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

by Mark Bowden

  Originally enlisted as informants, the group had begun killing early in the hunt. Murillo and other members of the group stayed in a house just outside the Holguin base and utilized three vehicles. DEA agents and Delta Force operators saw them there often, huddling with Colonel Martinez's top officers. On some occasions, Don Berna's men acted as escorts for Peña and Murphy when they left the base (contrary to instructions) to meet with informants. The group used DEA-supplied money to entice people to give information, and threatened to return with guns if they did not.

  Up until the end of 1992 the "civilian militia" worked quietly, but in January 1993 a decision was made, just as Ospina had advised, to take a more visible role. Someone suggested to this group of Colombian criminals that they give themselves a name, just as Pablo had created the Extraditables and, earlier, Death to Kidnappers. A name, the existence of an organized cell of Colombian citizens bent on destroying Pablo Escobar, would strike fear into those associated with or related to the fugitive, if not to Pablo himself. To amplify the menace they needed to advertise, use the media. Their initial appearance was electrifying and started a national guessing game about their identity. Ambassador Busby thought the group had the look of a classic military "psy-op," or psychological operation, but he didn't know whose it was. Others immediately concluded that Los Pepes were simply Pablo's rivals in Cali.

  At least one person felt there was no mystery. The day after his properties were bombed, in a note that pointedly refused to acknowledge the name Los Pepes, Pablo sent a note to Colonel Martinez.

  … Personnel under your supervision set car bombs at buildings in El Poblado where some of my relatives live. I want to tell you that your terrorist actions will not stop my struggle under any circumstances. And my views will not change. Your threats and your car bombs against my family have been added to the hundreds of young people that you have murdered in the city of Medellín in your headquarters of torture in the school Carlos Holguin. I hope that the Antioquian community becomes aware of what you do with the dynamite you seize, and of the criminal actions undertaken by men who cover their faces with ski masks. Knowing that you are part of the government, I wish to warn you that if another incident of this nature occurs, I will retaliate against relatives of government officials who tolerate and do not punish your crimes. Don't forget that you, too, have a family.

  The colonel hardly needed to be reminded. His family had been living with the threat for years. Just four months earlier, three police officers assigned to protect his family had been gunned down in Medellín. The hit was a very personal message from Pablo. The officers had been on their way to pick up the colonel's youngest son to take him to school.

  But the colonel was not going to back down. Los Pepes added new life to an effort that seemed to be going nowhere. A formidable array of enemies were now closing in around Pablo. The effort up until now had been devoted to finding Pablo himself and, in effect, to plucking him off the top of his mountain of financial, legal, and organizational supports. Now the tactics had shifted. Officially and unofficially, Pablo's enemies had begun to take down the mountain.

  3

  In February 1993, Los Pepes began killing in earnest On the 3rd, the body of Luis Isaza, a low-level Medellín cartel manager, was discovered in Medellín with a sign around his neck that read, "For working for the narco-terrorisit and baby-killer Pablo Escobar. For Colombia. Los Pepes." Four other low-level cartel workers were found murdered in the city that day. The next day two more were found murdered, two men known to be Pablo's business associates. There were more bodies the next day, and the next, and the next, up to six people a day.

  It was a controlled bloodbath, because all of the victims had one thing in common—Pablo Escobar. Among them was a former director of the Policía Nacional de Colombia who had been publicly linked to the Medellín cartel. On February 17, one of the dead was Carlos Ossa, the man thought to be financing Pablo's day-to-day operations. Ossa, who was shot several times in the head, had taken over the duties of a man who had disappeared after taking over for another who had also disappeared. On the same day Ossa's body was found, a government warehouse burned to the ground, destroying Pablo's collection of seventeen antique and luxury cars, valued at more than $4 million and including a Pontiac he had purchased in the mistaken belief that it had once been owned by Al Capone.

  As the murders and fearful surrenders mounted, Los Pepes publicly offered cash rewards for information on Pablo and his key associates, and began broadcasting threats against the drug lord's family. Just a few weeks after surfacing, the vigilante group had spooked Pablo more than anything the government had been able to do.

