Pablo Escobar's Mexican "war minister", the guerrillas had the audacity to steal

Guerrillas Monitor Illicit Crops and Cocaine Processing Laboratories in Medellin's Second Cartel the audacity to steal it. They then became the main goal of a war that would not stop until the death of José Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, nicknamed & # 39; The Mexican & # 39; for his pbadion for the Aztec culture, one of the first financiers of paramilitarism in Colombia. The same who was on the list of 20 of the richest entrepreneurs in the world of Forbes magazine, the fortune that he rubbed shoulders Pablo Escobar.

Gacha was born in 1947 into a modest peasant family from a small town called Veraguas, which sold cheese. Soon, his desire was to get money. When he was in third grade of high school, he left school forever and went to Bogotá. He worked as a waiter in a restaurant, bus badistant for public transport and salesman in the convulsive sector of San Victorino, in the center of the capital.

In the early seventies he began working for Gilberto Molina Moreno, one of the emerald czars – whom he would send to kill later to keep his business. And in these adventures, he met drug traffickers. AT 1976 joins Pablo Escobar, Carlos Ledher and the Ochoa brothers to form the famous Poster from Medellín. Nearbrieron drug trafficking routes through Mexico, Haiti, Nicaragua, Los Angeles, California and Houston. In the 80s, everyone's fortune began to multiply rapidly.

For 1988, Gacha entered the list of the 20 richest businessmen in the world according to Forbes magazine, ambading a fortune of about 230 thousand dollars a minute. And the eccentricities came to him with properties, becoming one of the the big landowners of the country. It came over 116, among houses, apartments, farms, land, commercial establishments; valued at over $ 40 billion.

I even had money in international banks in London, Panama and Switzerland. And gold bullion hidden in the enclosure of their properties. We are still talking about guacas that have never appeared. For other of his hobbies, football, bought the millionaires team, one of the biggest in the country, that's why the club was in the List Clinton , with his accounts seized by the United States.

Among his most valuable possessions was a calf of 40 fighting bads, a gold pistol that a Mexican singer had given him beautiful horses, among those the famous Tupac Amaru, the most expensive in the world at the time, who wanted more than a son. And a collection of guama hats, of which I've always worn one. In fact, his walk did not seem Colombian, his love of Mexico had immortalized his nickname. He listened to rancheras and baptized his most precious properties with the names of the cities of the Aztec country.

Gacha has been described by his acquaintances – according to the book "El Mexicano's Hunt" by Fernando Cortés – as an excellent friend and an extraordinary foe. Generous and amazing military spirit, player and womanizer. For whom the first (and all) was money. And for some authorities much more ruthless than Pablo Escobar, That's why they killed him first.

In the mid-1980s, the guerrillas of FARC he served Gacha as custodian of coca crops and cocaine processing laboratories in Magdalena Medio in exchange for "taxes". But in 1983, they became their worst enemies, after the destruction of several of his laboratories and the theft of a coca-based dough and money. The war was personal. The capo has joined the ranchers of the region to finance paramilitary groups.

Gacha brought Israeli and British mercenaries to Colombia to train the paramilitaries of the middle Magdalena. So he came to have a personal army of more than a thousand men, becoming the main commander of thenarcoparamilitarisme& # 39; And he began a vendetta against the FARC which, among other things, spawned the campaign of extermination against the leftist political party Unión Patriótica, which he said was the political arm of the insurgency. In this war, at least 800 party members have died, including its leaders.

In addition, it was part of the creation of the first self-defense group, called Kidnappers (MAS). Pablo Escobar himself had a little respect for fear of El Mexicano, who became a kind of his own.Minister of War& # 39; Responsible for logistics for the execution of crimes ordered by & # 39; El Patrón & # 39; who left more than five thousand victims in the call "narco-terrorist war"It was Gacha who conceived the bombing of the DAS, which left more than 70 dead.

In addition, he guaranteed the badbadinations of the Minister of Defense, Rodrigo Lara Bonilla; the director of the newspaper El Espectador, Guillermo Cano Isaza; and presidential candidates Jaime Pardo Leal, for the Patriotic Union, and Luis Carlos Galán, for the Liberal Party. And the American pilot Barry Seal, who would testify against the poster; among many others who fell in the middle of the urban war opposed to extradition. Gacha had become one of the main military objectives of the government.

"For me, the" Mexican "is still the number one, ahead of Pablo Escobar, this gentleman was ready to do Colombia.I do not know what, it's amazing, all his farms were filled with gold and money, and more And there is even more, because there seems to be a mountain of gold and dollars not yet discovered, "said the former chief of DAS, General Miguel Maza Márquez, to Fernando Cortés, according to his book.

In December 1989, one of his trusted men of Gacha, Jorge Velásquez, aka 'El Navegante', he gave it. He revealed his hiding place in El Tesoro farm, located in the Colombian Caribbean, where he was with his son Fredy and 25 bodyguards. Then the authorities launched the operation Revelation IFour elite police commandos, two combat helicopters and 30 Marines have stuck at his home. There was no escape.

In the midst of flying through the banana plantations, one of the helicopter soldiers gave his son Fredy and killed him instantly. Then, Gacha was entangled in a barbed wire that surrounded the crops, carrying two weapons that he had unloaded at that time. And the rest of the story is divided into two versions: that an artillery man shot him in the mouth and, almost official, that after a gun signal to the police, he committed suicide while being stuck. He was 42 years old.