Five
IN PANAMA, OUR FUGITIVE LIFE WAS VERY NICE. We were there with the acceptance of Panama’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega. We stayed at a house owned by a high government official near a golf club, but it was like being in a hotel. They gave us cars and provided what we needed. There was not much we could do there but wait while we tried to negotiate some change in the extradition policy in Colombia, so we spent our time playing soccer, going to the gym, sitting at the pool, using all the facilities. We went often to the club for meals and the people there looked at us like we were rich Colombian businessmen. They had no idea that at that moment we were the most wanted outlaws in the world.
I can remember Pablo doing push-ups every morning while Gacha, wearing bright green sweatpants, would try to work out while smoking a big cigar. I remember Gustavo and Carlos Lehder playing tennis all afternoon. Carlos loved to read the newspapers. And I spent much of the time riding bicycles to try to stay in shape and clear my mind of the problems. It was unusual, we were living near the golf course and Pablo didn’t play golf. But what we would do was early in the morning or later in the afternoon we would turn over our T-shirts and play soccer on the golf course.
After staying awhile in the high official’s beautiful house Pablo and I each rented our own homes with our families near the country club. Panama was so nice that I asked Pablo if we should buy a property in there. He told me, “No. I don’t trust Noriega. If anything happens he’ll take possession of our properties. Better to rent than buy.”
While we were in Panama Pablo and various associates held meetings with representatives of Colombia’s government to try to work out an arrangement for all of us to go home safely and without charges against us. These were secret meetings, as the Betancur government wanted no one to know they were negotiating with the traffickers. In return for being granted amnesty and canceling the extradition treaty, Pablo and his associates offered to stop the business, give aid to a program that would develop substitute crops to replace income from marijuana and cocaine—and pay off the total national debt of Colombia. I don’t remember exactly how many billions that was, I know it was more than $9 billion, but it would have been necessary for all of the drug cartels in Colombia to participate in exchange for the end of extradition. Even with everyone involved it would have been difficult, but possible, to raise those funds. The threat was that if there was no deal the cartel would have to fight back.
Would Pablo have actually gotten out of the business? I believe it was possible. He already had enough money for the rest of his life and this deal would have let him live completely free. But no one will ever know for sure, because when the supporters of Lara Bonilla in the government learned of the negotiations they insisted the government reject any such agreement out of respect for the justice minister’s life. They even built a monument to Lara. For a short time we had hope that we could go home and live our lives, but the rejection made it clear that was never going to happen.
To make certain that we had no surprises from the Panamanian government, Pablo was paying a couple of colonels on our general’s staff to provide us with inside information. So we knew every move that Noriega was going to make. It was one of these colonels who informed Pablo that Noriega had said that he was going to speak with the North American government, especially to the DEA. He said, “They are looking at him and he is trying to negotiate his freedom. His deal was that if he gave them you, he would be clean.”
Probably to show his serious intentions to the Americans, Noriega ordered his military to capture 16,000 barrels of ether that were supposed to go to the new laboratory being built in Panama with his approval, organized by some of Pablo’s associates.
Pablo knew that there was nothing he could do as long as we were guests in Noriega’s country. In secret he gave the order that everybody had to leave Panama right away. He had a couple of airplanes and helicopters sent to him. Several members of the family went back to Medellín, others to Europe, and we were to go to Nicaragua.
There were only a few places we could safely go. Finally we requested asylum from the Sandinista government in Nicaragua, and there we settled for some time. Pablo brought with him 1100 kilos, which could be turned into cash.
Some of Pablo’s friends went to Brazil and others to Spain. Most of the leaders were going their own way.
It’s hard to describe the strange thoughts I had in my mind. Only months earlier I could go anywhere in Colombia and be greeted with respect as an athlete and a successful businessman. Now I could no longer walk down any street in in my own country without the fear of arrest. I had been forced to flee. To become a hunted man and be powerless to do anything about it shakes your soul. To watch your family suffering and not be able to stop that is the most terrible feeling. And I was a fugitive without committing any crimes: I was pursued by Belisario Betancur’s government just for being Pablo’s brother. But that’s where we were, at the mercy of my brother and his ability to solve his problems.
In Bogotá the Betancur government began the new policy of extradition to the United States. One of the first four Colombians to be delivered to the Americans was Hernán Botero Moreno, the owner of the Nacional soccer team, the most popular team in Medellín. Botero came from a wealthy family who owned a great hotel in the city and he was accused of laundering $57 million for the drug traffickers. The fact that he was arrested was unfair because at that moment there wasn’t a law against transporting money. Even though he had been arrested he didn’t believe he could be extradited for committing an act that wasn’t a crime under Colombian law. In addition to Botero, extradition papers were signed against Carlos Lehder in case he was caught. And the word we got was that they were looking hard for evidence against Pablo in order to sign the papers on him.