  On February 19, Peña learned from the prosecutor's office in Medellín that Pablo would try to fly his children to safety in Miami. Maria Victoria had purchased tickets for Juan Pablo, Manuela, and Juan Pablo's girlfriend, Doria Ochoa on an Avianca flight that was scheduled to leave Medellín at 9:30 AM.

  Ambassador Busby moved fast. All along he had been looking for ways to put pressure on Pablo, methods that would make the fugitive drug boss stick his head up, so to speak. Now that Los Pepes were spreading fear throughout Pablo's world, the fugitive's family was his most vulnerable pressure point. It would not do to have them safely tucked away in the United States. Meeting with Colombian defense minister Pardo at his residence early that Saturday morning, Busby explained that he did not want the family to leave.

  "Do they have visas?" Pardo asked.

  They did. They were not criminals, Busby explained, so there had been no grounds for turning them down. The two men discussed options. If the Escobars had applied for simple tourist visas, perhaps they could be revoked with the argument that fleeing for their lives was not tourism. Busby had just about decided to simply cancel their visas on that basis when an aide suggested, "Why don't we poke fun at him?" Instead of declaring the Escobars ineligible for visas, they would reject them on the grounds that children under the age of eighteen could not travel to the United States without both parents.

  Peña was at the airport when the children arrived, surrounded by bodyguards and their traveling companion, Doria Ochoa. Nine-year-old Manuela carried a small fluffy white dog. They were allowed to board the plane before police moved in. Three of the bodyguards were arrested; four others fled. Police shooed the children and their escort off the plane, creating tumult at the airport. A pack of reporters and cameramen arrived. Ochoa argued vehemently with Peña, who took their passports. Juan Pablo, a tall, chubby sixteen-year-old, joined in the commotion. In the midst of it all, the agent spied Manuela sitting on the terminal floor, quietly petting and cooing to her dog, shutting it all out. He felt sorry for her. She had a kerchief around her head, covering her ears, and he remembered the bomb blast some years before, which had reportedly damaged her hearing. He eventually handed back the passports, and the Colombian police informed Ochoa that they would not be allowed to fly.

  The embassy took out newspaper ads the next day explaining that Juan Pablo and Manuela could obtain visas if both parents, Pablo and Maria Victoria, showed up in person to apply at the U.S. embassy.

  By now Pablo knew how heavily invested the United States was in his pursuit. He was so thoroughly plugged in to the Colombian police that there was no way he could not know. Among the possessions found by the Search Bloc on another failed raid in March were detailed aerial maps of the area that the embassy had provided the Search Bloc soon after Pablo's escape. Such discoveries were deeply disheartening to the men up in the embassy vault. How could they trust any Colombian? There was a story in the Bogotá press just days after the maps were discovered that said Pablo had actually been found by the Search Bloc in January, but that they had accepted a $666,000 bribe to let him go. Attorney General de Greiff, reacting to the story, publicly accused Colonel Martinez's force of corruption. The story was false, but on some days it did seem as though Los Pepes were the only ones who shared the Americans' determination to get Pablo.

  For his part,
Pablo had always tried to avoid picking a fight with America, and the signs he was seeing clearly distressed him. Ambassador Busby received by mail a newspaper clipping in an envelope that looked to have been addressed in the fugitive's handwriting. The article clipped was a story about the decision to turn back the Escobar children, and in it a quote from one of Pablo's defenders, one line was circled: "…is it valid to cancel the visas of children because one is persecuting the father?"

  On March 2, Busby received a handwritten letter from Pablo, with his signature and thumbprint at the bottom. It seemed some prosecutor in New York City had commented, in reference to the World Trade Center bombings, that no enemy of the United States could be ruled out in considering the source of the attack. Included on that list was the Medellín cartel.

  Señor Ambassador,

  After the terrorism that occurred in New York City, none of the United States law enforcement agencies have discarded the idea that the Medellín cartel is one of the possible suspects.

  I want to tell you that I didn't have anything to do with that attack, because in your country the government has not been participating in bombings, kidnappings, torture and massacre of my people and my allies.

  If all these sorts of things didn't happen when the extradition treaty was in place, then there is much less reason for it to happen now that it is not.

  You can take me off the list, because if I had done it I would be saying why I did it and what I want.

