COLUMN ONE : Colombia's New Era of Traffickers : The barons of the Cali drug cartel have franchised their empire to eager proteges. But this younger generation has stepped up violence in a town used to keeping a tense peace with <i> narcos</i> .

By TRACY WILKINSON

Feb. 12, 1994 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

CALI, Colombia — The young men saunter into swank car dealerships during the day, garish discotheques at night. Walkie-talkies in hand, automatic pistols in their belts, they take charge, they intimidate, and sometimes they kill.

The men--called traquetos , after the Spanish word for machine-gun fire--represent the latest generation of drug traffickers spawned by the Cali cartel, the sophisticated business empire that dominates the world’s cocaine industry. Traquetos are introducing a new element of brazen violence in this tropical city, which had maintained a surreal peace during the worst of Colombia’s drug wars.

For now, these new traffickers are providing cover for the barons of the mighty Cali cartel, who are seeking to negotiate a comfortable surrender with the government of President Cesar Gaviria. With the demise of Pablo Escobar and his Medellin cartel, all attention has turned to Cali.

Their fortunes amassed, brothers Gilberto and Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela, along with at least 60 other major Cali traffickers, have offered to turn themselves in to authorities in exchange for lenient sentences. If the deal is struck, the traffickers will serve only a few years in jail, if that, and most of their money and businesses--including the bulk of their vast drug empire--will go untouched.

While the prospect outrages the U.S. government, the surrender is being welcomed by many Colombians who have grown weary of sacrificing hundreds of lives in a war on drugs that increasingly appears futile.

But the rise of the violent traquetos , most of whom are youthful proteges of the Cali dons, shows that eliminating an Escobar or retiring a Cali cartel will not make even a dent in drug trafficking.

“We will never see the end of this,” said Eduardo Pizarro, a specialist in drug violence who is a native of Cali and now teaches at the National University in Bogota. “If tomorrow Cali disappears, the others will only grow.”

A senior official with the government prosecutor’s office in Cali observed: “The United States is worried about the Rodriguez brothers. We are also worried about them, but there are many other criminals, at a whole other level, who do perhaps even more damage to the society. In some cases, their names are not so well-known, but they are shipping huge amounts of drugs to the United States.”

In fact, the new traffickers have brought a measure of terror heretofore unknown in Cali, a languid if tense tropical city where a multibillion-dollar cocaine industry has built mansions, skyscrapers and shopping malls trimmed in purple neon; a city where convoys of Land Cruisers carrying sunglassed men course past chic boutiques and expensive Harley-Davidson dealerships offering $36,000 motorcycles and $1,000 black leather jackets.

The exploits of the traquetos are becoming legendary and are blamed for inflating Cali’s murder rate this year. Most of the men are in their 20s and have gotten rich quickly by smuggling a few kilos of cocaine to the United States. They almost always are working under the auspices, if not the direct management, of the senior Cali drug lords, authorities say.

They sport flashy jewelry and pricey clothes; many have taken lately to cutting their hair close to the scalp to emulate the style of one of their heroes, Ivan Urdinola. Urdinola, a notorious heroin smuggler implicated in the murder of more than 100 Indian peasants, reputedly favored using a chain-saw on his victims.

Giddy with their newfound wealth and power, the young gangsters are known for taking over discotheques any night of the week, remaining until dawn and forbidding other patrons from leaving, according to residents and proprietors of nightclubs frequented by traquetos .

And according to Cali press reports, the thugs have been known to spot an attractive woman at a club and kidnap her from her date. No one dares challenge them.

“You should not even look at them,” said the 32-year-old owner of a bar and discotheque. “If you have a pretty girlfriend, don’t take her to the clubs late at night.”

Gun battles in the discos are frequent. Eyewitnesses said several people were killed at the Los Compadres club on the outskirts of Cali two weekends in a row last December.

“They are our best clients,” the bar owner said of the traquetos. “They only drink fine liquors and spend a lot of money and leave big tips.”

The young criminals may be a boon to the bar business. But many Cali residents are increasingly contemptuous of them and outraged by their ruthlessness. Such violence and nouveau riche ostentation were typical of Escobar’s Medellin cartel but not its Cali counterparts, and residents now fear the “Medellin-ization” of Cali.

Although as brutal as the Medellin traffickers, the Cali crew has traditionally been more subtle, more discreet. The saw goes that where the Medellin will kill you, the Cali will buy you. Where Medellin waged war on the government, Cali infiltrated the government at just about every level.

The Rodriguezes and the other Cali cartel leaders, including Jose Santacruz Londono and Francisco Herrera, generally took great pains to appear as upright businessmen who attended cocktail parties with government officials and the winners of beauty-queen pageants.

At least temporarily, the traquetos serve a useful purpose for Cali drug lords under whose loose-knit direction they operate, but there is a limit to what will be tolerated.

“Right now, Gilberto Rodriguez needs these people . . . to take the heat,” a law enforcement source said. “But he doesn’t want them out of control. They are reckless and capable of bringing unwanted attention to Cali. If they become too big a problem, the Cali leaders will get rid of them.”

The Rodriguezes are said to be trying to appear as though they are leaving aside the drug business while offering to turn themselves in to authorities. Through their many lawyers, they are negotiating a plea-bargain agreement with Atty. Gen. Gustavo de Greiff. American officials regard the Cali cartel’s offer a farce; they have grown increasingly angry with De Greiff, whom they accuse of being too permissive.

