Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

by Mark Bowden

  Leaving the building, the group walked past a fat, dirty, unshaven man who let them pass and then ran to overtake them. The man, Juan Roa, stopped and without a word leveled a handgun. Gaitán briskly turned and started back toward the safety of his office building. Roa began shooting. Gaitán fell with wounds to his head, lungs, and liver, and died within the hour as doctors tried desperately to save him.

  Gaitán's murder is where the modern history of Colombia starts. There would be many theories about Roa—that he had been recruited by the CIA or by Gaitán's conservative enemies, or even by Communist extremists who feared that their revolution would be postponed by Gaitán's ascension. In Colombia, murder rarely has a shortage of plausible motives. An independent investigation by officers of Scotland Yard determined that Roa, a frustrated mystic with grandiose delusions, had nursed a grudge against Gaitán and had acted alone; but since he was beaten to death on the spot, his motives died with him. Whatever Roa's purpose, the rounds he fired unleashed chaos. All hope for a peaceful future in Colombia ended. All those brooding forces of change exploded into El Bogotazo, a spasm of rioting so intense it left large parts of the capital city ablaze before spreading to other cities. Many policemen, devotees of the slain leader, joined the angry mobs in the streets, as did student revolutionaries like Castro. The leftists donned red armbands and tried to direct the crowds, sensing with excitement that their moment had arrived, but quickly realized that the situation was beyond control. The mobs grew larger and larger, and protest evolved into random destruction, drunkenness, and looting. Ospina called in the army, which in some places fired into the crowds.

  Everyone's vision of the future died with Gaitán. The official effort to showcase a new era of stability and cooperation was badly tarnished; the visiting foreign delegations signed the charter and fled the country. The leftists' hopes of igniting South America's new communist era went up in flames. Castro took shelter in the Cuban embassy as the army began hunting down and arresting leftist agitators, who were blamed for the uprising, but even a CIA history of the event would conclude that the leftists were as much victims as everyone else. For Castro, an agency historian wrote, the episode was profoundly disillusioning: "[It] may have influenced his adoption in Cuba in the 1950s of a guerrilla strategy rather than one of revolution through urban disorders."

  El Bogotazo was eventually quieted in Bogotá and the other large cities, but it lived on throughout untamed Colombia for years, metamorphosing into a nightmarish period of bloodletting so empty of meaning it is called simply La Violencia. An estimated two hundred thousand people were killed. Most of the dead were campesinos, incited to violence by appeals to religious fervor, land rights, and a bewildering assortment of local issues. While Castro carried off his revolution in Cuba and the rest of the world squared off in the Cold War, Colombia remained locked in this cabalistic dance with death. Private and public armies terrorized the rural areas. The government fought paramilitiaries and guerrillas, industrialists fought unionists, conservative Catholics fought heretical liberals, and bandidos took advantage of the free-for-all to plunder. Gaitán's death had unleashed demons that had less to do with the emerging modern world than with Colombia's deeply troubled past.

  Colombia is a land that breeds outlaws. It has always been ungovernable, a nation of wild unsullied beauty, steeped in mystery. From the white peaks of the three cordilleras that form its western spine to the triple- canopy equatorial jungle at sea level, it affords many good places to hide. There are corners of Colombia still virtually untouched by man. Some are among the only places left on this thoroughly trampled planet where botanists and biologists can discover and attach their names to new species of plants, insects, birds, reptiles, and even small mammals.

  The ancient cultures that flourished here were isolated and stubborn. With soil so rich and a climate so varied and mild, everything grew, so there was little need for trade or commerce. The land ensnared one like a sweet, tenacious vine. Those who came stayed. It took the Spanish almost two hundred years to subdue just one people, the Tairona, who lived in a lush pocket of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta foothills. European invaders eventually defeated them the only way they could, by killing them all. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spanish tried without success to rule from neighboring Peru, and in the nineteenth century Simón Bolívar tried to join Colombia with Peru and Venezuela to form a great South American state, Gran Colombia. But even the great liberator could not hold the pieces together.

