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

by Mark Bowden

  After skating away from his drug bust in 1976, Pablo knew he had little to fear from the law in Medellín. He was the unofficial king of the city. Rubin was in Miami during this period, so for a few years he didn't see Pablo or his friends the Ochoas. When he returned to Colombia in 1981, as he puts it, "The circus was in full swing." All of the cocaine kings had mansions, limousines, race cars, personal helicopters and planes, fine clothes, and fancy artwork (some, like Pablo, hired decorators to guide their taste in painting and sculpture, which tended toward the garish and surreal). They were surrounded by bodyguards, sycophants, and women, women, women. It was a higher life than anyone in Colombia had ever seen, and it was going to go higher still. The gangsters imported a nightlife to Medellín, opening lavish discos and fine restaurants.

  Pablo in particular was known for his adolescent appetites. He and his buddies would play soccer matches under the lights on fields that he had paid to have leveled and sodded, paying announcers to call their amateur games as though they were big-time professional matches. Opponents and teammates were always careful to make Don Pablo look good. Soon he and the other cocaine kingpins would buy the best soccer clubs in the country. To entertain his closest friends, Pablo would hire a gaggle of beauty queens for evenings of erotic games. The women would strip and race naked toward an expensive sports car, which the winner would keep, or submit to bizarre humiliations—shaving their heads, swallowing insects, or engaging in naked tree-climbing contests. In the bedroom of one residence he kept, apparently for recreational purposes, a gynecological examination chair. In 1979 he constructed a lavish country estate on a seventy-four-hundred-acre ranch near Puerto Triunfo on the Magdalena River, about eighty miles east of Medellín. He called it "Hacienda Los Nápoles." The land alone cost him $63 million, and he had just started spending. He built an airport, a heliport, and a network of roads. He flew in hundreds of exotic animals—elephants, buffaloes, lions, rhinoceroses, gazelles, zebras, hippos, camels, and ostriches. He built six different swimming pools and created several lakes. The mansion was outfitted with every toy and extravagance money could buy. Pablo could sleep a hundred guests at a time, and entertain them with food, music, games, and parties. There were billiard tables and pinball machines, and a Wurlitzer jukebox that featured the records of Pablo's favorite performer, Brazilian singer Roberto Carlos. On display out front was a thirties-era sedan peppered with bullet holes, which Pablo said had belonged to Bonnie and Clyde. He would take his guests on jarring trail-bike excursions across his estate, or race them on Jet Skis across one of his custom lakes. Nápoles was an outrageous blend of the erotic, exotic, and extravagant Pablo was its maestro. He enjoyed speed, sex, and showing off, and he craved an audience.

  As his fortune grew and his fame spread, Pablo began tending his public image, conscientiously denying any official connection to his illicit enterprises and working hard to appear likable, although his reputation terrified even hardened Medellín criminals. He was stiffly formal in public, as if trying to measure up to a stature that ill suited him. His language became flowery and excessively polite. And he began courting the public, especially the poor.

  Employing leftist rhetoric when it suited his needs, Pablo played upon popular resentments of the established powers in Bogotá and the historical hard feelings toward the United States. Marxist groups like the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), ELN (Ejército de Liberación Nacional, or the National Army of Liberation), and a new urban movement calling itself M-19 enjoyed wide support from Colombia's educated youth. Rebellious Jesuits in Colombia were preaching liberation theology. After years of exploitation and political violence, including intimidation by the feared autodefensas, the private paramilitary squads employed by the wealthy to scare the peasantry into submission, the average poor citizen of Medellín despised the Colombian establishment. Bogotá, the seat of the national government, was in the hands of the wealthy elite, a privileged 3 percent who owned 97 percent of the country's land and wealth. Pablo, who was already wealthier than anyone in this 3 percent, portrayed himself as a champion of the people. His brother-in-law, Mario Henao, was a leftist intellectual who railed against the capitalist-imperialist influence of America. Mario provided Pablo with a patriotic rationale for his trafficking business and offered him a path to respectability. The flow of cocaine to North America and of dollars south could be considered a revolutionary tactic—at once sucking out Yankee dollars and corrupting the brains and bloodstreams of decadent norteamericano youth. By this reasoning, Pablo was not just enriching himself, he was striking a blow against the world establishment and using its own money to build a new, modern, hip, progressive Colombia. On an international scale, he was taking from the rich and giving to the poor.