While we were in Nicaragua Pablo spent time trying to establish a new foundation for the business. He split the 1100 kilos he had brought with him into two shipments. Pablo hired a pilot named Barry Seal, who normally worked for other leaders, to deliver six hundred kilos to the United States. Barry Seal previously had delivered more than one hundred loads’ worth, valued at between $3 and $5 billion. But this load got seized when he landed in Florida. Then it was discovered that Seal was a former CIA man who was collaborating with the American DEA. He presented dark, hazy photographs to the DEA that he said showed Pablo and others loading the drugs onto his plane. President Reagan showed one of those pictures on television to prove Pablo was sending drugs from Central America. Pablo said loudly that it could not be him in the picture, because one thing he never did was load drugs himself.
The public naming of Pablo Escobar as a drug kingpin was very painful to our mother. She told me that the first time she heard Pablo called “Most Wanted” on television she wanted to die. Pablo calmed her: “Your son is on TV but don’t believe everything that’s said. I’m not going to tell you, Mommy, that I’m a saint, but I’m not the devil either. I have to protect myself, I have to fight back. Mommy, you need to understand that they made me like this. I was in the business helping people, but they made me like this.”
Supposedly this Nicaragua story was revealed to the newspapers by Colonel Oliver North, who was working in the basement of the White House to help the Nicaraguan rebel contras overturn the Sandinista government. This story served his purpose well. But this also gave the American government evidence that Pablo was a drug trafficker and allowed them to get an indictment against him and Gacha so that they could be put on the extradition list. Barry Seal was to be the important witness in the U.S. trial against a friend of Pablo’s if this person could be extradited to America. Two years afterward Seal was assassinated in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and naturally Pablo and the Medellín cartel got blamed for it. Like always, it made headlines and was useful to political people. Except that afterward three Colombians eventually were convicted of this assassination and when questioned they said they were instructed in the operation by an anonymous military officer, who they believed was a colonel.
Eventually Pablo decided that the safest place for him was Colombia, where he had control of the people around him. Things had cooled down enough for him to return, although no longer with a public profile. But he still believed it was possible to reach an agreement with the government to take off the pressure. “I’m going to go home,” he told me. “I’ll make arrangements for everyone.”
I traveled briefly to Brazil and finally landed in Madrid, Spain, where we were in operation. I spent time there with a Medellín cartel boss. We were in Madrid only for a short time before I started getting my warning feelings again. It felt like someone was following me when I walked or drove in the city. Then my wife told me the same thing, that when she went shopping she had the feeling people were following her. I also knew that Cali’s cartel bosses were also living in Madrid. Finally I decided, “You know what, I know some people here, but my life is in Colombia. I need to go back.”
The depth in which my country was held in my heart was surprising even to me. Colombia is a beautiful nation and even with all the dangers waiting for us I wanted to be there. I left my family in Spain until I knew it was safe for them to return and then I started my journey home.
I arrived by helicopter to one of our farms called the Circle at five in the afternoon, just as Pablo brought together a meeting of the most important drug traffickers in the country, some very prestigious people—even some priests—and owners and presidents of the country’s soccer teams. There were about seventy people there and they brought at least two hundred bodyguards with them. We have a saying in Colombia, “with all the toys,” meaning with all the weapons, all types of guns. Believe me, these bodyguards came with all the toys. This was a major getting together of some of the most important people in the country, and Pablo had made arrangements with the commander of the police, so that he could be informed of any actions against the drug dealers. He had guaranteed to all the people who attended that they would be safe.
Pablo was trying to find a peaceful way to respond to the extradition of Botero. It was at this meeting that he said his famous words, “I would rather have a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States.”
“Gentlemen,” Pablo said to them, “this extradition law is not only for me. It’s going to be for all of you. That’s why we have to be together to stop it now.” Then he proposed his plan: First, the soccer teams would strike in protest. They would refuse to play the championship until the extradition was canceled. The people would say, “What’s going on?” and tell their leaders to stop the extradition.
In addition, Pablo wanted to organize a collective security force made up of the sicarios. He already had his own group of bodyguards but he wanted everyone to work together to create a larger group that would be distributed throughout Medellín. His plan was to divide the city into five or six zones and each group would have charge of one zone. In this way all of the people in the business would be protected from extradition.
