by Mark Bowden
When they found him, they were going to kill him. It was a practice so commonplace throughout South America that there was even an expression for it: la ley de fuga, the law of escape.
11
The American soldiers, agents, and spies, the pilots, technicians, and analysts were just getting acquainted, late in the summer of 1992, with a personality that had preoccupied Colombia now for nearly a decade. In September, more than a month after his escape, Pablo felt secure enough to grant a rambling and defiant interview with Radio Cadena Nacíonal. Once again, he denied being a criminal. The interviewer began by asking tough questions but was quickly disarmed by Pablo's manner. The broadcast degenerated into a fawning celebrity interview. Pablo lied fluently and good-naturedly. Philosophical, self-deprecating, witty—he didn't sound like a man running for his life. The tone was infuriating to his pursuers, as if he were taunting them.
"Do you regret having surrendered a year ago?" he was asked.
"At least, I regret having escaped," he said. He explained that he had left the prison only because he feared for his life. "Does one seek escape alternatives when you have arrived at a jail to which you have voluntarily surrendered?" he asked.
"Were you the man in charge in the prison?"
"I wasn't in charge…[but] I was not just any prisoner. I was the product of a peace plan whose cost was not high for the government…. They simply gave me a dignified prison and special conditions previously agreed to by the government, with the lawyers and with me."
Pablo downplayed and defended the luxuries in La Catedral, the parties. "Even if it is the most beautiful mansion in the world, if you are limited in your movements and watched by tower guards with weapons, and soldiers, then that is a prison," he said. "But I am not going to evade responsibility in the sense that I permitted some curtains and some special furniture and I am willing to pay for that error in accepting the most humble cell in any jail in Antioquia, as long as my rights are respected and I am guaranteed that I will not be moved for any reason."
"Is your head worth more than the one billion pesos offered by the government and more than the two and a half billion pesos offered by the government of the United States?"
"It seems my problem has become political, and could be important for the reelection of the president of the United States."
"At this moment, you have become once again the most sought-after man in the world. The Colombian authorities, other secret services, DEA agents, the Cali cartel, former accomplices of your activities, deserters of your organization, indirect or direct victims of terrorist acts. Whom do you fear the most? How do you defend yourself from them?"
"I don't fear my enemies because they are more powerful. It has been my lot to face difficult circumstances, but I always do it with dignity."
"For you, what is life?"
"It is a space of time fall of agreeable and disagreeable surprises."
"Have you ever felt afraid of dying?"
"I never think about death."
"When you escaped, did you think about death?"
"When I escaped, I thought about my wife, my children, my family, and all the people who depend upon me."
"Do you believe in God and the hereafter? In heaven and hell?"
"I don't like to speak publicly about God. God, to me, is absolutely personal and private…. I think all the saints help me, but my mother prays a lot for me to the child Jesus of Atocha, and that is why I built Him a chapel in Barrio Pablo Escobar. The largest painting in the prison was of the child Jesus of Atocha."
"Why have you been willing to have yourself killed?"
"For my family and for the truth."
"Do you accept that you have ever committed a crime or had someone killed?"
"That answer I can only give in confession to a priest."
"How do you think everything will end for you?"
"You can never foretell that, although I wish the best."
"If it depended on you, how would you like to end your life?"
"I would like to die standing in the year 2047."
"Under what circumstances would you commit suicide?"
"I have never thought about those types of solutions."
"Of all the things that you have done, which are the ones of which you are most proud, and of which are you ashamed?"
"I am proud of my family and of my people. I am not ashamed of anything."
"Whom do you hate, and why?"
"In my conflicts I try not to end up hating anybody."
"What advice have you given your children? What would you do if either of them dedicated themselves to illegal or criminal activities?"
"I know that my children love me and understand my fight. I always want the best for them."
"What do your wife and children mean to you?"
"They are my best treasure."
"Do you accept that you are mafioso? Does it bother you that someone says that about you?"
"The communications media has called me that thousands of times. If it bothered me, I would be in an insane asylum."
"What is it that most angers you and gets you out of control?"
"You can get angry, but you cannot lose your control. I get angry at hypocrisy and lies."
"Do you accept that they say you are a drug dealer or a criminal, or don't you really care?"
"My conscience is clear, but I would respond as a Mexican comedian once said, ‘It is completely inconclusive.'"
"People say that you always get what you want…"
"I have not said that I have always gotten what I wanted. If I had always gotten what I wanted, everything would be rosy and I would calmly be drinking some coffee in the Rionegro Plaza or the park at Envigado. I fight tirelessly, but I have suffered too much."
"What is the key to your immense power?"
"I don't have any special powers. The only thing that gives me strength to keep on fighting is the energy of the people who love and support me."
"Corruption. To what extent has it gotten in the government?"
"Corruption exists in all the countries of the world. The important thing would be to know the causes of corruption in order to avoid it and stop it."
"Of what do you repent?"
"All human beings make mistakes, but I don't repent of anything because I take everything as an experience and channel it into something positive."