  He himself rarely used cocaine and was only a moderate drinker. His recreational drug of choice remained marijuana. Surrounded by bodyguards and worshipful associates, he had begun to see himself differently. It wasn't enough anymore to have succeeded on the streets of Medellín or to dominate the international drug trade; somewhere along the way Pablo had begun to see himself as a great man. His words and ideas assumed historical importance, and his ambition grew to fill the everlarger space. He was like a gambler on a winning streak, rolling for higher and higher stakes. He began to see himself as an embodiment of the Colombian people, a vessel for their future, as though his goals were their goals, and his enemies, their enemies. He was fascinated with the career of Pancho Villa, the Mexican revolutionary who had challenged the United States directly in 1916 when he'd led raids into Texas and New Mexico. American troops, led by General John J.Pershing, had chased him back into Mexico, and then spent eleven months in Mexico in vain pursuit. The effort had turned Villa into a popular hero in Mexico (he was later assassinated by political enemies, in 1923). Pablo embraced a local legend that Villa had actually been Colombian. He began collecting memorabilia from that period of Mexican history and enjoyed dressing up and posing as Villa. Eventually, he would relive the Villa story, becoming the target of a U.S. military-assisted manhunt that would make Pershing's pursuit of Villa look like a trail ride.

  Pablo became one of Medellín's most generous employers, paying salaries to workers in his cocaine labs that enabled them to buy houses and cars. Perhaps influenced by Mario Henao, he began spending millions on social improvements in the city, doing far more than the government ever had for the poor crammed into the city's expanding slums. He donated funds and leaned on his associates to raise millions for roads and electric lines, and he cleared soccer fields throughout the area. He built roller-skating rinks and handed out money at public appearances. He started a housing development for the poor called Barrio Pablo Escobar, which gave homes to people who lived in huts by the city's trash dumps. The Conservative Catholic Church in Medellín backed Pablo's social programs, and some priests would continue to support him throughout his life. He would show up for ribbon cuttings and dedications, displaying a reluctance to accept applause or thanks, but always allowing himself to be drawn out eventually to center stage. He would often take part in local soccer matches, demonstrating that despite his widening girth he could still move with surprising athleticism. By the end of the decade, the people's don was not just the richest and most powerful man in Antioquia; he was also its most popular citizen.

  In an interview he gave to an auto-racing magazine in 1980, the thirty-year-old Pablo was feeling mostly generous about his fellow man. "I am a great friend and I do everything possible so that people appreciate me," he said. "What is worth most in life are friends, of that I am sure." Of course, friendship also had its hazards. "Unfortunately," Pablo added, somewhat ominously, "along life's paths one also meets people who are disloyal."

  In private, he spoke softly and prided himself on his unruffled, casual good humor. When he was stoned he liked to tell stories, laughing about his own exploits and at the blundering of his enemies, but was otherwise content to watch and listen.
He was a slob, lazy and self-indulgent in all his habits. He ate too much, guzzled Coca-Cola, devoured pizza and other fast foods, and spared no expense in recruiting young women—the younger the better—to satisfy his sexual appetite. Like others before him who amassed great wealth and power at a young age, Pablo grew increasingly self-righteous. He was already de facto above the law. In Medellín he had created a dual system of justice. The violence committed in the course of his business—the murder rate doubled in the city during this period—was studiously ignored by the police. It was considered part of the drug business, something separate from civil society. Pablo himself regarded murders committed by his men as matters of no consequence to society at large. It was strictly business, a grim necessity in a state without a strong legal system. In Colombia, one could waste a lifetime waiting for state-administered justice. One of the prerogatives of the wealthy and powerful in rural Colombia had always been enforcing their own justice—that's what lay behind the long and bloody tradition of autodefensas, or private armies. Once Pablo had made his first millions, he didn't look to the law for protection, and he resented its interference in his affairs. He considered it his right to use violence on his own account, and on occasion did so publicly. Once, when a worker was discovered stealing something from his estate, Pablo had the man bound hand and foot, and in front of horrified guests at Nápoles personally kicked the man into his swimming pool and then watched him drown.

