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

by Mark Bowden

  Gaviria had been in office only three weeks, but already he had demonstrated that his approach to dealing with Pablo would include both the carrot and the stick. Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc was the stick, and it continued its bloody work: in October another of Pablo's cousins, Gustavo's brother Luis, was killed "in a shoot-out with the police." The new president also extradited three suspected drug dealers in the first two months of his administration (the twenty-fifth suspected trafficker extradited since Galán's murder in August 1989). But Gaviria also offered the carrot. In his acceptance speech, he had drawn a careful distinction between terrorism and drug trafficking. Drug trafficking was an international problem, he said, one that Colombia could not be expected to solve alone. But terrorism was a national problem; it was the national problem. The two issues were separate, and he would deal with them separately. His first priority would be to end the violence, even if that meant striking a deal with the likes of Pablo Escobar. Gaviria doubted at that point if the Colombian police and judicial system were capable of arresting, trying, and punishing Pablo anyway. The nation's best hopes were to keep the pressure on and to offer the drug boss a deal sweet enough to make him surrender. Just a week after Turbay was taken, Gaviria issued a decree offering Pablo and other indicted narcos immunity from extradition and reduced sentences if they would surrender and confess. The decree was seen purely as a reaction to the kidnapping, which it was not. It was the first step in a plan Gaviria had thought through carefully.

  Not everyone agreed with him. General Maza, the survivor of two grotesque assassination attempts, put it bluntly: "This country won't be put right as long as Escobar is alive."

  Pablo answered with two more prominent kidnappings. Taken at gunpoint were Francisco Santos, the editor of the newspaper El Tiempo and the son of its owner and publisher, and Marina Montoya, the sister of former president Barco's top aide. He demanded that extradition be outlawed and that the government spell out exactly what kind of confession was required for surrender, provide a special prison for those who did surrender, and offer protection for their families.

  The kidnappings demonstrated a shrewd understanding of Bogotá's close-knit, incestuous power structure. They literally struck home with Bogotá's elite, of which Gaviria was a part. And they produced results. A committee of powerful citizens calling themselves the Notables formed to pressure Gaviria into acceding to the kidnappers' demands. Among the prominent citizens in the group were Julio Turbay, the former president whose daughter was a captive, and Alfonso López, the former president who had met with Pablo in Panama City years before. The group began corresponding with Pablo's chief attorney in Bogotá, Guido Parra, looking for a peaceful answer.

  They also met with Gaviria to plead their case, applying excruciating personal pressure. On one visit to the Presidential Palace, Turbay and Juan Santos, the owner and publisher of El Tiempo, found the new president in a dejected mood, weighed down by the pressure of his responsibility.

  "This is a very difficult moment," said Gaviria. "I've wanted to help you, and I have been helping within the limits of the possible, but pretty soon I won't be able to do anything at all."

  Turbay, who could more easily put himself in Gaviria's shoes, was sadly empathetic.

  "Señor President," he said, "you are proceeding as you must, and we must act as the fathers of our children. I understand and ask you not to do anything that might create a problem for you as head of state." In García Márquez's account of the meeting, he wrote that Turbay pointed then to the presidential chair. "If I were sitting there," he said, "I would do the same."

  García Márquez wrote, "Gaviria stood, pale as death."

  Less empathetic was Nydia Quintero, the former wife of Turbay and the mother of the hostage. She had been in touch with Pablo through intermediaries and came to plead with Gaviria to call off Colonel Martinez, whose efforts were now forcing Pablo to run from one hiding place to the next. Gaviria explained that this was something he could not do. Law enforcement, he explained, was his duty, and nonnegotiable. Ordering the police to call off their pursuit of Pablo would be asking them to ignore their duty. Besides, the president knew what Pablo was after. "It was one thing for us to offer an alternative judicial policy, but suspending operations would not have meant freedom for the hostages but only that we had stopped hunting down Escobar," he would later explain to García Márquez. Quintero was outraged by the president's attitude. She found him cold and utterly unconcerned about her daughter's life.

