The Medellín Cartel (Spanish: Cártel de Medellín) was a loose coalition of Colombian drug trafficking organizations based primarily in Medellín, Colombia, that played a central role in the expansion of the international cocaine trade during the late 1970s and 1980s. Rather than a single hierarchical organization, contemporary law-enforcement assessments and subsequent scholarship describe the cartel as a network of semi-autonomous traffickers who cooperated in production, transportation, financing, and enforcement while retaining independent control over their respective operations. The network included prominent traffickers such as Pablo Escobar, Carlos Lehder, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, and the Ochoa brothers—Jorge Luis Ochoa Vásquez, Fabio Ochoa Vásquez, and Juan David Ochoa Vásquez—whose activities collectively shaped the structure and scale of Colombian cocaine trafficking during this period. Estimates by U.S. and Colombian authorities during the 1980s attributed a substantial share of cocaine entering the United States to trafficking networks associated with Medellín, though contemporaneous reports emphasized that market share fluctuated over time and could not be ascribed to a single unified organization.
The Medellín network emerged in the early 1970s from Colombia’s longstanding contraband economy and expanded rapidly as cocaine replaced marijuana and other illicit goods as the dominant export commodity. Traffickers associated with Medellín capitalized on growing demand in the United States, access to coca production in Peru and Bolivia, and weak state presence in rural Colombia to develop processing laboratories, transportation corridors, and international distribution routes through the Caribbean and Central America. By the mid-1970s, this network of traffickers had established the logistical and financial foundations that would underpin the rapid expansion of Colombian cocaine trafficking in the following decade.