected they did so to spread the risk of their assets. Sheila continued to manage both their finances after the divorce. By the 1990s, they had accrued a huge portfolio of assets including Barranquilla’s historic Hotel El Prado, the 19-storey Miss Universe building named for its unique shape resembling the contours of a woman’s body, and the Villa Country shopping mall. They also owned several other buildings in the heart of Barranquilla’s business district as well as some large parcels of land along the Caribbean coast.
The beginning of the end for the Nasser Arana clan came in August 1990 when Switzerland changed their banking-secrecy laws as part of the fight against money laundering. Both US and Swiss authorities opened investigations into the family. Things began to unravel for the criminal clan in 1994 when Shelia Arana was arrested in Switzerland where she had been residing for the past few years to escape the violence that was gripping Colombia. Swiss bank accounts containing over $150 million were frozen.
Back in Colombia, with the Medellín Cartel having recently been made defunct, Julio contacted the Cali Cartel leaders in an effort to launch a raid led by mercenaries to spring his ex-wife from her Swiss jail. It was turned down but the DEA had already learnt about the plot and Swiss authorities increased security anyway.
Sheila Arana was extradited to the US in early 1995 where she was charged with drug trafficking and money laundering. She agreed to a plea bargain which included 12 years in prison and forfeiting all the money in the Swiss bank accounts. Julio Nasser continued his drug-trafficking activities until he was arrested in 1997. He was transferred from Barranquilla to a jail in Bogotá where he remained until his death from natural causes in 2000.
Their youngest son Jorge ‘Tito’ Nasser ran Barranquilla’s famous bowling establishment, Tito’s Bolo Club. It was a place that brought locals together to play and socialise. Tito was captured in 1998 and sent to Bogotá where he was detained in jail until 2000, at which time he was released after his terms of incarceration expired. However, new charges were brought against him and he returned to jail but was absolved of the crimes and released in 2001.
The eldest son Carlos ‘Capeto’ Nasser and daughter Claudia were both captured in 1998. Capeto was considered one of The Snail’s most important partners at the time of his arrest. Nonetheless, both Capeto and Claudia were acquitted in 2001 along with their brother Tito.
Tito was assassinated just over two weeks after being released. Upon leaving a gym in Barranquilla, he was just starting up his Ford pick-up truck when a sicario approached and shot him dead. His death was ordered by Norte del Valle Cartel associate, Víctor Mejía known as ‘El Mellizo’ or ‘The Twin’. The other twin was his brother Miguel; they had initially commenced their drug-trafficking activities two decades earlier under the banner of the Clan de los Mellizos or Clan of the Twins.
Víctor Mejía was making moves on the coast and was considered to be behind the murder of The Snail’s debt collector Crusi ‘Crucito’ González. He was gunned down at the Champagne Vallenato discotheque in Barranquilla in November 1998. Six other people were also killed in the shoot-out, including the club’s owner.
Mejía had arrived in Barranquilla in 1993 after fleeing Cali as the war raged between the cartels of Cali and Medellín. He had a penchant for Harley-Davidson motorcycles, owning about a dozen of them, and would often ride around the affluent parts of the city. He also liked electronic music and imported ecstasy pills from The Netherlands which he would distribute throughout the Caribbean coast. His main business, though, was his cocaine-smuggling operation which he ran with an iron fist.
He was responsible for the murder of Gustavo Salazar, the North Coast Cartel’s member from Cartagena. Salazar had lost one of Mejía’s cocaine shipments and was said to be reaching out to the DEA to make a deal. However, it was his innocent brother Hernando who paid first in a case of mistaken identity. The sicario got it right on the second attempt.
It wasn’t just for lost cocaine shipments that Víctor Mejía would kill. He was a jealous psychopath. In 1995, Alfredo Abello, the brother of extradited cartel boss El Mono, was murdered because he had tried to seduce one of Mejía’s girlfriends.
Víctor Mejía would go on to become one of Colombia’s biggest drug lords. He only came to the public’s attention in 2001 when police uncovered $35 million hidden inside the walls of an apartment he and his brother owned in Bogotá. They briefly fled to Argentina and Australia before returning and aligning themselves with right-wing paramilitaries.
