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

by Mark Bowden

  At the door to the warden's house, Popeye suddenly grabbed Mendoza and threw him through the entranceway and into a wall, pressing the barrel of an automatic pistol to the side of his face and screaming, "I'm going to kill the guy! I've always wanted to kill a vice minister!" Then, thrusting his face right into Mendoza's, he yelled, "You son of a bitch. You motherfucker. You have been trying to get us for years, and now I will get you." Popeye used a peculiar Medellín euphemism for killing. The term he used was despegue, or "takeoff," in the sense of launching someone into the grave, or the afterlife. Mendoza was so frightened that he felt removed, as if he were watching the scene outside himself, as though it were happening to someone else. Popeye moaned and pleaded like a psychopath.

  Roberto Escobar, Pablo's brother, intervened, speaking to Popeye calmly, respectfully. "Popeye, you know, not now. Maybe later. Relax. He's worth more to us alive at this moment."

  They sat Mendoza down on a sofa in the warden's living room, and Pablo addressed him. The drug boss now had a pistol in his hand. "Señor Vice Minister," he said. "From this moment you are my prisoner. If the army comes, you will be the first to die."

  "Don't think that by retaining me you will stop them," Mendoza said, believing his argument. "If you take us hostage you can forget about everything. They have heavy machine guns, loads of them. They'll kill everybody here! You can't escape!"

  Pablo laughed.

  "Doctor," he said, speaking softly, leaning in close to Mendoza. "You still don't understand. These people all work for me."

  Then everyone began to make phone calls. There were so many phones it was comical. There was a whole bank of regular phones connected to wires, and most of the men had cell phones. Mendoza remembered all the memos that had crossed his desk in the past year requesting authorization for one or two new phone lines for La Catedral, arguing that without the new lines they would have no way of calling for help in an emergency.

  "Why was I getting all these requests for phones?" he asked Navas. "This place looks like a Telecom center."

  Again Pablo laughed. Moments later he was on the phone with someone, evidently a lawyer. Others were talking to family members who had been seeing the reports on TV. Mendoza heard Pablo talking to his wife, calming her.

  "We're having a little problem here. We're trying to solve it. You know what to do if it doesn't work."

  Then he handed Mendoza the cell phone.

  "Call the president," he demanded.

  "The president will not take the phone," Mendoza said.

  "Get somebody to take the phone, because you are about to die."

  Mendoza dialed the president's office, and the phone was answered by Miguel Silva, a staff worker for the president and a friend of Mendoza's.

  "You are being held hostage?" Silva asked.

  "Yes."

  Silva abruptly hung up.

  "Let me kill him, patrón," pleaded Popeye.

  Then Escobar disappeared, and Mendoza waited. How had he gotten himself into this fix? Look what a mess he had made of the assignment given to him by his friend the president, who had asked him to solve the problem of Pablo Escobar. Ha! What a fool he had been to believe in the power of the state. Mendoza had always known that the narcos, and particularly Pablo Escobar, wielded tremendous influence, but the ultimate authority, he had always assumed, rested with the state. Once the government roused itself, he felt sure, it would throw off these evil, violent men. That's why he had never lost heart in the years of battling with everyone to do something about Pablo, and why he had stepped forward tonight to confront the man himself in the jail. Surely once Escobar saw that the government really meant business, that an entire brigade of the army had him surrounded, he would realize that he was outgunned and would back down. But now it was clear that the opposite was true. Mendoza had sat in the Presidential Palace that morning and felt the enthusiasm and energy of a nation deciding to act. They had confronted Pablo and…who had backed down? The troops outside seemed frozen in place. Suddenly General Pardo's reluctance to move in seemed less the product of bureaucratic confusion and more the posture of a man who was too frightened to act. And that was the kind interpretation. Perhaps it was corruption; perhaps the general had been paid not to act. Mendoza felt so stupid. These people all work for me.