  The Notables, meanwhile, began issuing public statements of their own. Henceforth, one read, they alone would speak for the families of the hostages. In return for releasing the hostages, they proposed, they would urge the government to consider Pablo and the Extraditables a political movement, not a band of criminals. As such, they were entitled to the same treatment the government had given Colombia's guerrillas. The group M-19, most infamous for the Palace of justice siege, had negotiated an agreement with the government the previous year to abandon violent struggle and become a legal political party. Its members had been granted amnesty for acts committed during their struggle against the state. The Notables wanted the government to offer the same kind of deal to Pablo. But on the same day their statement was published, October 11, Gaviria instructed his minister of justice to reiterate that the only deal awaiting Pablo was the one he had offered.

  "The letter from the Notables is almost cynical," Pablo wrote Parra angrily from hiding. "We are supposed to release the hostages quickly because the government is dragging its feet as it studies our situation? Can they really believe we will let ourselves be deceived again?" Pablo wrote that there was no reason to change his position "since we have not received positive replies to the requests made in our first communication. This is a negotiation, not a game to find out who is clever and who is stupid."

  Gaviria gave more ground. On October 8, he offered "legal clarifications" of the earlier decree, making it clear that Pablo or any of the others could choose the least significant charge against them and escape prosecution for all others by pleading guilty to it. It would also continue to ensure that they would not be extradited, no matter what new charges were brought against them in captivity.

  Pablo was interested, but he wanted more. In a letter to his lawyer Parra, Pablo explained that he wanted the president to promise, "in writing, in a decree, that under no circumstances will we be extradited, not for any crime, not to any country." He reiterated that he wanted to control the circumstances of his imprisonment, and he wanted protection for his wife and children while he was locked away.

  In November he upped the ante once more. The day after his cousin Luis was killed, Pablo's men kidnapped Maruja Pachon, the sister-in-law of the slain Galán and the wife of a prominent congressman, and her sister-in-law, the congressman's sister. An effort to abduct the granddaughter of former president Betancur failed. Defiant bulletins from the Extraditables accused Colonel Martinez's force of atrocities in Medellín. One claimed that the Search Bloc was rounding up young men in neighborhoods sympathetic to Pablo and shooting them down.

  "Why have search warrants been exchanged for execution orders?" one bulletin read. "Why are search-for posters being distributed and rewards being offered for people who are not wanted by any judicial authority?"

  Another acknowledged responsibility for the kidnappings and noted, in particular, that "the detention of journalist Maruja Pachon is our response to the recent tortures and abductions perpetrated in the city of Medellín by the same state security forces [Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc] so often mentioned in our communiqués."

  Pablo's tactics were paying off. His bombing campaign had terrified the public, and polls showed growing support for striking a deal to end the violence. Just weeks before Christmas, he ordered three of the hostages released, part of the news team who had been taken with Diana Turbay. Gaviria responded immediately, again sweetening the terms for surrender. In return for releasing the hostages unharmed and working to end
the plague of violence in the country—fifteen hundred deaths had been attributed to the drug traffickers in the previous two years—the president now offered the narco kings, in the words of Gabriel García Márquez, "the gift of imprisonment." The president promised that those who confessed to even a single minor crime would serve only a reduced prison term. Fabio Ochoa turned himself in on December 18, the day after the new decree was issued. "I feel the same happiness on entering jail as someone else feels when leaving it," he said. "I only wanted to end the nightmare that my life had become." Over the next two months his two brothers, Jorge and Juan David, did the same.

  By the end of 1990 Pablo's life was also a nightmare. Colonel Martinez had come close to catching him several times and had chipped away at the people around him. The deaths of his cousins and brother-in-law, the surrenders of the Ochoas…his organization was falling apart. The man who just a year earlier had dozens of luxurious estates to chose from was now sleeping some nights in the woods in the mountains, running to stay ahead of his determined pursuers. He dared not speak by radio or telephone, so he sent messages by courier. He had neither the time nor the means of controlling his cocaine business, so every month that he spent on the run he lost money and standing. By the end of 1990 he saw only one sure way out of his predicament. He would escape—into the arms of the Colombian government.

