Santacruz and the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers formed the Cali Cartel in the 1970s. They were primarily involved in marijuana trafficking. In the 1980s, they branched out into cocaine trafficking. At some point, the cartel supplied 80% of the United States' and 90% of the European cocaine market. The Cali Cartel was less violent than its rival, the Medellín Cartel. While the Medellín Cartel was involved in a brutal campaign of violence against the Colombian government the Cali Cartel grew. The cartel was much more inclined toward bribery than violence. After the demise of the Medellín Cartel, Colombian authorities turned their attention toward Cali. The campaign began in the summer of 1995.
Capture and escape
Several Cali Cartel leaders were arrested during the summer of 1995; Gilberto was arrested on 9 June, Santacruz on 4 July, and Miguel on 7 August. However, Santacruz escaped on 11 January 1996, from La Picota prison in Bogotá. His motives for escaping were attributed to a number of reasons. He was in charge of consolidating the network of hitmen and armed men of the cartel, for which he established an alliance with old members of the Medellín Cartel; he was to exert more control over some of the smuggling networks, which had begun acting more independently after the cartel's leaders were incarcerated; and he coordinated the assassination of about 27 potential witnesses against him and some of the other capos of the cartel, and apparently was arranging for the assassination of important figures of the government.
Death
According to the official version of Santacruz's death, police had tracked him down to Medellín, and they received an anonymous phone call on 5 March 1996, informing them of Santacruz's presence in a shopping mall. He was followed after he left the mall and killed while attempting to flee, after the police stopped his car. A second version of his death became known after Javier Antonio Calle Serna, a drug-trafficker and leader of the Los Rastrojos organization who is in prison in the United States, published his memoir, in which Calle Serna argued that Santacruz's death was orchestrated by paramilitary groups at the instigation of Danilo González, a Colombian police colonel who had originally fought against Pablo Escobar before he became an associate of the Cali Cartel.