Only a few of the people at this meeting agreed immediately to support the plan, while most of the others wanted more time to think about it. Right then Pablo was one of the few traffickers whose names were known to the public. It was his problem, they believed. They thought they could continue to live as they had been for the last few years, having no idea what was coming. They were very selfish. After they had all left a few hours later I was able to breathe the air of my country for the first time in months. Not for too long though. After midnight a Mercedes came to the farmhouse and a nicely dressed lady knocked on our door. “I have flowers for Dr. Hernández,” she said, naming a person we didn’t know. She claimed she was delivering wedding flowers and had been given this address.
“This is not the place,” I told her, and she apologized and left.
I watched her drive away and I had my uneasy feeling. “That’s strange,” I said to Pablo. “Something’s wrong. I’ve never seen someone deliver flowers in a Mercedes-Benz.”
Pablo thought I was nervous because I’d just come home. “Maybe it’s the owner’s car,” he said.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I told him. “We’re far away from the city. Something is wrong.” Pablo dismissed that, but I warned the bodyguards: “If you see something weird just start shooting into the air.” Pablo and I sat talking for a few hours, catching up with our lives of the last few weeks. It was two in the morning; Pablo was drinking coffee and eating some cake when we heard three shots fired.
“I told you,” I said. “I told you. Now we gotta run.” We went out the back way and started running, really running. Some of the bodyguards came with us. Suddenly whoever was coming, we figured it was the police or the military or both, started firing at us. One of the gun shots struck a small stone wall and pieces of the brick hit me in the face. I started bleeding badly. I thought I was mortally wounded. But I was able to keep moving. Another gun shot grazed my leg. There was confusion all around as we ran through the night, people were shouting orders. I was looking for my brother, but in the mess I couldn’t find him. Then I saw him walking calmly. “You guys are gonna kill yourself running where you can’t see,” he said. I couldn’t believe how calm he remained. Some of our people had been sleeping and had fled without getting dressed.
We managed to get to a road down below, where we had some luck. One of the bodyguards had been praying at a nearby cemetery and was coming back in a car. Pablo and I and Gustavo jumped into his car and escaped, others went through the woods, but eight of our people were captured. My wounds were slight and needed only a Band-Aid. But for me this was a major escalation. Because of my position as the accountant I had been far from any kind of violence. Now people were shooting at me. Although I had known the stakes of the business before, the coldness of it had never been so close to me. It was more than just leaving the country, or having to hide, it was living every day with the possibility of instant death.
The question was, How did they find us? What happened to the protection Pablo had paid for? When something went wrong there were always questions Pablo wanted answered. We learned two weeks later that a drug trafficker from Cali had gone from the meeting at the Circle and called someone in the government, believing he could win a guarantee that he would never be extradited by informing on Pablo. And Pablo also discovered that the raid had been directed by Colonel Casadiego Torrado, who Pablo had considered a friend and had been paying $50,000 a month for cooperation and information. But maybe this colonel figured that by capturing or killing Pablo Escobar he could ensure his career. Pablo sent him a message: “Now you are against me and you know what I think about that.” For his own protection the colonel was transferred to another city and worked there. And eventually he was promoted to general and rose to a position of power in the Colombian police. Right at that time there wasn’t too much we could do anyway, we were so busy. A few years after Pablo’s death Torrado got killed near Cali, but I think that was because he got caught up in his own problems.
After this Pablo changed his way of doing business. Instead of keeping colonels and generals on the regular monthly payroll, he informed them he would pay them only for the information they provided.
On the night of the raid at the Circle, at exactly the same time in Madrid, police had arrested Jorge Ochoa, the Cali cartel’s Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, and a third man who was a friend of theirs. When I had left I’d given the key to my apartment to Jorge and told him to use it if he needed it. But it was their own actions that attracted attention, so when Torrado informed on them the police knew where to find them.
They were put in prison. The United States requested that Spain extradite Jorge Ochoa to the United States for his participation in drug trafficking. Colombia also officially requested his extradition for the crime of smuggling fighting bulls into our country from Spain. This created a serious problem for the Spanish government about where to send him. If Ochoa was sent to the U.S.—where he had been indicted three times—he would spend the remainder of his life in jail there; if he went to Colombia the penalty would be much less. The Ochoa family hired lawyers in Spain and America and spent twenty months fighting extradition to the U.S. It was well known in Europe and South America that the decision to return Jorge to Colombia was made by Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González. Ochoa was sentenced to twenty months in prison in Colombia, but the power of the traffickers proved enough and eventually he put up a bond for $11,500 and walked free.
Pablo and I, the Ochoa brothers, Carlos Lehder, Gacha, the Mexican, we had all become wanted men. Now whenever we traveled precautions had to be taken. Bodyguards always were with us. Pablo, and I suppose the others, would not permit any photographs taken. In Medellín, Pablo owned more than twenty taxicabs to move around. In some of the places he stayed he had secret hiding places built into walls just in case he got trapped. When Jorge Ochoa finally got out of jail he also took elaborate steps to hide. One of the people involved in negotiations between the traffickers and the government described to the law how he was taken to meet with him.