"If you were born again, what would you do? What would you repeat and what would you dedicate yourself to?"
"I would not do those things that I thought would turn out right but which came out wrong. I would repeat everything that has been good and nice."
"What did your wife and children say when you were in prison and what did they think of your activities?"
"They have loved and supported me always. And they accept my cause because they know it and understand it"
"Do you consider yourself an ordinary man or someone of exceptional intelligence?"
"I am a simple citizen, born in the village of El Tablazo of the municipality of Rionegro."
"Have you, personally, ever taken drugs?"
"I am an absolutely healthy man. I don't smoke and I don't consume liquor. Although, with respect to marijuana, I'd have the same reply that the president of Spain gave when he was asked about it."
"Do you consider it a mistake on your part to have entered politics?"
"No, I do not accept it as a mistake. I am sure that if I had participated in other elections, I would have defeated everyone in Antioquia by an overwhelming majority."
"Why so much money? What do you do with it? Is your fortune as large as the international magazines say it is?"
"My money obeys a social function. That is clear and everyone knows about it."
"If you had to make a profile of yourself, what would you say? To you, who is Pablo Escobar?"
"It is very difficult to portray one's self. I prefer that others analyze me and that others judge me."
"Why did you enter drug t
rafficking?"
"In Colombia, people enter this type of activity as a form of protest. Others enter it because of ambition."
"Do you feel yourself bigger than Al Capone?"
"I am not that tall, but I think Al Capone was a few centimeters shorter than I am."
"Do you consider yourself to be the most powerful man in Colombia? The richest? One of the most powerful?"
"Neither one nor the other."
"Did you feel complimented when the magazine Semana presented you as Robin Hood?"
"It was interesting and it gave me peace of mind."
"By temperament, are you violent and proud?"
"Those who know me know that I have a good sense of humor and I always have a smile on my face, even in very difficult moments. And I'll say something else: I always sing in the shower."
LOS PEPES
October 1992–October 1993
1
On January 30, 1993, a car bomb exploded in Bogotá, blowing a crater several feet deep in the street and sidewalk and taking a savage bite out of a bookstore. Even by the capital city's weary standards this was a nightmare. The bookstore bomb was estimated to have contained 220 pounds of dynamite. Inside the store, crowds of children and their parents had been buying school snpplies for a new semester. Torn body parts were strewn about. In all, twenty-one people were killed, seventy more injured. Bill Wagner, the CIA station chief, recoiled when he stepped past the police barricades into the horror of the bombing's aftermath. In a gutter running with blood he saw the severed hand of a child.
He thought: We are going to kill this son of a bitch if it's the last thing I do on this earth.
Despite the determination of the United States and Colombia, the loss of hundreds of lives, the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, and the deployment of elite U.S. military and espionage units, the half-year-old hunt for Pablo Escobar had so far yielded little but frustration. Colonel Martinez's discipline and Delta Force training had vastly improved the speed and efficiency of the Search Bloc, which was headquartered at the Holguin school in Medellín. It now felt almost like home to Colonel Santos, the Delta sergeant major in charge, and the other Delta operators who regularly rotated through. There had been some successes, most notably October 28, 1992, when Brance "Tyson" Muñoz, one of Pablo's most notorious sicarios, was killed in the proverbial "gun battle with national police." But that was about all they had to celebrate.
The Search Bloc had learned Tyson's whereabouts thanks to the U.S. embassy's reward program. Ambassador Busby had tried to get the Colombian government to offer money for tips but it had refused, pointing out that whatever reward money it put up would likely be topped by Escobar—"If we put one million dollars on his head, he'll just put ten million on ours," an official had explained. So the embassy had gone ahead on its own, offering a $200,000 reward and relocation to the United States for any useful information. Ads for the rewards ran on television and displayed photos of Pablo and some of his top people. The Tyson tip was the first time it had paid off.
A notorious killer whose nickname came from his resemblance to the American fighter Mike Tyson, he was renowned for his ferocity and loyalty to the boss, whom he had known since childhood. He had gained weight and grown his hair long in an effort to disguise himself. The informant was a friend of someone who worked for Tyson. He lived in a building across from the house where the infamous sicario was staying, and he told police he could see him coming and going.
Ten days after the tip, the raid was launched at one in the morning with the whispered radio code "The party has begun." The Search Bloc found Tyson's apartment secured with a heavy steel door, which they blew off its hinges. The breaching charge was a bit overdone. It blasted the door across the apartment and punched it completely through an outer wall, sending it crashing to the street nine stories below. Twenty-six officers followed the blast into the apartment. Tyson tried to flee out a back window to a fire escape, but there were iron bars on the window, and he was trapped. He took a bullet right between the eyes.