  With all consideration,

  Pablo Escobar

  The bloodbath continued. On February 28, the younger brother of a man who had handled real estate transactions for Pablo was kidnapped and killed, and the next day the realtor, Diego Londoño, turned himself in, claiming Los Pepes had also tried to kill him. That day Pablo's brother-in-law H.H., Hernan Henao, was killed by the Search Bloc when they raided his apartment in Medellín. H.H. had been arrested years earlier, but had been released from prison. Two weeks later the Search Bloc killed two of Pablo's top assassins in shoot-outs, and Los Pepes dispatched one of Pablo's top business associates. After another of Pablo's car bombs went off in Bogotá on April 15, killing eleven and injuring more than two hundred, Los Pepes exacted swift revenge, blowing up two fincas owned by Pablo's bankers.

  Pablo's lawyers also became targets, for both the police and Los Pepes. The previous fall, the Search Bloc had raided a finca owned by attorney Santiago Uribe. The raiders were in the process of ransacking the place when Uribe himself drove up, saw what was happening, and tried to turn around to drive away. He was arrested, taken into the house, and questioned. Uribe denied knowing his fugitive client's whereabouts. Among his files they found letters from Pablo and tapes linking him to drug dealing, bribes, and murder—including the assassination just days before of judge Myrian Velez, one of the "faceless" judges in Medellín, who had been appointed, supposedly in secret, to investigate the murder of El Espectador editor Guillermo Cano. Velez had been preparing to indict Pablo as the "intellectual author" of the murder.

  In the letter about Velez's murder, Pablo denied responsibility but noted, "I think they did us a favor because she was aspiring to gain a higher position in the court system and she would have been very difficult to persuade to act in a righteous manner [i.e., accept a bribe]." All this evidence linking Pablo to murder and other crimes eventually would have been thrown out of court, having been obtained illegally. The DEA memo recounting this incident observed, "Upon completion of the search and as Uribe was departing the finca, the PNC supervising officer relayed a message that they [the national police] were continuing their search for Escobar and preferred that Escobar not surrender."

  Another of Pablo's top lawyers, Roberto Uribe, had also been feeling the heat. Since that first meeting with the drug boss years ago at Nápoles, Roberto Uribe had grown fond of him, and had convinced himself that all the allegations against his infamous client were false—or that Pablo had been forced to do certain things to protect himself. He hadn't seen Pablo since the escape but had spoken to him on the phone several times. Pablo had said his only options were to negotiate a new deal with the government or remain a fugitive for the rest of his life. The lawyer felt a professional obligation to work on a surrender deal, but so far had gotten nowhere with the Gaviria administration. He was convinced that the government was no longer interested in surrender. The whole process was now extralegal.

  This assessment was based in part on his own experience with the Search Bloc. After his office was raided, Roberto Uribe agreed to drive to the Holguin school to answer questions.

  "You're a criminal!" Colonel Martinez told him. "A terrorist!"

  In the story Uribe later told a judge, the colonel's men then planted a pistol and a stick of what looked like dynamite in his car and arrested him. He was later released by a judge who dismissed the charges.

  All of this was mild, and had occurred before Los Pepes had surfaced. Now things were much worse. On March 4, one of Pablo's legal team, Raul Zapata, was found murdered, and a note left with the body threatened four other lawyers. Two of those on the list were killed weeks later as they were leaving Modesto prison in Bogotá, one an attorney for Pablo's brother Roberto. Any public outcry over these killings was far outweighed by anger over another huge blast in Bogotá, attributed to Pablo, on April 15. A car bomb loaded with more than three hundred pounds of dynamite exploded at a busy intersection, killing eleven people and injuring more than two hundred. The nightly news was filled with images of flaming vehicles, victims trapped in the carnage crying for help, and bloody bodies.

