Rodriguez Gacha, Jose Gonzalo
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Rodriguez Gacha, Jose Gonzalo (AKA: El Mexicano), prom.
1984-86, Col.
On July 27, 1984, a Miami, Fla., grand jury, on evidence from
informant Barry Seal, who had once managed shipping operations
for the Colombian drug cartel, indicted Carlos Enrique Lehder
Rivas, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, Federico Vaughn, Jorge Ochoa
Vasquez, and Jose Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha
for drug trafficking
and racketeering. Rodriguez Gacha owned a vast warehouse in
Sinaloa, Mex., where tons of Colombian marijuana was held for
shipment to the U.S. Following the assassination of Colombian
justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla on Apr. 30, 1984, and the
subsequent government crackdown on drug traffickers, Rodriguez
Gacha and other Medellin drug cartel members fled to Panama where
they were given sanctuary by Panamanian president Manuel Antonio
Noriega.
Rodriguez Gacha was also a suspect in the assassination of Bogota
newspaper editor Guillermo Cano Isaza, who had published a series
of essays about the pernicious influence of the Colombian cartel
in his paper, El Espectador. On Dec. 17, 1986, the editor was
machine-gunned in his car outside the newspaper offices. On Dec.
5, 1987, Judge Andres Montanez dismissed all charges against
Escobar Gaviria, and Rodriguez Gacha, who were thought to have
masterminded the killing of Cano Isaza. The previous month
Justice Minister Enrique Low Murtra announced Rodriguez Gacha had
paid an assassin thirty million pesos to murder lawyer Jaime
Pardo Leal, a leftist politician whose murder on Oct. 11 sparked
strikes and two days of rioting. See: Escobar Gaviria, Pablo;
Lehder Rivas, Carlos; Ochoa Vasquez, Jorge Luis.