Sweet, Sweet Surrender

The don served flan. Luncheon had been arranged with a caution befitting one of the world's richest fugitives. Nine weeks ago, TIME's reporter in Bogota, Tom Quinn, received a call from a go-between: "The Cali guys have an announcement to make. Do you want to talk to them?" A week later, after an introductory phone chat and a roundabout journey to the rendezvous, Quinn found himself dining in a modest apartment in downtown Cali, a tidy industrial city in the Cauca Valley currently under occupation by 4,000 Colombian antidrug commandos and a CIA anti-crime task force. His genial host was the chief quarry of all those G-men: Gilberto Rodriguez Orejuela, supposedly one of the world's leading cocaine traffickers.

Rodriguez Orejuela is a soft-spoken 56-year-old who complains of migraines and an expanding waistline. Since the bloody demise of Pablo Escobar of the competing Medellin cartel last year, Gilberto, in partnership with his brother Miguel and other members of the Cali cartel, has achieved a virtual monopoly on the world cocaine trade. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration estimates that along with smaller groups, Rodriguez exports 700 tons of the drug annually. Thus he is a major contributor to America's drug plague and its attendant tragedies: the crack babies, the drive-by deaths, the myriad other lives left in ruins. Now, as he offered Quinn sirloin tips, fried shrimp and flan, he explained how he wanted to give all that up.

"My brother and I intend to surrender to the Colombian justice system and ) face trial," he said. "We have a plan that we think will significantly reduce narcotics trafficking out of Colombia." He was doing it for his family, he said: his seven children, all professionals or legitimate businessmen, wanted him to lead a normal life.

But, said Rodriguez, there were qualifications to any deal. "My brother and I want to surrender to justice, but by no means to injustice." They would submit only to a set of Colombian laws passed last year offering extreme leniency to drug kingpins who give up. They expected protection under a 1988 Colombian Supreme Court ruling making extradition unconstitutional, especially to the U.S. where Gilberto faces charges of drug dealing and threatening a DEA employee with death. To assure such immunity, Gilberto, whose nickname is "the Chess Player," insisted that any deal "would have to be endorsed by the U.S."

In return, he said, he could guarantee that a "large percentage" of Colombian drug dealers would be willing to surrender too. "They'd get out of the business and stay out, and dismantle their infrastructure, their labs and their routes," he promised, all "without tricks, without ratting on each other and without violence." The net effect, he estimated, would be a 60% reduction in the drug supply to the U.S. alone.

Some time later, a man appeared at Rodriguez's side with a briefcase. Inside were copies of the Colombian penal code and a letter detailing his surrender proposal, which he suggested Quinn read over.