  Los Pepes answered immediately. They blew up three fincas owned by members of the Escobar family. On April 16, police found the tortured body of Pablo's most prominent lawyer, Guido Parra, along with that of his eighteen-year-old son, Guido Andres Parra, stuffed in the trunk of a taxi in a deserted area near an Envigado country club in Medellín. Parra was the lawyer who had negotiated Pablo's surrender almost two years earlier, who had conferred with the families of the kidnapped journalists and with the president, and who had confessed how much he feared his client. He had been abducted from his apartment in Medellín by fifteen heavily armed men who had arrived in three cars. Father and son were found with hands bound in plastic tape and bullet wounds to the head, along with a chilling hand-lettered sign that read, "Through their profession, they initiated abductions for Pablo Escobar." It was signed, "Los Pepes," and had a postscript: "What do you think of the exchange for the bombs in Bogotá, Pablo?" The body of the taxi driver was found about a mile away, with a sign that accused him of working for the Medellín cartel.

  Three of Pablo's best-known attorneys, Santiago Uribe, José Lozano, and Reynaldo Suarez, publicly resigned from his service. Lozano made the mistake of secretly continuing the work, for which he was shot twenty-five times in downtown Medellín as he walked with his brother, who was badly injured. In July seven other lawyers who had worked for Pablo or the cartel resigned (Uribe for the second time) after Los Pepes again publicly threatened "potential harm or murder." No one doubted that they meant it. Roberto Uribe, the lawyer whom Colonel Martinez had tried to lock up, sought protection from Attorney General de Greiff. He went into hiding, spending time in the United States and at a remote house on the Colombian Pacific coast. He couldn't work or contact his family or friends. He spent his time lying on the beach and watching television.

  As lawlessness accelerated over the spring and summer, no one from Washington questioned it, or questioned America's commitment to the pursuit. Civilian overseers from the Clinton administration were new in office, and knew next to nothing about what the U.S. military was doing in Colombia. People were always getting killed by one faction or the other down there, so reports of bombings and murders did not seem out of the ordinary, and no one from Colombia or the U.S. embassy was complaining or explaining. No one except Pablo, that is. On April 29, he wrote a letter to de Greiff:

  Los Pepes have their headquarters and their torture chambers in Fidel Casta�
�o's house [in Medellín], located on El Poblado Avenue near the country club…. There they torture trade unionists and lawyers. No one has searched the house or confiscated their assets…. The government offers rewards for the leaders of the Medellín cartel and for the leaders of the guerrillas, but doesn't offer rewards for the leaders of the paramilitary, nor for those of the Cali cartel, authors of various car bombs in the city of Medellín.

  The state security organizations have zero victories in the matter of the assassinations of the lawyers, zero victories in the El Poblado car bombs, zero victories in the investigation into the deaths of the trade unionists and zero victories in the investigations into the massacres in which thousands of young Antioquians have died. I remain disposed to turn myself in if given written and public guarantees….

  Regards

  Pablo Escobar

  Up in the vault at the embassy, Centra Spike analysts weren't missing the distinct pattern in Los Pepes's hits. The death squad was killing off the secret white-collar infrastructure of Pablo's organization, targeting his money launderers, bankers, lawyers, and extended family, as if using the very charts that Centra Spike and the CIA had painstakingly assembled over the previous six months. What's more, the hits often corresponded with fresh targeting information Centra Spike was turning over to CIA chief Wagner, who was passing it along to the Search Bloc. It was not just who Los Pepes killed but who they did not. There were certain key individuals in Pablo's inner circle who were monitored constantly by the Americans, often with video as well as audio surveillance. Not only were these people key to intelligence gathering, but anyone paying them a visit, threatening them, or killing them would likely show up in the American monitoring. These were the people Los Pepes left alone.

  Supplying intelligence to abet murder, such as the street address of a target who was subsequently killed, certainly appeared to be in violation of Executive Order 12333. Not all of the men in Bogotá were eager to hazard their careers and freedom on the legal opinion authored in 1989 by the Defense Department's legal counsel. So they were careful. Major Steve Jacoby turned his Centra Spike intelligence over to Wagner, and what happened to it after that was officially, as far as he was concerned, none of his business. Wagner passed along to the Colombian government the information he thought would be most helpful, but there was also an unofficial channel. The complete daily intelligence reports were collected in a red book that was left in an area where any official visitors to the embassy could check them out Colombian police officers paid regular visits. Everyone was pleased with the results Los Pepes produced. A DEA memo to Washington in April summed up the official attitude at the embassy: