Thirty years after the Cali Cartel's fall, son of capo rejects surname stigma

Thirty years after the fall of the Cali Cartel, once one of the world's most powerful drug trafficking organizations, Miguel Andrés Rodríguez Moreno is speaking out against the enduring stigma attached to his surname. Moreno, one of eight children of cartel co-founder Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, insists he has distanced himself from the family's criminal past.

"I have detached myself," Rodríguez Moreno stated in an interview with EFE. His father, 82, is serving a sentence in a U.S. prison, while his uncle Gilberto died in a U.S. jail in May 2022. Now 49, Rodríguez Moreno emphasizes that he was never involved in the criminal organization. Instead, he has forged his own path as a lawyer and business consultant, and he created the podcast ‘Punto de Quiebre’ (Breaking Point), which features stories of individuals who have reinvented themselves after facing crises.

The Cali Cartel, led by brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, dominated a significant portion of global cocaine trafficking in the 1980s and 1990s, engaging in a violent rivalry with Pablo Escobar's Medellín Cartel and confronting the Colombian state.

For Rodríguez Moreno, the cartel's collapse marked a profound turning point. He recalls the day in August 1995, at age 17, when he found his family in tears, fearing his father had been killed. The news of his father's arrest, rather than confirming his death, brought a sense of relief. "When they told me they had captured him, I felt relieved, because for me it was like reconnecting with him, even if it was in jail," he remembered.

He described his upbringing as living within a "glass dome," shielded from the harsh realities of his father's business by his mother. Paradoxically, he found that his father's imprisonment, which lasted nearly a decade in Colombia before his extradition to the U.S. in 2005, allowed them to develop a relationship they never had when his father was free. "When he was in jail, that's when we really got to know each other. We shared much more than when he was free," he recalled. In 2006, Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela pleaded guilty in the U.S. to drug trafficking and money laundering charges.

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