  Ever since Bolívar's death in 1830, Colombia has been proudly democratic, but it has never quite got the hang of peaceful political evolution. Its government is weak, by design and tradition. In vast regions to the south and west, and even in the mountain villages outside the major cities, live communities only lightly touched by nation, government, or law. The sole civilizing influence ever to reach the whole country was the Catholic Church, and that was accomplished only because clever Jesuits grafted their Roman mysteries to ancient rituals and beliefs. Their hope was to grow a hybrid faith, nursing Christianity from pagan roots to a locally flavored version of the One True Faith, but in stubborn Colombia, it was Catholicism that took a detour. It grew into something else, a faith rich with ancestral connection, fatalism, superstition, magic, mystery…and violence.

  Violence stalks Colombia like a biblical plague. The nation's two major political factions, the Liberals and Conservatives, fought eight civil wars in the nineteenth century alone over the roles of church and state. Both groups were overwhelmingly Catholic, but the Liberals wanted to keep the priests off the public stage. The worst of these conflicts, which began in 1899 and was called the War of a Thousand Days, left more than one hundred thousand dead and utterly ruined whatever national government and economy existed.

  Caught between these two violent forces, the Colombian peasantry learned to fear and distrust both. They found heroes in the outlaws who roamed the Colombian wilderness as violent free agents, defying everyone. During the War of a Thousand Days the most famous was José del Carmen Tejeiro, who played upon popular hatred of the warring powers. Tejeiro would not just steal from wealthy landowning enemies; he would punish and humiliate them, forcing them to sign declarations such as "I was whipped fifty times by José del Carmen Tejeiro as retribution for persecuting him." His fame earned him supporters beyond Colombia's borders. Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, sowing a little neighborhood instability, presented Tejeiro with a gold-studded carbine.

  A half century later, La Violencia bred a new colorful menagerie of outlaws, men who went by names like Tarzan, Desquite (Revenge), Tirofijo (Sureshot), Sangrenegra (Blackblood), and Chispas (Sparks). They roamed the countryside, robbing, pillaging, raping, and killing, but because they were allied with none of the major factions, their crimes were seen by many common people as blows struck against power.

  La Violencia eased only when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seized power in 1953 and established a military dictatorship. He lasted five years before being ousted by more democratic military officers. A national plan was put in place for Liberals and Conservatives to share the government, alternating the presidency every four years. It was a system guaranteed to prevent any real reforms or government-initiated social progress, because any steps taken during one administration could be undone in the next. The famous bandidos went on raiding and stealing in the hills, and occasionally made halfhearted attempts to band together. In the end they were not idealists or revolutionaries, just outlaws. Still, a generation of Colombians grew up on their exploits. The bandidos were heroes despite themselves to many of the powerless, terrorized, and oppressed poor. The nation both thrilled and mourned as the army of the oligarchs in Bogotá hunted them down, one by one. By the 1960s Colombia had settled into an enforced stasis, with Marxist guerrillas in the hills and jungles (modern successors to the bandido tradition) and a central government increasingly dominated by a small group of rich, elite Bogotá families, powerless to effect change and, anyway,
disinclined. The violence, already deeply rooted in the culture, continued, deepened, twisted.

  Terror became art, a form of psychological warfare with a quasi- religious aesthetic. In Colombia it wasn't enough to hurt or even kill your enemy; there was ritual to be observed. Rape had to be performed in public, before fathers, mothers, husbands, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters. And before you killed a man, you first made him beg, scream, and gag…or first you killed those he most loved before his eyes. To amplify revulsion and fear, victims were horribly mutilated and left on display. Male victims had their genitals stuffed in their mouths; women had their breasts cut off and their wombs stretched over their heads. Children were killed not by accident but slowly, with pleasure. Severed heads were left on pikes along public roadways. Colombian killers perfected signature cuts, distinctive ways of mutilating victims. One gang left its mark by slicing the neck of a victim and then pulling his tongue down his throat and out through the slice, leaving a grotesque "necktie." These horrors seldom directly touched the educated urbanites of Colombia's ruling classes, but the waves of fear widened and reached everywhere. No child raised in Colombia at midcentury was immune to it. Blood flowed like the muddy red waters that rushed down from the mountains. The joke Colombians told was that God had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that it was unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populating it with the most evil race of men.