  Still, he did not feel angry with himself. He, Eduardo Mendoza, had done what he could. All through that year he had pushed for a crackdown on Pablo, and he had entered this prison with the hope of saving lives. Remembering Pablo's dynamite trucks and assassination squads, he reflected, I tried to save as many people as I could. With that thought he resigned himself to his fate.

  The drug lord returned after about five minutes. The pistol he had held in his hand was now tucked in his pants. Mendoza had the distinct impression that Escobar had talked to someone, probably a lawyer, because his manner was different. He plopped down beside Mendoza on the sofa.

  "Doctor, you are detained, but you are not going to be killed," he said. "If anyone touches you, he will have to answer to me."

  "You cannot escape from here," Mendoza said. "The army has the prison surrounded."

  Escobar smiled at him patronizingly.

  "You had an agreement with me, and you are breaking it."

  Mendoza had decided not to argue with him. Then Escobar said something that Mendoza didn't understand. "Doctor, I know you guys are worried about those killings. Don't worry. These are problems among mafioso. They do not concern you."

  Then Escobar stood up and left the room, and Mendoza did not see him again.

  He and Navas were taken back out into the prison and marched up to wait in Pablo's "cell," a spacious suite, handsomely furnished. Mendoza noted that all the items that had supposedly been removed months ago were back in place—stereo equipment, big-screen TV, giant bed. He wondered if they had ever been removed.

  Popeye and another gunman kept watch over them. Popeye had exchanged his automatic pistol for a shotgun. Now and then he would strut up to Mendoza, pump it once or twice, and grin. Mendoza just sat and waited. He no longer worried as much about being killed by Popeye, but was certain that he would die when, and if, the army invaded.

  They sat like that through the night. Mendoza wrapped a poncho around his shoulders, but it didn't do much to ward off the chill.

  4

  At the Presidential Palace, Gaviria didn't hesitate when he heard his friend had been taken hostage. Why in the world had Eduardo gone into the jail? What a stupid, stupid thing to do! The president had planned a trip to Spain for that evening to take part in celebrations marking the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the Americas. He had postponed the trip in the afternoon, as this crisis at La Catedral had worsened. Now he demanded that the general outside the prison attack immediately—and the general refused.

  He refused!

  Gaviria ordered Defense Minister Rafael Pardo to send a special forces unit to Envigado immediately to make the assault. Speechwriters at the palace began working on a draft of a statement the president would make to the nation the following morning. In the statement, the president would say, unfortunately, Eduardo Mendoza, his friend and vice minister of justice, and Hernando Navas, the national director of prisons, had been tragically killed in the shoot-out.

  When the special forces units arrived at El Dorado Airport in Bogotá, there were no pilots on hand to fly the C-130 transport. So they waited for pilots. It was 4:30 A.M. when the strike force finally descended toward José María Córdova Airport in Rionegro, outside Medellín. The dense fog prevented them from landing for a time, and it was early in the morning before they could start up the mountain in trucks. On the way up, regular army units steered them along the wrong road, which took them back down to the airport.

  The blundering progress of this strike force was being reported on radio and TV nationally, and observed by the prisoners inside La Catedral, and their hostages. They all waited in a state of anxious boredom.

  "How do you m
anage to keep so slender?" Mendoza was asked by one of the gunmen, a thick, dark-haired man with a wide belly.

  "I'm a vegetarian."

  "What should I eat to lose weight?" he asked.

  Mendoza told him to try eating more fruits and vegetables.

  At about two o'clock in the morning the man left; he reappeared carrying a plate filled with apple slices.

  "Now I am going to start a healthy diet," he said.

  "What are you going to do that for?" asked Popeye. "We're all going to be dead by seven o'clock."

  Mendoza certainly thought so. He could hear the preparations on the shortwave radio. He heard when a special forces unit finally arrived and relieved the reluctant general outside. Then he heard the various units readying themselves, calling in with their bizarre code names, checking off their readiness.

  Mendoza was familiar with this unit, and what he knew scared him. It had been created after the debacle in 1985, when the guerrilla group M-19 group had stormed the Palace of justice and taken three hundred hostages, including most of the nation's Supreme Court When the government took the ministry back by force, the raid killed more than one hundred people, including eleven justices. This disaster had prompted the creation of an American-trained special forces unit recruited from both the army and the national police. Shortly after the unit was formed, Mendoza was at his office in Bogotá when he got an emergency phone call telling him that the U.S. embassy nearby was being violently attacked. He phoned a friend at the embassy who told him all was quiet there.

  "Then could it be the ambassador's residence?" Mendoza asked.

  "I'll check," his friend said.

  He called back seconds later.

  "No, Eduardo, the ambassador's residence is quiet; it's your building that's under attack!"

  The police were conducting a raid at his own apartment building nearby. Months later, when it was all sorted out, it was revealed that the new special forces unit had been hired by a rich Bogotá emerald and drug dealer to assassinate a rival and make it look like a government operation. The plan had backfired because the primary target of the hit had crawled through the ceiling and escaped. Every other person in the suite had been killed. In the ensuing scandal the unit had been disbanded, its leadership fired. It had only recently been reconstituted, and this mission, here at La Catedral, was the first time President Gaviria had ordered them into action. Mendoza was now terrified to be on the receiving end of its assault. He knew that, unlike the timid army brigade, these men would attack, furiously.

  "Can I go outside for a look?" he asked his captors.

  They let him step out on the porch. Sunlight had begun to illuminate the fog, but he still could not see for more than a few feet. Beside him, just outside the door to Escobar's room, was a table covered with machine guns and ammunition. He took off the poncho, even though he was freezing, and stood out in the cold, hoping that the attacking forces would see his business suit and not shoot him. As he stood there shaking, he heard the first shots of the assault. There were explosions and screams.

  His captors pulled him inside and began to plead with him.

  "Doctor! Please! They are going to kill us! Help us!"

  "I've been telling you that all night!" Mendoza shouted at them. "Now it's too late!"

  He crawled toward the bathroom and tried to curl himself up behind the toilet, the sturdiest fixture, but then decided it was too dangerous there because there was so much glass that would shatter. He crawled back out to the living room, where Navas and one of the prison guards were crouching. Mendoza was terrified. The sound of shooting and explosions was louder now. In a kind of trance, he stood and tried to walk out of the room, hoping to see the attacking forces and speak to them, but a prison guard screamed at him to get on the floor unless he wanted to be killed.

  He tried to move Pablo's mattress to get behind it, but it was too heavy. Even with one of the gunmen helping, they couldn't budge it. So Mendoza, exhausted and numb with cold and fear, gave up. He stretched prone on the floor and waited. He looked at the gunmen arrayed around him in the room and thought, This is how I'm going to die.

  But he did not die. A concussion grenade exploded just outside the room, and as he instinctively recoiled, a gun barrel was jammed against his forehead. The invader, a black Colombian special forces sergeant, didn't shoot A powerful man, he threw the vice minister against the wall and sat on him. Mendoza stayed pinned under the man through shooting and explosions. When it was clear that Pablo's gunmen had surrendered the room without a fight, the sergeant turned to him. Mendoza saw a kind face, with deep wrinkles at the eyes.

  "We're going to try to get out of here," the soldier said. "Just look at my boot. Don't think of anything. Just look at my boot."

  He began crawling, and Mendoza followed. They crawled out to the porch and behind a short brick wall, past a row of doors.

  "When I tell you to run, run," the sergeant ordered. On cue, Mendoza leapt up and took off uphill for the main gate as fast as he could go, arms churning, blinded by the smoke, confused by the explosions and gunfire. The officer ran behind him shouting, "Run! Run! Run!" and Mendoza sprinted faster than he ever had. He ran so recklessly and hard that he careened into a wall, breaking two ribs, but kept on running in such a hinging panic that he felt no pain and would discover the broken bones only later. He ran out the main gate and up the hill to where General Pardo and his men were positioned, right where he had left them hours before.