  But not until he had arranged the terms exactly as he wanted them. Gaviria had once promised never to negotiate with the narcos, but he was now dealing regularly through intermediaries with Parra. The lawyer was despised, distrusted, and feared by many in Bogotá for representing Pablo. Just days after warning the government publicly that it should not trust Parra, the president of the Colombian Association of Journalists, Alejandro Jaramillo, disappeared. But as much as people now feared him, Parra evidently lived in fear of his client. Delivering a message from the hostage Francisco Santos to his family, Parra broke down and wept.

  "Remember," he told them. "I won't be killed by the police. I'll be killed by Pablo Escobar because I know too much."

  Pablo still had good reason to hold out, even though life on the run was miserable. Gaviria had called an assembly to rewrite the Colombian constitution, which presented Pablo with a chance to have a prohibition on extradition written into the founding document of the state. Extradition had never been that popular, and with Pablo's bombings, his kidnapping, and his plata o plomo strategy, there were more than enough votes. If he could hold out until the assembly formally drew up and enacted the document, it would crown his biggest victory.

  So the dying continued. In the first two months of 1991 there was an average of twenty murders a day in Colombia, and in Medellín a total of 457 police had been killed since Colonel Martinez had started his hunt. Young gunmen in that city were being paid 5 million pesos for killing a cop. When the Search Bloc shot two more of Pablo's top sicarios in January 1991, Pablo announced that two of his prize hostages would be executed in return. Marina Montoya was murdered on January 24. Her kidnappers placed a bag over her head and marched her from the place where she had been held captive for four months, a slender woman of sixty with long white hair, and shot her six times in the head. Her body was found in an empty lot north of Bogotá. Someone had stolen her shoes. Diana Turbay was killed ten days later when police forces found where she was being held and tried to rescue her. She was evidently killed in the crossfire. The deaths of these women, well known and loved in the social circles of Bogotá's elite, had exactly the effect intended.

  Nydia Quintero, the mother of Diana Turbay, asked for an audience with Gaviria.

  "They killed Diana, Señor President, and it's your doing; it's your fault," she said. "It's what comes of having a soul of stone."

  Monica de Greiff, the minister of justice, resigned. She had received chilling phone calls from would-be kidnappers, who had detailed for her the progress of her young son on his way home from school, just to let her know they could take him at any time. Gaviria responded by extending his offer of immunity from extradition. If Pablo turned himself in and confessed to something, anything, he would not have to worry about facing justice even for these fresh outrages. The new president was all but begging Pablo to stop.

  The drug boss's lawyers continued to negotiate. Pablo insisted on being seen not as a criminal but as a revolutionary. He was not seeking a role in the government, but in return for putting down his arms he expected significant concessions. It was simple power versus power, his guns, bombs, and sicarios against the state's. By now the issue was only incidentally connected to drug trafficking. Pablo was playing a dangerous game, because if the colonel and Centra Spike succeeded in finding him first, he would most likely be killed or, if not, extradited immediately. He had been indicted in three states in the United States. The alternative being worked out by his lawyers may have been the most generous plea bargain of all time, but it did represent a significant compromise. If he could hold out and continue to evade Colonel Martinez, whatever prison time he agreed to serve would be a far cry from the unparalleled luxury he had enjoyed for the last fifteen years. He would have his own special "prison," which would be built in his hometown of Envigado on a hill called La Catedral, on land that he owned. He would pay to have it built. The guards in the prison would work not for the Bureau of Prisons but for the government of Envigado, which Pablo effectively controlled. The only inmates would be his closest associates and sicarios. The PNC—most particularly the Search Bloc—would not be allowed within twenty kilometers of its gates. Prison would give Pablo a comfortable, safe place to settle down and reestablish his dominance of the cocaine-trafficking business. If his lawyers managed to limit his term, he would emerge in a few years cleansed of his sins in the public eye, a fabulously rich, powerful Medellín citizen, Don Pablo, exactly what he had always wanted to be. Who could say where his ambition might take him from there?