  "This is what happens to those who steal from Pablo Escobar!" he said. The warning no doubt resonated among his guests, many of whom were in a position to steal far more from El Doctor than the unfortunate servant had.

  Most of Medellín accepted this system of private justice, because to oppose Pablo was unwise. Those who did became his enemies, and his enemies had a way of turning up dead. He had little stomach for idealism. For all his concern about Medellín's poor, Pablo's worldview was essentially cynical. One prospered by being smarter and more dangerous than the other guy. So when politicians or journalists in Bogotá started spreading the alarm about this emerging criminal power, defending the rule of law, he saw them as sanctimonious poseurs aligned with his rival cartels or with the United States. In Pablo's worldview, no one acted on principle. They pursued what was in their own best interests. Anyone who opposed him was simply "disloyal," not just to him personally but to Colombia.

  Politics was the next logical step for a man of Pablo's ambition. In 1978 he was elected as a substitute city council member in Medellín. He helped underwrite the presidential campaign of Belisario Betancur that year, loaning the campaign planes and helicopters, and also contributed liberally to the campaign of Betancur's rival Julio Turbay, who won the election. Two years later, Pablo backed the formation of a new national political movement, called the New Liberal Party, headed locally by former justice minister Alberto Santofimio and nationally by the enormously popular reformer Luis Galán. In 1982 he ran for Congress himself. He stood as a substitute, for Envigado representative Jairo Ortega. Under the Colombian system, voters elect a representative and a substitute, who is allowed full privileges of the office and sits in when the primary delegate is unable to attend congressional sessions. Ortega and Pablo were elected in the same balloting that elevated Betancur, on his second try, to the presidency.

  So Pablo Escobar was a congressman. It was just a substitute position, but the victory seemed precisely the validation he had sought. He was now officially a respectable citizen, a representative of the people. The post conferred automatic judicial immunity, so Pablo could no longer be prosecuted for crimes under Colombian law. He was also entitled to a diplomatic visa, which he began using that year to take trips with his family to the United States. He posed in front of the White House with his young son, Juan Pablo, and began enjoying for the first time the mansions he had purchased for himself in Miami (one in Miami Beach and an $8 million spread north of the city in Plantation, Florida). Pablo had arrived. He told his friends that he intended someday soon to be president of Colombia.

  By then, much of the ruling class in Bogotá had made its peace with drug trafficking. Some saw cocaine simply as a new industry, one that had created a new, wealthy, young social class—and one highly fashionable at that. The narco millionaires were comparable, to some, to the class of oil millionaires who had become powerful at the turn of the century. Pablo himself would argue, with some truth (perhaps with the voice of his leftist brother-in-law in his ear), that the wealth in some of Colombia's most established families had its seeds in crime—slaving, tobacco, and quinine smuggling, land seizures during the civil wars, gold and emerald smuggling…Colombia's history was rife with examples. Just as these wealthy classes had shaped Colombia's political and social agendas throughout history, the narcos had their own demands. They wanted the state to legitimize their enterprise, and given the money they were ready to spread around and the building boom going on in Medellín, some intellectuals saw the cocaine trade as potential economic salvation for Andean nations, akin to the discovery of vast oil fields in the Persian Gulf. Although this new narco class was made up of wealthy capitalists, the subversive nature of cocaine trafficking appealed to leftist nationalists, who applauded the great transfer of wealth from north to south.

