MIAMI – Federal agents with the Drug Enforcement Agency waited for guests to arrive for a baby shower at a restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana. When they moved in to arrest a woman, two men who were near her ran away holding cases for what appeared to be a violin and a guitar.
DEA agents searched the woman and found she was carrying $1,200 in cash. They suspected the men were bodyguards and announced that they had arrested Martha Libia Cardona, a top fugitive — but it wasn’t her. The embarrassing mistake was in 1983.
Special Agent Brent Eaton, then the spokesman for the DEA, had to explain the error to reporters. The fingerprints of the suspect, Lilia Reyes, didn’t match those of Cardona, who had fled Miami after paying a $1 million bond after her arrest in 1980. The tip came from two witnesses.
“It’s not clear whether she ever said specifically that she was Martha Cardona, but both people independently drew that conclusion,” Eaton told reporters about the witnesses who had believed Reyes, 38, was Cardona, 36, who had been arrested in 1980 in Miami.
Paying for bonds after arrests in the U.S. was part of the cost of doing business when extradition from Colombia to the U.S. was rare. There were the payoffs to corrupt officials and those who paid with their lives. The risk was higher for families who had turned into crime rings at the service of the Medellin cartel.
In 1982, former Local 10 News reporter Mark Potter interviewed a U.S. smuggler for his “Colombian Drug Wars” five-part investigative series. Speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation, the American pilot said that while working in Colombia, he had paid off a police officer, a senator, coronels and generals.
“You can make arrangements to land in an international airport like Barranquilla or land in a military base off of Guajira, and have the military load the airplane for you,” he said. “They use forklift trucks and converter belts, load the airplane for you, and protect the field to be sure that no bandits come around.”
Cardona, a mother of four, became a widow when her husband Luis Carlos Gaviria was killed during a transaction involving 400 kilos of cocaine in 1977 in New York. DEA agents believed that was when she had to step up as the matriarch of the family business.
Cardona’s Medellin cartel associate Griselda Blanco — a powerful crime boss who wanted to be known as “The Godmother” because she was a fan of the 1972 epic crime film “The Godfather” — knew that cost well. Only one of her four sons survived, according to the DEA. He was named after the film’s Michael Corleone.
The murder of Blanco’s 27-year-old son Osvaldo “Ozzy” Trujillo Blanco, also known as John Owaldo Trujillo Blanco, was the most public. After he was released from a U.S. prison, he had been in Colombia for four months. He was the target of a mass shooting in 1992 at La Baviera, a trendy tavern in Medellin.
Blanco was already in prison when she learned of the murder. U.S. justice had already caught up with Cardona. Colombian law enforcement arrested her in 1991, and a judge ordered her extradition to face drug trafficking charges in U.S. federal court in Miami.
Colombian officials told Potter they lacked the resources to destroy coca plants or to eradicate the remote “kitchens” that were used to produce cocaine for industrial-scale trafficking. Medellin’s Chief Judge Flor Palacio was among those who held the U.S. responsible for the demand that was fueling the corruption.
“I believe very much in the honesty of the officers directing the security organizations,” Palacio told Potter. “At the same time, I think the majority of the agents are corrupt.”
In 2000, the U.S. launched Plan Colombia. It had cost U.S. taxpayers about $14 billion as of 2022, according to the Congressional Research Service. In the 2024 budget request, President Joe Biden’s administration asked for $444 million to deal with counter-narcotics and migration management in Colombia.
“Production is made for demand; without demand there is no production,” Rodolfo Garcia, the former anti-narcotics chief in Colombia, told Potter in 1982 about the role that North Americans play.
That hasn’t changed, but the players have. Mexican and Balkan criminal groups have moved closer to coca production in South America to gain access to wholesale quantities and make supply lines more efficient, according to the United Nations Office on Drug and Crime.
“If the Americans didn’t buy the drugs and they didn’t consume them, we would not have this problem,” Palacio told Potter in 1982. “We are simply suffering the consequences of an attitude caused by the American people.”
Garcia and Palacio also told Potter that they had both feared for their lives. The Colombian diaspora continues to separate families. The population of Colombian migrants who move to the U.S. has been increasing since 1980. Miami-Dade and Broward counties had the highest populations.
Visit Local10.com on Thursday, Feb. 15 for Part 4 of the 5-part series of “Colombian Drug Wars.”