  "General, is Escobar dead?" Mendoza gasped.

  Pardo said nothing. He stared at him with a vacant, slightly amused expression and shrugged. It instantly dawned on Mendoza what had happened.

  "Oh, my God!" Mendoza cried. "He got away? How could he get away!"

  5

  Morris D.Busby, the U.S. ambassador to Colombia, was awakened by two phone calls early on Wednesday, July 22, 1992, at a house in Chevy Chase, Maryland, where he and his wife were staying with friends. Both calls were from the embassy in Bogatá. The first was welcome news. Colombian President César Gaviria had finally decided to move Pablo Escobar to a new prison, something Busby had been urging for some time, and the transfer was under way. Shortly after that call came another, telling him that Pablo had somehow escaped through an entire brigade of the Colombian army, roughly four hundred men. The ambassador had spent too much time in Colombia to be surprised by that. He cut short his vacation and flew back to Bogotá later that morning.

  This embarrassing turn of events for Colombia might be just the break he needed. Ever since he had been assigned to the embassy in Bogotá the previous year, handpicked for the assignment in large part because it had become such a dangerous one, Busby had been eager to make an example of Escobar, but was frustrated by the drug boss's deal with the government. Here was the most notorious drug trafficker in the world perched on a spectacular Andes mountaintop, running his cocaine business surrounded and protected by the Colombian army. Current estimates were that seventy to eighty tons of cocaine were being shipped from Colombia to the United States every month, and Pablo controlled the bulk of it.

  At the Presidential Palace later that same day, Busby found President Gaviria furiously pacing in his office. Gaviria had been up all night receiving one outrageous report after another. The whole episode illustrated his powerlessness. It had taken more than two years, hundreds of lives, and hundreds of millions of dollars to hound the murderous drug billionaire into his surrender. Now, in one night, it had all come undone. Waiting through the president's lamentations were Joe Toft, the flinty DEA office chief, and Bill Wagner, the "political secretary" who was in fact Bogotá's CIA station chief.

  Gaviria was fed up. He had been living with the threat of Pablo Escobar for years. All the time he'd campaigned for president he had expected to be killed by the drug boss. He had seen him in person only once, in 1983, the day Pablo had taken his seat in Congress. The short, mild-mannered economist's fondest hope on taking office two years before was for Pablo to just go away,
at least for a while. Colombia was in the midst of rewriting its constitution, an enormously important and historic task that could establish a stable undergirding for the nation for the first time since La Violencia. The rebels in the mountains and jungles were on the run. The government had ended, at least temporarily, the raging narco violence by striking their deal with Pablo. A new constitution, assuring democratic representation and addressing some of the long-simmering land-use issues at the heart of the civil war, would strengthen the state and farther disarm the guerrillas, and would assure an impressive legacy for Gaviria. The last thing he needed was for this damned out law to be running loose again, setting off his truck and car bombs and unleashing his sicarios, sowing fear, corruption, and dissent. That Pablo had been able to simply vanish from his "maximum-security prison" was a huge international setback, confirming all of the worst assumptions about the country. It made Colombia look like a narcocracy.

  The president was sure of one thing. This was the last time he and the country would be humiliated by Pablo Escobar. There would be no more deals, no more special prisons. Pablo would be hunted down and killed. It was a terrible thing to hunt down a man as you would an animal, but now there was no other way. Pablo was a criminal with no restraints, no boundaries. He could do anything; he would do anything.

  The president continued to pace and vent. Who had ever had to face down a criminal like this? What country had ever been held hostage like this by one terrible man? What leader of a nation of twenty-seven million people had ever felt his own life was at stake in the pursuit of a criminal? Someone with the power to walk right out of prison and through an entire brigade of the army. An entire brigade!