  The mistake Pablo made was to covet a public role in this process. He could have continued pulling strings in Colombian politics through a long, fat lifetime, but he insisted on stepping out from behind the curtain. Pablo wanted the limelight. He wanted to be both the contrabandista and the don. He went to great and vicious lengths during the seventies to erase evidence of his more sordid criminal past (while still flaunting it in private), and undertook an aggressive campaign to be seen as a benevolent, law-abiding citizen. He hired publicists and paid off journalists. He founded his own newspaper, called Medellín Cívica, which produced occasional fawning profiles of its benefactor.

  "Yes, I remember him," one Escobar admirer said in its pages. "His hands, almost priestlike, drawing parabolas of friendship and generosity in the air. Yes, I know him, his eyes weeping because there is not enough bread for all the nation's dinner tables. I have watched his tortured feelings when he sees street children—angels without toys, without a present, without a future."

  Pablo sponsored art exhibitions to raise money for charity and founded "Medellín Without Slums," an organization that sought to continue his housing programs for the poor. He took walking tours of the city slums with two local priests, whose friendship implied the blessings of the church. The only hint of Pablo's personal agenda in this civic outreach was a forum he sponsored on the subject of extradition at a popular bar and disco in Medellín called Kevin's. Colombia had signed a treaty with the United States in 1979 that recognized the shipment of illegal drugs to be a crime against the United States. As such, it called for suspected drug traffickers to be extradited for trial to the United States, and, if convicted, imprisoned. The prospect struck fear into the hearts of men like Pablo Escobar, who long ago had learned they had little to fear from Colombia's justice system. Unsurprisingly, Pablo's forum on extradition denounced the practice as a violation of "national sovereignty." He made banning extradition a point of nationalist pride, and the centerpiece of his political agenda.

  Pablo's election in 1982 marked the peak of his popularity and power. From any of his luxurious estates, it must have seemed to him that all of Colombia, if not all of South America, was within his grasp. In addition to his now frequent trips to the United States, he flew with his family to Spain and toured Europe. He had money and political position and was even beginning to exercise military power. The Colombian army's long-standing battle with Marxist guerrillas in the mountains and jungles had customarily been assisted by vigilantism—autodefensas underwritten by wealthy landowners and industrialists. Having assumed his place at the table of the nation's oligarchs, Pablo began to do the same. When the sister of his friends the Ochoas, Martha Nieves Ochoa, was kidnapped by M-19 in 1981 and held for an extravagant ransom, he and
the Ochoas and their fellow narco bosses formed a private militia to combat the guerrillas. The militia was dubbed Muerte a Secuestmdores (Death to Kidnappers), and it cloaked its bloody tactics (leaflets were dropped over a soccer stadium announcing the group's formation and promising to hang kidnappers from trees in public parks) in pious rhetoric against criminality, creating the rich and uniquely Colombian irony of a movement against criminal kidnappers funded and led by a longtime criminal kidnapper.

  Pablo still employed populist rhetoric when it suited him, but he and the other narco kingpins had long since found themselves natural enemies of the Communists in the hills. The Middle Magdalena Valley, the lush green divide between the Central and Occidental Cordilleras in the Antioquia region, had been a stronghold of the FARC, Colombia's dominant guerrilla group. Wealthy landowners had for decades employed private armies to protect their property and families and to terrorize campesinos who exhibited any sympathy for the rebels. By the mid-eighties, Pablo and his associates were the wealthiest landowners in Colombian history. They could afford to do more than just defend themselves and scare rural villagers. Armed with sophisticated military equipment and trained by Israeli and British mercenaries, they began to go after the guerrillas more aggressively than even the Colombian army had. In the process, these narco-funded paramilitary groups formed close ties with the army, and together they had the FARC, the ELN, and M-19 on the run. Battling Communists further legitimized Pablo and the other narcos in the eyes of some Colombians. Some elected officials and journalists—many of them paid well for their efforts—began to argue for the legalization of cocaine trafficking. This was an extreme position, one that would have turned Colombia into an outlaw nation, but it had the effect of making Pablo's campaign against extradition seem moderate and even reasonable. Colombia's leadership was increasingly inclined to be agreeable. Both candidates for president in 1982 reportedly had their campaigns underwritten by drug traffickers.