Ding dong the wicked Pablo Escobar was dead, and with his departure went his infamous Medellin Cartel as well. But the air around that sudden void swirled and rushed to fill the vacuum. Somebody was certainly going to fill that tremendous gap in the South American drug trafficking industry. Oh yes, an industry it most certainly was, and still is today.

So it’s not like Colombia held elections to put a man in that position. It’s an absolute power grab, and when the music stops, the last man to be sitting in the last chair is the winner, in this case it was two men, two brothers from Santiago de Cali, a city just as far south of Santa Fe de Bogota, as Medellin is north of Bogota. The brothers: Gilberto Rodriguez and Miguel Rodriquez Orejuela.


Top left is Gilberto and to his right is his brother Miguel Rodriguez Orejuela

There in the jungle just on the outskirts of Cali was a polvorina, or essentially a powder keg, It was storage for conventional industrial explosives, namely ammonium nitrate. Yeah, well I hated that neighborhood, but that was where I was living for some nine months with a Colombian assault force of approximately 20 pipe-hitters “hand-picked” from Colombia’s elite special forces ranks.

The boys loaded in Fulgone trucks headed out to assault a cartel interest. Prior to one assault the truck break had not been set, resulting in the truck rolling backwards down the hill into the river resulting in the death of one of my assaulters.

Now, when I say elite, I mean elite for Colombia. I personally would hold them in no higher regard than a contract security force from the U.S. In the background I came from, “Selection is an on-going process.” Meaning just because you made it through the Selections and Assessment process you were a made man, not as such, no. The Colombians were all about stringing a hammock from their laurels and enjoying the life-long moniker ‘Elite Commando.’

In the polvorina, was a company-sized unit of Colombian regular army types that provided a guard force to protect the ammonium nitrate bunkers. They stayed on one end of the polvorina, and our assault force stayed at the other end next to a charming rolling-rock creek. We lived in open-air pavilions so, while we did have overhead cover from rain, we were subject to the heat, humidity, and insects of the jungle.

An aspect of the protective perimeter of our polvorina compound
Looking uphill toward our open-air barrack and chow hall

There were no complaints to be had though, as the regulars who guarded the polvorina lived underground in tunnels, dugouts, and caves. The Sergeant of the guard of the regulars had white skin and red hair, looking every bit more so like a gringo than most of the rest of us gringos. His nickname, of course, was well-established as “Canelo” (cinnamon) for the cinnamon color of his red hair. A famous present-day example is the current Mexican middleweight Santos Saúl Álvarez Barragán, popularly known as “Canelo”.

Mexican middle-weight world champion Saul Canelo Alvarez

Where I came from, every man wanted to train every day in everything all day long. The issue was which subjects would we train in with just a few hours in the day. The assault force at the polvorina just wanted to take off as many days in a row as possible. We, two-three gringos, were quite lucky to get them to engage in one event per week, and that was usually flat range fire at known-distance. That means you just stand there like a lump and plink at paper targets for a couple of hours.