Introduction ..................................................
a
t the end of December 1956, two Colombian brothers, Rafael and Tomás Herrán Olózaga, were apprehended in Havana while holding a ship ment of heroin valued at sixteen thousand dollars. The brothers, a chemist and pilot, respectively, were twins who hailed from elite fami lies in Bogotá and Medellín. Their paternal great-great-grandfather, Tomás Cipriano de Mosquera, and great-grandfather, Pedro Alcántara Herrán, had served as presidents of Colombia during the nineteenth century. On their mother’s side, they were closely related to the Echavarría Olózaga family, which formed part of Medellín’s leading industrial clan.1 The brothers had arrived in Havana on 1 November 1956, from Colombia, passing first through Jamaica. Arrested with them were two Colombian women, one of whom had helped bring the drugs into Cuba. The other, Tomás’s wife, functioned as a courier, smuggling the drugs into the United States using her status as a university student in Philadelphia. A Cuban was also arrested along with the four Colombians. The Herrán Olózaga brothers confessed that they had brought drugs into Cuba before. After their arrest, all of the parties except Tomás were released on bail and traveled to Mérida, Mexico. Tomás, evidently the gang’s leader, remained imprisoned in Cuba for a year. After gaining his freedom, he returned to Medellín. In February 1957, however, agents of the Colombian Intelligence Service, backed by an official of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, raided the brothers’ laboratory in a Medellín suburb, where they had been processing cocaine since at least 1952. In the wake of this action, officials learned that the brothers had previously trafficked in Ecuadorian opium. As early as 1939, in fact, both the Colombian and German police had suspected that Rafael was a drug trafficker, suspicions created when they learned of his attempt to get a German drug manufacturer to sell cocaine and morphine in amounts greater than one kilogram to the Union Pharmacy he operated in Medellín.2