The Cali cartel is believed to control 80% of the world’s cocaine market and a growing share of the heroin market; it is said to make about $25 billion a year as it moves into new markets in Japan, Europe and Russia.

The Rodriguezes reportedly requested, among other things, that they be allowed to serve time under house arrest in one of their many mansions.

De Greiff refused interview requests for this story. But he told the Colombian magazine Cambio 16 that he was confident the traffickers would turn over valuable information on distribution networks, routes and airports.

“They say they are tired of leading a life of crime and want to be legal,” he said.

Others, such as the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, the U.S. Justice Department and some Colombian experts, are skeptical.

Instead of getting out of the business, law enforcement officials say, the Rodriguez brothers and other key cartel leaders have been dispersing their business, moving the main drug production and distribution operations into other parts of Colombia and neighboring countries.

Experts say cartel leaders will continue to earn hundreds of millions of dollars annually through drug operations franchised to up-and-coming traffickers, and through billion-dollar investments in legitimate construction companies, banks, pharmacies and car dealerships.

Although it is unclear whether the traquetos would assume a larger role in the drug trade if the current bosses are temporarily sidelined by a surrender pact, one rising star among the new drug barons, authorities say, is Juan Carlos Ramirez, a sort of graduate of the traquetos. He is said to be buying up properties all over Cali.

By farming out portions of the business, the Cali kingpins “are building another layer of insulation between themselves and the actual traffickers,” said a law enforcement official in Bogota. “They are trying to take one step farther from the actual business. This is not a plan of the last six months or so. They’ve been planning to do this a long, long time.”

The Cali leaders were able to take advantage of the state’s war on Escobar, who, after 16 months on the run, was killed Dec. 2 in a shootout with police.

With authorities consumed by the pursuit of him, the Cali cartel easily took over the drug trade and expanded its political and economic influence, officials say.

“The cartel went into business with established entrepreneurs with political connections who can launder their money for them and prevent investigations from getting too far,” said Alfredo Molano, a sociologist who has written extensively on the drug trade. “They have their own very intimate contacts with politicians achieved through the financing of political campaigns.”

Top cartel members could begin negotiating with the government from a position of strength. They claimed to have provided the intelligence that enabled government forces to track down and locate Escobar and his principal henchmen, and they believe that they deserved credit in return. The Cali leaders are also expected to benefit from the rewriting of the Colombian penal code last year. The Colombian Congress, after lobbying from cartel lawyers, revised the code to allow the reduction of sentences in exchange for information and confessions.

Consequently, Gilberto Rodriguez, wanted in the United States on several indictments, could be sentenced to as little as 11 1/2 months.

Even if Rodriguez goes to jail, the legacy of the Cali cartel is unmistakable.

Until the latest violence, the city of Cali lived in a generalized state of denial, where the surface seemed tranquil and no one wanted to scratch any deeper. If a dead body appeared on the roadside, no one talked about it. If men in civilian clothes passed through the airport with submachine guns, no one seemed to notice.

In the first nine months of last year, the murder rate in Cali rivaled that of Bogota, a city with more than twice the population.

“Cali is a powder keg where the elite has been cohabiting with the narco-traffickers,” said Pizarro, the National University expert in drug violence. “The Cali elite chose to close its eyes and may now be discovering the costs of living with the narco-traffickers.”

In Cali, seated on the edge of the lush Cauca Valley, the social and economic elite always maintained a schizophrenic relationship with the cartel hierarchy. They did business with them and accepted their money, but sought to maintain a social distance. A famous story tells of cartel leader Santacruz being denied entry to the august Club Colombia when he wanted to give a coming-out party for his 15-year-old daughter; he simply built an exact replica of the club.

But part of the cartel leaders’ strategy appears to be assimilating, however gradually, into acceptable society. The Rodriguezes and their cronies may not make it, but their children, who are being educated in the Ivy League and other fine schools, will.

“Today your child may go to the same school their children go to,” a Cali businessman who has shunned the drug industry said over drinks at the Club Colombia. “In a generation, our children will be marrying their children.”

Carlos Holguin Sardi, governor of the Valle del Cauca state where Cali is located, said the recent upsurge in violence here is “not as spectacular as people think” and is being curbed by a new law that makes it illegal to carry firearms on the weekend.

Despite the widely held perception that government and police officials have been corrupted by the cartel, Holguin said in an interview that authorities have made gains recently in cracking down on traffickers. He pointed to the January arrest in Cali of a leading Peruvian cocaine supplier, who used the alias “The Vatican,” and of a former Florida policeman who allegedly ran drugs. A drug-laundering operation with ties to the Sicilian Mafia was also broken apart. “The police action seems strong,” he said. “I, at least, believe so.”

Still, when the army mounted roadblocks the night of a Christmas concert by salsa queen Celia Cruz, not a single trafficker was caught. And of some 500 arrest warrants on file with the government prosecutor’s office, none has been executed.

“Everybody knows who the traffickers are,” said the businessman at Club Colombia. “Everybody knows where they are, where they live, where their mistresses live. And everybody is afraid.”

Times special correspondent Steven Ambrus in Bogota contributed to this report.