  It was here, in the second year of La Violencia, that the greatest outlaw in history, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, was born, on December 1, 1949. He grew up with the cruelty and terror alive in the hills around his native Medellín, and absorbed the stories of Desquite, Sangrenegra, and Tirofijo, all of them full-blown legends by the time he was old enough to listen and understand, most of them still alive and on the run. Pablo would outstrip them all by far.

  Anyone can be a criminal, but to be an outlaw demands a following. The outlaw stands for something, usually through no effort of his own. No matter how base the actual motives of criminals like those in the Colombian hills, or like the American ones immortalized by Hollywood—Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James—large numbers of average people rooted for them and followed their bloody exploits with some measure of delight. Their acts, however selfish or senseless, were invested with social meaning. Their crimes and violence were blows struck against distant, oppressive power. Their stealth and cunning in avoiding soldiers and police were celebrated, these being the time-honored tactics of the powerless.

  Pablo Escobar would build on these myths. While the other outlaws remained strictly local heroes, meaningful only as symbols, his power would become both international and real. At his peak, he would threaten to usurp the Colombian state. Forbes magazine would list him as the seventh-richest man in the world in 1989. His violent reach would make him the most feared terrorist in the world.

  His success would owe much to his nation's unique culture and history, indeed to its very soil and climate, with its bountiful harvests of coca and marijuana. But an equal part of it was Pablo himself. Unlike any other outlaw before, he understood the potency of legend. He crafted his and nurtured it. He was a vicious thug, but he had a social conscience. He was a brutal crime boss but also a politician with a genuinely winning personal style that, at least for some, transcended the ugliness of his deeds. He was shrewd and arrogant and rich enough to milk that popularity. He had, in the words of former Colombian president César Gaviria, "a kind of native genius for public relations." At his death, Pablo was mourned by thousands. Crowds rioted when his casket was carried into the streets of his home city of Medellín. People pushed the bearers aside and pried open the lid to touch his cold, stiff face. His gravesite is tended lovingly to this day and remains one of the most popular tourist spots in the city. He stood for something.

  For what, exactly, isn't easy to understand without knowing Colombia and his life and times. Pablo, too, was a creature of his time and place. He was a complex, contradictory, and ultimately very dangerous man, in large part because of his genius for manipulating public opinion. But this same crowd-pleasing quality was also his weakness, the thing that eventually brought him down. A man of lesser ambition might still be alive, rich, powerful, and living well and openly in Medellín. But Pablo wasn't content to be just rich and powerful. He wanted to be admired. He wanted to be respected. He wanted to be loved.

  When he was a small boy, his mother, Hermilda, the real shaping influence in his life, made a vow before a statue in her home village of Frontino, in the rural northwest part of the Colombian departamento, or state, of Antioquia. The statue, an icon, was of the child Jesus of Atocha. Hermilda Gaviria was a schoolteacher, an ambitious, educated, and unusually capable woman for that time and place, who had married Abel de Jesús Escobar, a self-sufficient cattle farmer. Pablo was their second son, and she had already borne Abel a daughter. They would eventually have four more children. But Hermilda was cursed with powerlessness. For all her learning and drive, she knew that the fates of her ambition and her family were out of her hands. She knew this not just in some abstract, spiritual way, the way religious men and women accept the final authority of God. This was Colombia in the 1950s. The horror of La Violencia was everywhere. Unlike the relatively secure cities, in villages like Frontino and the one where Hermilda and Abel now lived, Rionegro, violent and terrible death was commonplace. The Escobars were not revolutionaries; they were staunchly middle class. To the extent that they had political leanings, they were allied with local Conservative landowners, which made them targets for the Liberal armies and insurrectionists who roamed the hills. Hermilda sought protection and solace from the child Jesus of Atocha with the urgency of a young wife and mother adrift in a sea of terror. In her prayers she vowed something concrete and grand. Someday, she said, she would build a chapel for Jesus of Atocha if God spared her family from the Liberals. Pablo would build that chapel.

