The other day I was talking to a kid who was recently married and had just had a baby. He was short and stocky and, like many Colombians, wore braces on his teeth. The one thing I noticed about him was his eyes: they were blank, almost unseeing, even though he was staring right at me, as if I was not entirely there. He ran a restaurant in Cali with his brother and was in the middle of making plans to go to Disney World.
At some point while we were talking, it came out that his father was Henry Loaiza-Ceballos, a/k/a "The Scorpion," a/k/a the Cali Cartel's "Minister of War." In an incredibly relative way, the Cali Cartel was a less violent organization than the one based in Medellin, which is astounding to think about when you consider Loaiza's crimes.
Loaiza's signature achievement was probably the Trujillo massacre, which was actually a series of killings that took place between 1988 and 1994 in the town of Trujillo, in southwestern Colombia. While no one was ever officially charged with the murders, it is believed that Loaiza, along with a Colombian paramilitary organization, organized the murders some 245 and 342 people, many of whom were cut up with chainsaws. When a local priest tried to alert the authorities, his decapitated body was found floating in the Cacua river the next day.
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