  Just as Gaviria applied both a carrot and a stick, so did Pablo. On April 30, his sicarios killed Enrique Low, a former justice minister who had spoken out in favor of extradition. Earlier Low had been delivered a small wooden coffin with a tiny Colombian flag attached, soaked in blood. Pablo also struck a blow to the president by having one of Gaviria's cousins and oldest intimates, Fortunato Gaviria, abducted from a finca in Pereira and killed. The autopsy showed that he had been buried alive. The president's boyish manner was by now nearly crushed. He looked defeated, moving through the Presidential Palace heavy with sadness and frustration, increasingly alone and blamed for the country's tribulations. "I was the only Colombian who didn't have a president to complain to," he would say later.

  But his efforts finally paid off. Over the spring Pablo began gradually releasing the remaining hostages, the final two, Santos and Pachon, on May 20. Then, after all these months of uncertainty and death, Pablo surrendered.

  5

  Pablo orchestrated the endgame through a popular Catholic televangelist. He claimed he had chosen the date for many reasons, but the most telling one was that on that day, June 19, 1991, over the loud protests of U.S. Ambassador Thomas McNamara and Bogotá DEA chief Robert Bonner and the opposition of Gaviria's government, the Constitutional Assembly voted to formally outlaw extradition by a vote of fifty to thirteen.

  The surrender had been arranged by Pablo's lawyers, after hammering out the last of the terms with the government. His specially built Envigado prison, La Catedral, was still under construction but habitable. His celebrity hostages—those who had survived—were home with their families, trying to resume normal lives. Word leaked that Pablo intended to surrender, and the country collectively held its breath. The news seemed too good to be true.

  He awakened early that morning, which was not his custom. He ate breakfast with his brother Roberto and his mother and sisters in Medellín. They were happy to see him. In the months he had been on the run, he had not dared to spend time with them. Pablo was still negotiating the final details on the phone at nine in the morning.

  He emerge
d from hiding like a man expecting to be shot. To secure the short helicopter flight from the agreed-upon rendezvous point to the new prison, high in the hills beyond the southern edge of the city, his lawyers had negotiated a ban on all other flights—"Not even birds will fly over Medellín today," Defense Minister Raphael Pardo wrote in his diary. At midafternoon, a twelve-seat Bell helicopter took off for the prearranged spot, a mansion with a private, impeccably groomed soccer field on the grounds to its rear. Aboard was Father Fernando Garcia and Congressman Alberto Villamizar, a man Pablo had once tried to kill. Villamizar's wife and sister had been among the ten prominent hostages Pablo had taken the year before. Both had been released unharmed. Villamizar had been instrumental in working out the details of this moment. With the priest and the congressman was the drug boss's old associate Jorge Ochoa, who had been released from prison temporarily at Pablo's request As described in García Márquez's book News of a Kidnapping, there were about thirty armed men waiting on the soccer field as the chopper set down. About half of the gunmen moved forward, surrounding a short, chubby man with black hair to his shoulders, a leathery suntan, sunglasses, and a thick black beard that reached to his chest He wore a light blue cotton jacket, an Italian shirt, blue jeans, and his trademark new white tennis shoes, and he carried a portable phone and battery pack in a briefcase. Pablo stopped to quickly embrace several of his bodyguards. Then he gestured to two of the men to board the helicopter and climbed up himself.

  He extended a hand to the congressman.

  "How are you, Dr. Villamizar?"

  "How's it going, Pablo?" Villamizar said, shaking the prisoner's hand.

  Pablo looked over and smiled at his friend Ochoa, whom he had not seen for months.

  "And you," he said. "In the middle of this right to the end."