*
There were two cities on the coast that I wanted to see – Cartagena and Santa Marta. I decided on a round trip going to Cartagena first and then on to Santa Marta. While travelling across the South American continent I had used buses, however, I decided to alter my mode of transportation for this trip. I would fly up to Cartagena or Cartagena de Indias as it is known officially.
The bus route from Bogotá to Cartagena, the capital of Bolívar state, initially tracked north-west to Medellín before heading north to the coast. The police often closed the road between Bogotá and Medellín at night due to the threat of attack from FARC guerrillas. The mountains that lie between these two cities were known for a strong FARC presence. Actually, in those days it would be foolish not to expect the presence of guerrillas wherever there were mountains. Apart from the rugged terrain deterring the enemy, the constant cloud cover makes it difficult for the army’s helicopters and planes to operate. The mountainous region north of Medellín was another danger zone. The journey was also an extremely long one. No, I decided, it was safer and easier to travel by plane.
The day was still warming up when the taxi dropped me off at Bogotá’s El Dorado airport. I checked in at Avianca, Colombia’s national airline, and was set for the flight north. As I disembarked the plane an hour later, the heat whooshed around me. There was no escaping it. The temperature in Colombia is based on the altitude – the higher you go, the colder it gets and vice versa.
What makes Cartagena so special is the Ciudad Antigua or Old City. Designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is filled with colonial buildings, stunning churches and beautiful little plazas and is surrounded, for the most part, by thick walls built by the Spanish in response to the Battle of Cartagena de Indias. In early 1586, about 1000 English soldiers, led by Francis Drake, stormed the city and occupied it for two months. The Spaniards were held hostage as the English ransacked the city. A ransom was eventually paid and Drake then abandoned the city.
Between the 16th and 18th centuries, Cartagena was an important trading hub. Precious metals, such as gold and silver, mined in the Spanish territories within South America, were transported to this port city where they were loaded onto big Spanish galleons which then set sail for the homeland. Many of these ships never made it far, sinking off the Colombian coast after running aground or being sunk by British warships or even pirate ships.
In 2015, the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Jose was found not far from Cartagena laden with treasure. The ship was sunk by the British in battle in 1708, with about 600 Spanish sailors perishing as a result. The find has been described as the holy grail of shipwrecks with an estimated value of at least $1 billion, and likely much more. It was carrying gold, silver, emeralds and jewellery. President Santos said it constitutes ‘one of the greatest, if not the biggest as some say, discoveries of submerged patrimony in the history of mankind’.
Cartagena was also one of only two authorised slave ports in the Spanish New World. (The other was Veracruz, Mexico.) Approximately one million Africans were forcibly brought to Cartagena, many of whom were used as cane cutters and builders. A large Afro-Colombian population now inhabits the coastal areas of Colombia. These peopl
e are, in most cases, the descendants of these slaves. Slavery was abolished in 1851.
The Spanish invasion and subsequent slave trade saw different ethnicities mingling together, leading to the mestizos – a blend of European and indigenous heritage; mulattos – a mixture of European and African; while zambos refers to the combination of indigenous and people of African descent. A study of blood tests conducted in the 1990s reveals that the Colombian population has over 60 percent of white genes, over 20 percent of indigenous genes and just below 15 percent of African genes.
I stayed in a little hostel in the Getsemani district just outside the walls of the Old City. Back then the area was known to be somewhat dangerous due to common delinquency. It is now one of the trendiest neighbourhoods in Cartagena, full of bars and boutique hotels. I didn’t much like the lodgings on offer, being a bit cramped and dirty, and was determined to stay only a few days. It was just a short walk to the entrance of the Old City, so a convenient spot nonetheless.
The main entrance to the Old City is the Puerta del Reloj or Clock Gate. It is unmistakable. Inside is the Plaza de los Coches or Square of the Cars which is the original site of the old slave market. It is now filled with tables and chairs where tourists can relax and enjoy a drink from one of several bars there, largely oblivious to its history. I wandered throughout the walled city absorbing the beauty of my surroundings – the colonial architecture painted in a variety of bright colours and the bougainvillea with its pretty pink flowers hanging from balconies. It was a joyous place to be and getting lost in the maze of streets only made it more delightful. It is, simply, magical.
The day was heating up so I grabbed a drink. One of my greatest discoveries in Colombia has been the array of exotic fruits, with maracuyá and lulo my favourites. Mixed with water and sugar, they always tasted best during a hot day on the coast.