“We drove twenty minutes around town,” he said. “We went into the garage of a house. In the garage they asked me to change vehicles. I got into a taxi. The car drove me to what I believed was an industrial area—lots of warehouses, large double-trailer trucks—and the driver asked me to get out of the car. He went over to one of the trucks that were parked on the street. He got into the driver’s seat and opened the door for me. After I was seated in the cabin, he asked me to pick up my feet and get my hands off the door. He activated some mechanism and the seat that I was sitting on moved backward, and at the same time, a door in the body of the truck opened up, and when I realized it I was already inside the body. There was a very nicely appointed office where Jorge Ochoa found himself. He said to me, ‘I would like to know whether I can count on you in order to establish discussions that would be very confidential with the government in the sense of asking the government to cease their attacks on us to let us work.’”
The thought was still that we would be able to make an agreement with the government that would permit us to resume our regular lives. No one believed this could go on for long.
When Pablo failed to get the support he wanted to fight the extradition laws he started building up his own security forces. There were many young people in Medellín who wanted to work for Pablo. It was considered a job of honor. But what was happening now was different from anything ever before. In Colombia the smuggling businesses, the drug business, the emerald business, the coffee business, the flower business, and the mining business had all for many years been an accepted part of our economy. They employed many people, including police, military, and politicians. They brought money into the country. The violence in all these businesses—as I’ve mentioned, in the emeralds it has always been much worse than with drugs—was kept almost completely inside the business. So the government watched them, but didn’t try hard to end them. Now the United States wanted Colombia to solve the Americans’ drug problem—and our government had agreed to do so. This is when the violence that shocked the world began. It was this decision, a decision that would not be of great benefit to our country, that led to the deaths of so many people.
To fight back Pablo established offices in four areas in the city, where the sicarios waited. These offices were in pool halls, barbershops, places where men would hang out together. The sicarios originally were formed to be the police of the cartel. Much of the power of the cartel came from the threat of violence as much as actual violence. People heard stories about what happened to men who cheated or betrayed the drug traffickers, and so they took great care for themselves.
Until the extradition treaties, dealing with informers or thieves was the kind of job done by the sicarios. An airport manager who betrayed the cartel by informing to the government was not an innocent person; he was making his fortune from the business and knew the consequences of his actions. But the government’s decision to change the understanding between the legal system and the traffickers by extraditing to the U.S. was considered a declaration of war on the drug traffickers. To respond Pablo and the others in Medellín formed the secret group, Los Extraditables, to fight the extraditions. At the head was Pablo, but members were all of those who were indicted in the U.S. or might be charged there with crimes. Because our government had refused to negotiate, the leaders of the cartel had nothing to lose. That’s why the motto of the organization became Pablo’s declaration: “Better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States.” In 1986, for example, twenty-eight Colombians were extradited to the U.S. to stand trial under American law.
The first blow struck against the government came in November 1985, when Los Extraditables financed the M-19 guerrillas to stage a raid on the Palace of Justice, where the Supreme Court held its sessions. The friendship between Pablo and the M-19 went back to the peaceful resolution of the Marta Ochoa kidnapping. To solve that situation Pablo had met with Ivan Marino Ospina, the main leader of the rebels, at one of the farms he owned outside Medellín. The arrangement was made that the cartel’s force, the MAS, would not attack the guerrillas and the M-19 would leave all of the traffickers alone. During these negotiations Pablo and the leaders of the guerrillas made a firm bond. To strengthen that bond Ospina told Pablo the recent history of the sword of the liberator Simón Bolívar, a great treasure of our country. It was known to all Colombians that the sword had been captured by the founder and commander of M-19, Jaime Bateman, from a museum in 1974, who announced it would not be returned until a peace agreement was reached between the guerrillas and the government. For the M-19 the sword was a symbol of their struggle. It had been passed among rebel leaders, eventually ending in the hands of Ivan Marino. It was given to Pablo to seal the treaty between the two groups.
The sword of Simón Bolívar hung on the wall of one of Pablo’s homes until he gave it to our nephew Mario Henao, and told him to hide it in Medellín. Meanwhile, the whole country was searching for this symbol of freedom.
The sword remained in Pablo’s possession until 1991, when the government agreed to peace with the rebels. As part of the agreement the government wanted the sword returned. So much had happened since he had received it that Pablo didn’t automatically remember it was in his possession. Worse, Pablo wasn’t sure where it was. We had thousands of hiding places in hundreds of apartments and houses all around the city. The search lasted for a long time. At that time we had voluntarily surrendered and were jailed in our own prison, the place called La Catedral. The sword of the liberator Simón Bolívar was smuggled into the prison—a deed we all believed was symbolic. We all held it, passing it around. I remember holding it in my hands and looking at it; it was both beautiful and dangerous, just like Colombia.
