Latinnews Archive
Latin American Weekly Report - 14 October 1993
Cali cartel informer in judicial system; ATTORNEY-GENERAL SACKS KEY OFFICIAL AFTER PHONE TAP
Apparent progress in the government's campaign against the Cali drug cartel (see Page 466) was thrown sharply into reverse when it was discovered that a senior member of the attorney-general's office had been secretly communicating with one of its leading figures, Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela.
Guillermo Villa Alzate, the senior official of the attorney-general's office in charge of supervision of the judicial police (Dijin), was sacked on 30 September after a telephone tap suggested that he had been passing police reports to Rodriguez Orejuela and offered to help him deal with accusations against him by senior police officers, whom he described as hijos de puta.
The telephone, it turned out, had been tapped for more than a year.
Villa Alzate claimed to have been framed by a Dijin colonel, Alonso Arango, whom he had accused of falsifying a report on operations against the Cali cartel. The attorney-general, Carlos Gustavo Arrieta, dismissed this suggestion.
The public prosecutor, Gustavo de Greiff, shrugged off the setback, describing the Villa Alzate scandal as an isolated case. He then pressed ahead on 30 September with operations against the Cali traffickers by issuing warrants for the arrest of Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, brother of Miguel, and Jose Santacruz Londono, regarded as the supreme bosses of the Cali cartel.
De Greiff was contacted earlier this year by lawyers acting for 100 or more Cali gangsters, with an offer of surrender in return for lenient treatment (see Page 222). He said they sought an amnesty in return for information about the Medellin cartel, but he turned them down, and has now charged the three capos with planning a 1988 sabotage attack on a building owned by Pablo Escobar, head of the rival Medellin cartel.
Arrieta has been asking some difficult questions, such as why the taped telephone conversations were leaked to the press before his department heard about them, and why the police had failed to capture Miguel Rodriguez after discovering through the tap the time and place of a meeting with Villa Alzate.
Return to top