By the end of 1992 twelve major players in Pablo's organization, including Tyson, had been killed in "gun battles" with the Search Bloc. There was always a steep price to pay for these victories. On the day Tyson was killed, four police officers were gunned down in retaliation. Five more were killed over the next two days. Through the first six months of the hunt more than sixty-five police officers had been killed in Medellín, many of them Search Bloc members whose identities were supposed to be a state secret. Often these men were killed in their homes or traveling to and from the academy, which demonstrated that Pablo knew not only their identities but their work shifts and home addresses. Pablo was offering a $2,000 bounty for killing Medellín policemen, and it was working.
Death wracked the enterprise. DEA chief Toft was so depressed by all the funerals that he stopped attending unless the officer killed was high-ranking enough that he couldn't get out of it. They were grueling. Colombians were not fastidious embalmers, so the special chapel the national police had built in Bogotá to handle the grim tide often reeked of death. The Colombians, men and women, tended to be more demonstrative than Americans, so the funerals produced wrenching outpourings of grief and anger. The women would wail, and the men would gasp and weep and then retire to get staggeringly drunk. After attending a funeral where a pregnant widow clutching a small child threw herself on her husband's casket and refused to let go until she was pulled away, the normally stoical Toft went back to his secure apartment and cried.
Pablo kept up excruciating pressure. On December 2, a huge car bomb exploded near a Medellín stadium, killing ten policemen and three civilians. Ten days later, a top police intelligence officer was assassinated. At the end of the month, police discovered a car loaded with three hundred pounds of dynamite parked outside the national police's Antioquian headquarters.
There was impatience in Washington, D.C. The previous September, the U.S. Justice Department had indicted Tyson's brother, Dandeny Muñoz, for the bombing of the Avianca airliner in 1989 (in the attempt to kill then-presidential candidate César Gaviria). With the drug war in full swing, there is little doubt President Bush would have liked to have seen a headline noting the drug lord's demise before Election Day, November 3, 1992, as tangible evidence of progress. But election day came and went, Bush lost to Bill Clinton, and Pablo remained at large. Clinton took office in January with ballooning deficits and promptly began cutting government spending. The new president was less inclined to approach the drug war militarily, and Bush's defeat meant that Ambassador Busby's days in Bogotá were likely to be numbered. Few in Bogotá believed that the new administration would long share their enthusiasm for a protracted, seemingly futile pursuit of Pablo Escobar.
There was a growing weariness in Colombia, too. The public's immediate response to Pablo's renewed bombing campaign had been anger. They wanted him caught and punished. But as the months wore on and the blood toll mounted, anger gave way to resignation, and then to impatience. If the government could not catch Pablo, and if the cost of the hunt was so high, then why continue?
All of these factors combined to create a feeling in the embassy vault that time was running out. It seemed that Colonel Martinez's Search Bloc could not close the last one hundred yards.
This was the assessment delivered by Santos, who had spent most of the last six months living at the Holguin base. It had been a large training school for the national police until commandeered for this manhunt. It had big classroom buildings, barracks, a training range, a soccer field, and a track. The Delta operators based there occupied a small room, where they slept on cots or air mattresses. Adjacent to it they set up their office, with a desk, some chairs, and a fan. They covered the walls with giant photomaps of the city of Medellín and the surrounding areas. Whenever Centra Spike would forward the latitude and longitude coordinates for a target, Santos and his men would locate the exact spot on their maps. The colonel was always glad to receive the informat
ion and usually acted upon it, but he was too proud to permit the Americans to help plan his assaults.
For Santos and the others, usually a squad of six who rotated in shifts that lasted about a month, it was a challenge to avoid drudgery. They spent most of their time working out on the school grounds, holding classes for Search Bloc assaulters, or holed up in those small rooms playing cards or video games and counting down the days until they got to go home. There were usually two CIA agents and a Centra Spike technician sharing the space. Whenever Murphy or Peña rotated through, they stayed there as well. The academy grounds were girded by two layers of fences and barbed wire. Just outside the outer fence, a few blocks downhill toward the city, was a checkpoint on the road that let only authorized vehicles pass. The Americans were allowed to wander beyond the outer fence to a few small stores or restaurants inside the checkpoint but were otherwise strictly forbidden to leave the compound.
They left anyway, and not just for Search Bloc assaults. Embassy officials received undeniable evidence of this when a young woman arrived at their door from Medellín with a baby and the name of the red-haired Delta sergeant she said was its father. The baby's red hair lent credence to her story. The operator was sent home and kicked out of the unit. That these men were straying outside the fence should not have come as a surprise. Delta operators were handpicked for their independence and war-fighting skills. They were daring, highly trained men used to accomplishing what they set out to do. There was little chance they would happily sit around playing games for weeks on end while there was action just a few miles away. Given a new set of coordinates for an important target, they became forward observers, heading off into the surrounding city or hills to find a convenient observation post where they could watch the suspected hideout, sometimes for days. Often they accompanied the Search Bloc on raids, operating global positioning system devices that they were far more familiar with than were the Colombians. Going along also earned them the respect of Martinez and his men. The raids were dangerous. How could they push the Colombians to take risks that they would not run themselves?