Pablo returned it to two M-19 leaders in Medellín and in 1991 it was given back to the government.
The evidence against the drug traffickers was kept inside the Palace of Justice. The best way to prevent extradition was to destroy all the files that they had collected. What happened in some ways was like what happened in America when the government attacked in Waco, Texas. As far as I know now it was never intended that so many people would die; the plan was just to destroy the records against the drug cartels. In fact, the traffickers offered to pay the rebels twice the millions of dollars for this if they were able to negotiate successfully with President Betancur. Some of the guerrillas got into the Justice Building the night before and waited there. They slept in the building. The next morning other guerrillas got to the building in a stolen truck and raced inside; a few security guards were killed at that time. The guerrillas took three hundred people hostage, including the members of the Supreme Court of Colombia and other judges. Almost two hundred of them were rescued within a few hours. But then the siege began.
Colombians were shocked by this attack on the government. The television covered it completely. I know Pablo watched it on television like everybody else, as I did. I don’t know if he was in contact with the rebels during this time. Because Pablo rarely showed expressions of emotion, it was difficult to know what he was thinking. I know it was difficult for me to accept that we had reached this point.
The first thought of most Colombians was that this was only a rebel attack. The M-19 did have a recording delivered to a radio station, demanding that President Betancur come to the building to negotiate. Obviously that was impossible. Hours after the siege began, the fourth floor, where the files against the traffickers were kept, was on fire.
Supposedly inside the government the generals took over, telling the president to stay out of the way. The army circled the building with tanks. On the second day they attacked the rebels. More than a hundred people died in the battle, including justices of the Supreme Court, workers in the building, and guerrillas. No one knows all the details; some of the hostages died in the attack, but others were killed by the rebels. Even today no one knows the complete facts of what happened in those hours. No question that the rebels killed innocent members of the justice ministry, but it also is known that many people who left the building alive—the shopkeepers, shoeshine people, people who were safely away from the rebels—disappeared and were never seen again. Their bodies were never found. The military and the police remain suspect in those killings.
Even inside the organization some people were shocked at this attack and decided to leave the business. If they did so respectfully there was not a problem with that. For example, in Spain the Lion felt the business was getting too dangerous and he made his own decision that it was time to leave. That was when he quit. Some others made the same decision.
The attacks on the government continued. The girl with the beautiful legs was friendly with one of the prosecutors known to be trying to make a case against Pablo by the name of Miriam Belles. One morning soon after the violence started, the prosecutor was walking out of her house to the protected cars when the sicarios went by on a motorcycle and killed her. Without evidence, the girl believed Pablo had ordered this killing. “I had an emptiness in my soul and a pain in my heart,” she remembers. “It was an action without any sense. Pablo didn’t need to kill a woman who had two children.” While still sometimes she would do a task for Pablo, she explains, the feelings she had for him were gone. The Pablo Escobar she had cared for did not exist.
Whatever threads were holding together the Medellín cartel were finally ripped apart. Each organization was left to protect itself. By that time Carlos Lehder’s organization had fallen apart completely. Like Pablo, Lehder had once dreamed of becoming president of Colombia; he even had started his own political party, the National Latin Movement. But his politics were much too hard-line; he remained an admirer of Hitler, so he never was very popular. Also, the stories of his grand life on Norman’s Cay had become public. He had ruled that place completely. All the while the cocaine planes landed and unloaded and took off again, making Lehder a billionaire.
But his most powerful weapon was money, not fear. Eventually a report on television in the United States made public the corruption of Bahamian government leaders, including their beloved prime minister, Lynden Pindling—although nothing ever was proved against him. I don’t know the truth of that specific accusation, although it was so easy to bribe officials that I wouldn’t be surprised. But the result of that report was that Norman’s Cay was closed as a transit point and Lehder could not return there. We began using other places in the Bahamas for landings, like the Berry Islands and Great Harbor, without much interruption.
Lehder spent most of his time in Colombia with Pablo. They were together at farms, and offices; they traveled through the country together. The bold Carlos that we had met a few years earlier was now gone. The government froze almost all his accounts and took over his properties and possessions. Once his fortune had been estimated at $2 billion, but now he was nearly bankrupt. While he was on the run he had to go into the jungle and there he got sick with fever. It was feared there was nothing that could be done to help him. He was dying there. Pablo sent a helicopter for him and brought him back to Medellín where he received the proper treatment to save his life. Even then he was very weak.
When he finally recovered, Pablo gave him work to do. Basically he became a trusted bodyguard, although he was given the respect he had earned. Once he was recovered he decided to start making a second fortune at a farm. One of Lehder’s new employees who was running the farm called the police, and Carlos was captured and extradited him to the United States. I was saddened, because I cared for him, because of his intelligence, and the great friendship he gave my brother Pablo. After his trial he was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus 135 years, so all of us now knew how we would be treated if we permitted ourselves to be extradited to the United States. With the government refusing to negotiate, our choices were only to fight until the state canceled the treaty or die fighting. As far as is known to anyone, Carlos Lehder remains hidden somewhere in the American prison system, still making appeals of his sentence.
During that time we were careful about where we stayed, and we moved often, but we didn’t feel under tremendous pressure. Pablo still returned to Napoles, although now he only remained there for brief periods of time. It was in this period that all the good deeds Pablo had done for the people began to pay off. The people who loved him refused to help the police or the military find him. In fact, many members of the police and the army remained on his payroll while they were searching for him.
We always had a great amount of security around us, whatever we did. In our family security, it was normal to have the men with the mustaches and the solid bodies, but we also had several beautiful women. In those days nobody in Colombia would think that a beautiful girl having a drink at the bar could actually be looking over the place to see if it was safe. One, I remember, was a tall blond girl with gorgeous blue eyes known as Lorena, and after working for me for two years we helped her become a model in Italy. Lorena, who later helped save my life, looked like a Barbie. She was very strong, very serious. To answer the unasked question, no, there was never a sexual relationship between the security and the principal.
The reason for using the women was that they could easily go to public places without raising any suspicion. When we had a meeting in a hotel or a restaurant they could check it out without bringing any attention. If we wanted to go to a nightclub we would always send two of these women with two nicely dressed male bodyguards an hour before we wanted to show up to check the place. They acted like couples, but they were watching carefully. Later, when it became very risky for us to go out we would send as many as ten different couples, who sat at different tables and let us know if there were any problems. One night I was going to a club and sent a few couples to look the place over. They called and told me, “Everything’s cool. You can come ahead.” But just to be sure, I decided to dress like a bodyguard without using any expensive jewelry or watch, unlike one of my own bodyguards, who always wore lavish clothes and accessories. I dressed more casually. So when we got to the club, the well-dressed bodyguard with the pretty girl was invited inside—and they wouldn’t let me in! I had to go to the corner and called them inside, and everybody left.
To increase security we would also pay the club security $500 to make sure nobody with a gun got into the club. “If they show a permit,” my people told them, “tell them to walk away.” Remember, there were no cell phones then, but we had the big military phones and used them.
Although the fact that we were often on the move made it more difficult to manage the operations, our business didn’t seem to suffer. Our organization had been well established and could continue to operate smoothly. We had secure routes, guaranteed transportation, and good distribution. And we had more customers than we could supply.
When the DEA began making more drug busts in the U.S. some people thought that meant they were defeating the cartels. But the real reason they were successful in making more intercepts was because more drugs were being sent into America. It was said that Medellín was responsible for shipping 80 percent of the cocaine in the world. For example, the DEA found a Colombian cargo plane carrying one thousand kilos hidden in cut flowers and wood products and said its value on the street was $20 million. Twenty million dollars! That was one shipment. With that amount of profit the business could never be stopped, there would always be people ready to take their chances to earn their fortune, even risking a prison term.
The big problem we had then was that we could supply more than the demand, so the price went down. From $35,000 or $40,000 a kilo it went down to $9,000. The profit was almost nothing but still the flow didn’t even slow down. So instead of paying the delivery men a fee for each kilo, it was better to give them ownership of part of the load. Transporter Tito Domínguez stockpiled his share when the cost was low. And when there was a big bust, like the cargo plane, the price went up quickly, and people like him would sell their product.
Pablo’s people were always able to make moves ahead of the U.S. government. Sometimes there were as many as eight different agencies trying to stop the drugs; besides DEA there was Customs, the Coast Guard, the local city police department, the state police, and the military. When Domínguez was caught he was charged with crimes by seven different agencies. One thing that helped us was that these agencies got to keep the equipment they seized, so instead of working together they were all in competition with each other for the publicity and the materials they could seize and own. They had airplanes and speedboats and fishing boats and cars that sometimes they sold and used their profits. But Pablo’s people continued to outsmart all of them.
Domínguez explained: “The government worked three men minimum on a speedboat pretending to be fishing. When we had a shipment arriving we had eight or nine boats in the area. We would check out every boat in the area and if a boat didn’t have any fishing equipment or looked suspicious they would radio, ‘Tito, mother-in-law’s in the driveway. How far out are you?’ I would shut down and wait until I got the word that mother-in-law had left the area.