  Pablo did not grow up poor, as he and his hired publicists would sometimes later claim. Rionegro was not yet a suburb of Medellín, but a collection of relatively prosperous cattle farms in the outlying districts. Abel owned a house, twelve hectares, and six cows when Pablo was born, and he tended adjacent land that he had sold to a well-known local Conservative politician. The house had no electricity but did have running water. For rural Colombia, this would qualify as upper middle class, and conditions improved when they moved to Envigado, a village on the outskirts of Medellín, a thriving city that was rapidly creeping up the green slopes of the mountains around it Hermilda was not just a schoolteacher but a founder of Envigado's elementary school. When they moved there, Abel gave up his farming to work as a neighborhood watchman. Hermilda was an important person in the community, someone well-known to parents and children alike. So even as schoolchildren, Pablo and his brothers and sisters were special. Pablo did well in his classes, as his mother no doubt expected, and he loved to play soccer. He was well dressed and, as his chubby frame attested, well fed. Escobar liked fast food, movies, and popular music—American, Mexican, and Brazilian.

  While there was still violence in Colombia, even as he entered his teens, the raging terror of La Violencia gradually eased. Abel and Hermilda Escobar emerged from it all to create a comfortable life for themselves and their seven children. But just as the prosperity of the fifties in the United States bred a restless, rebellious generation of children, so Pablo and his contemporaries in Medellín had their own way of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. A hippielike, nihilistic, countrywide youth movement called Nadaismo had its origins right in Envigado, where its founder, the intellectual Fernando Gonzáles, had written his manifesto "The Right to Disobey." Banned by the church, barely tolerated by authorities, the Nadaistas—the "nothingists"—lampooned their elders in song, dressed and behaved outrageously, and expressed their disdain for the established order in the established way of the sixties: they smoked dope.

  Colombian dope was, of course, plentiful and highly pote
nt, a fact that the world's marijuana-toking millions quickly discovered. It was soon the worldwide gold standard for pot. Pablo became a heavy doper early on and stayed that way throughout his life, sleeping until one or two in the afternoon, lighting up not long after waking up, and staying stoned for the rest of the day and night. He was plump and short, standing just under five feet, six inches, with a large, round face and thick, black, curly hair that he wore long, combing it left to right in a big mound that sloped across his forehead and covered his ears. He grew a wispy mustache. He looked out at the world through big, heavy-lidded hazel eyes and cultivated the bemused boredom of the chronic doper. Rebellion evidently took hold not long after he reached puberty. He dropped out of Lyceum Lucrecio Jaramillo several months before his seventeenth birthday, three years shy of graduation. His turn to crime appears to have been motivated as much by ennui as ambition.

  With his cousin and constant companion Gustavo Gaviria, he had taken to hanging out nights at a bar in a tough neighborhood, the Jesús de Nazareno district. He told Hermilda that he wasn't cut out for school or a normal job. "I want to be big," he said. It was a testament to Hermilda's persistence, or possibly Pablo's broader plans, that he never fully abandoned the idea of education. He briefly returned to the lyceum two years later with Gustavo, but the two, older than their classmates and accustomed now to the freedom and rough-and-tumble of the Medellín streets, were considered bullies and were soon fighting with their teachers. Neither lasted the school year, although Pablo apparently tried several times, without success, to pass the tests needed to earn a diploma. He eventually just bought one. In later life he would fill shelves in his homes with stacks of unread classics and would talk sometimes of wanting to earn a higher degree. At one point, entering prison, he said he intended to study law. No doubt this lack of formal education continued to feed his insecurities and disappoint Hermilda, but no one who knew him doubted his natural cunning.