“We had real good intelligence. When the talk of the town became that the government was doing speedboat busts we switched to sport fishermen. When we found out they were focusing on the Miami coast we moved a few hundred miles up to places like Cocoa Beach.
“I had one big house in the north and one in the south, each of them on the water with a big dock. These were ports of entry, nothing else. The drugs would go in the back door and right out the front door. These houses were just a doorway to America. They were in expensive neighborhoods because the neighbors’ houses were further away for privacy. The boats would deliver as much as one thousand kilos and be out of there in minutes. It was a system that was never stopped.”
I’m not defending the violence that happened, I’m explaining it. But the leaders of the Medellín cartel believed they had to force the government to change the extradition law and this was the path they chose. Soon all the judges were under protection, but there always was someone willing to inform on them. Until finally in December of 1986 the new Supreme Court found that because of a technicality the extradition treaty could not be enforced; the reason given was that it had been signed only by a temporary president. It was a small victory because the new president, Virgilio Barco, signed it fast, but it proved the impact that the attacks had on the judges in the country.
One thing that is important to remember is that there were good police and bad police. These police were not like the regular police in the United States, who are trained to protect the public. Some of them were not innocent at all. The police sometimes acted more like attacking soldiers than men who upheld the law. There were police who searched houses for Pablo who acted as gentlemen; they would make their search and leave. But others did crazy things. They were hard with innocent people, they stole possessions, they broke things for no reason, and they left after making threats. Or the police would go to a house at random and knock down doors, terrorizing people, and steal their belongings. It was known that even having in your possession a photograph concerning Pablo—even if you weren’t in it—had become a crime. If the soldiers or the police found such a picture in your house or your car, you could be arrested for cooperating with the criminals and your property would be taken. The girl with the beautiful legs remembers that her family burned every picture of Pablo. The searchers came to her house to search at least seven times. This was called ayananie, although they were always accompanied by a judge who made it legal. They stopped her many times in her car at roadblocks and they broke into her car while it was parked. But of course they never found anything to associate her or her family with Pablo. Their searches were so tough that when people wanted to get even with their neighbor for any reason they would call the police from public phones and tell them, “Pablo Escobar is living at this address.”
And sometimes the police killed. Our cousin Hernando Gavíria was at his farm with his family for a vacation when the corrupt police arrived looking for Pablo. Hernando did not know where Pablo was, nor was he in contact with him. But still the police started thrashing him. They hung him upside down, and covered his eyes to torture him with electricity, and they also inserted needles in his testicles, all in front of his children and wife, while threatening the children and wife if they didn’t tell them where Pablo was. He died in front of his family.
Even while this was going on, many of the police continued on our payroll. On Fridays the police would line up, some in uniform, and be given a salary. For that money they performed surveillance services. For example, after the war started between Medellín and Cali in the late 1980s, some police in both of those cities worked for the traffickers who controlled those cities. So that when a car came into Medellín with a license plate from Cali, or when strangers would check into a Medellín hotel, the Medellín police would check them out. If they were from Cali sometimes they would take them into custody and if their intentions were innocent they would be released; but if it was suspected they were in the city for a crime, instead of being taken to the police commanding officer they would be handed over to the cartel.
Pablo’s war against the police started with the murder of Diego Mapas, a friend who was one of our associates. He got the nickname Mapas, map, because he was incredible with directions. If you gave him an address, he would find it better than a map.
One afternoon Diego Mapas and two other bodyguards rented a taxi in Medellín to go to Bogotá to make a drug deal. What they didn’t know was that they had been followed from Medellín. The police pulled them over, and took Mapas, his bodyguards, and the taxi driver to a farm near Bogotá, where they were tortured the same way as our cousin Hernando, and disappeared never to be found again. And all these tortures were in order to find out where Pablo was hiding. The Colombian government offered $10 million for both Pablo and myself—dead or alive, but preferably dead.
Pablo learned what had happened from a member of the police force named Lieutenant Porras who would supply information to Pablo, because Porras did not agree with the way the police were carrying out their corrupt methods. Pablo encouraged him to denounce all the crooked cops, so Porras did go to the district attorney, and surprisingly for Porras the DA put him in jail. After a few weeks he supposedly escaped from the prison and then was killed by the police in a barricade near Boyacá. It’s not correct to think of the police in those days just as people keeping the law. Many of them were corrupt—something we know for sure.
Pablo fought the police hard. They were trying to kill him, so he killed them. They put a price on his head; he put a price on their heads. The total war started about 1988. In Medellín the police had hundreds of small stations for about three or four men called CAIs, for Centro de Atención Inmediata, and they were put in intersections all over the city. They were like guard posts or checkpoints, and they would stop traffic. The sicarios would attack these posts with machine guns or sometimes bombs. There would be money paid for the death of each policeman. The amount of payment was figured by the rank of the policeman. A regular policeman was between $1,000 and $2,500.
There were many poor people in Medellín trying to collect that money. It was a big business and sometimes different people made claims about the same shootings. So a system was set up that before the event the assassin would need to inform the head sicario where he would attack, and afterward he would have to present a newspaper story about the attack to receive his pay.
There are many, many guesses about how many policemen were killed, from about two hundred to two thousand. I don’t know the exact number. One reason for that difference was that there was violence done from so many different places. Pablo was the easiest to blame for all the deaths, but many of these assassinations were done by other police trying to get paid, as well as other people wanting to get even.
The police fought back with their own assassins. The secret police death squads would go in black cars into the poor neighborhoods, the barrios, at night. Most regular people would stay off the streets after work, so the police decided anyone on the corner was a bad guy, and that they worked for Pablo. Their secret squads with machine guns would drive around shooting young people for just standing on the corner, or they would take them away and later people would find their bodies. This was every night.
Another attack by the corrupt cops against innocent people was the following: One night they went to a nightclub called Oporto in Medellín; there they took about twenty young men from eighteen to thirty years old outside the parking lot to look for Pablo’s son. All these young men were sons of Medellín′s wealthy including some politicians. Right there on the spot they were told to lie face down, and they were massacred. The government kept quiet, and this way the police had more confidence to do their slayings. And another night at a Medellín street corner in the humble Castilla neighborhood another massacre occurred where twelve young men ranging from twelve years old to twenty-four were killed when they stood outside. All this was done by the secret police unit. The deaths kept piling up.
In a neighborhood called Aranjuez in Medellín the killing secret police unit went to a house where there were eight young men. The police took these young men in unmarked SUVs with tinted windows to the police’s Carlos Holgüin School. There these police tortured these teenagers to find out where Pablo was hiding—without success, of course, because how would they know? The next day most of these kids were found murdered, but a couple did manage to escape to tell the story.
Pablo actually wrote letters to President Cesár Gavíria and the attorney general to make public the truth that the police were killing innocent people. But the government didn’t do anything with the names of the corrupt police. I don’t know how much really they could have done to stop it, but Pablo wanted the people to know the truth. The bodies kept piling up in the streets of Medellín’s poor neighborhoods, especially over the weekends.
What was amazing was that Pablo’s mood never changed. He accepted what was happening and never panicked. He understood his fate. I remember hearing him say several times, “No drug dealer ever died of old age.” The fact is that no matter how much pressure he was feeling, no matter what had happened during the night, no matter where we were, he always acted the same and positively. He would usually get up sometime past noon, while Gustavo loved the early mornings. Pablo never saw him. So between Gustavo and Pablo they covered the entire day. Once Pablo got up he would spend his usual half hour or more brushing his teeth. That was his obsession, brushing his teeth, which were perfect. Then he would put on a new shirt; he wore a new shirt every day 365 days a year. After he wore a shirt he would donate it to someone, there was always a person who wanted a shirt of Pablo Escobar’s. When possible he would enjoy his favorite breakfast, arepas, it’s like a corn patty with scrambled eggs, chopped onions and tomatoes, and nice Colombian coffee. Pablo loved to sing and sometime in the day he would be singing songs he loved. If he wasn’t able to speak to María Victoria or his two children, his son Juan Pablo, and his daughter, Manuela, because it was too difficult or too dangerous for them, he would write poems for his little daughter and send them to her or record tapes for her to hear. I think of all the things that he lost while we were running, the only thing that truly affected him was not being with his family. He missed his family every single day.
It was while this was happening that the legend of Pablo Escobar was being built. All of the other drug traffickers had used violence in the business, all of them, but all of the publicity was focused on Pablo. In the United States and the rest of the world his name was put on the entire drug business coming from Colombia. This was good news for all the others. The concentrating on Pablo took much of the attention off the other cartels.
The media of the world made it seem like catching Pablo would end the drug trade from Colombia. Maybe what made Pablo so interesting and exciting to everyone was the fact that he couldn’t be caught. He was one of the richest men in the world, he was running a major drug organization, he was fighting wars with the government—and he was like a ghost. He was everywhere, but he was nowhere. When he was in the city the few people who knew about his presence never gave him away. The main reason for this was that the poor people of Medellín loved him and protected him. Some people were afraid of him, that’s true, but for the people with nothing he was their hero. The government had done nothing for them, the gifts of money and houses he had given them before were repaid with their loyalty.