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

by Mark Bowden

  Martinez was willing to try anything. If his superiors would not let him off the hook, finding Pablo and finishing this was the only way out. When he learned that a special unit of Colombian police had been achieving success in tests with a new portable direction-finding kit, he asked for that, too.

  There was only one problem. The special unit included his son Hugo.

  "Send the team, but I don't want you to come here," the colonel told his son. Martinez had known about his son's work for a long time, and without telling Hugo had twice intervened to keep his unit from coming to Medellín. The task was simply too dangerous. Coming and going from the protected base would blow their cover, so the team would have to live and work undercover in the city. Given the bounty Pablo had placed on the head of every police officer in Medellín, and the even higher reward for killing a member of the Search Bloc, he feared putting his son in such a position.

  "It's my unit, Dad," Hugo pleaded.

  "Send someone else," the colonel said.

  "No, I'm ready to go," Hugo said. "This gives me and my team and our equipment an excellent chance to prove ourselves."

  "I really don't want you to come. You're too much of a target for him."

  "No, Dad, I really want to be involved. I really want to come." Hugo explained that he and his mother, brother, and sister had been living with the threat of Pablo now for years. Once, knowing that his conversation was being recorded and would eventually reach Colonel Martinez's ears, Pablo had said, "Colonel, I'm going to kill you. I'm going to kill all of your family up to the third generation, and then I will dig up your grandparents and shoot them and bury them again."

  "I'm already involved," pleaded Hugo. This way he would at least have the chance to fight back. As a family, he told his father, they needed to resolve this, "so that it is not always going to be hanging over our heads. We can do it together." Hugo told his father that he was an important part of the surveillance team. "It won't work as well without me."

  Young Hugo looked nothing like his father. He was short, stocky, and dark where his father was tall, fair, and slender. He shared his father's keen intellect, but was also a visionary, an infectious leader, the kind of man who could convince other people to follow him even when only he understood where they were going. Certainly the colonel had some of that. He had managed to keep the Search Bloc together through years of great difficulty, and keep them focused on a task that seemed impossible. But the father was aloof. He led by stern discipline and example. Hugo led with enthusiasm. When he got talking about technical matters that often only he understood, Hugo flushed with pleasure. He would grab sheets of paper and a pencil and begin making scratchy diagrams of his ideas, leap to his feet, gesture, explain, exhort. His belief in technology was evangelic.

  During his father's first war against Pablo, Hugo had been a student at the national police academy in Bogotá, and as a cadet he had escaped much of the change Pablo's threats had imposed on his mother, brothers, and sister. He worried about his family, and their predicament angered him. When he graduated, Second Lieutenant Hugo Martinez was sent to the DIFIN, which was primarily an investigative arm of the Colombian judiciary.

  He was placed with an electronic-surveillance unit that had been given a new portable eavesdropping and direction-finder by the CIA. It looked like a prop from an early science-fiction movie, a gray metal box about one square foot in size, with cables snaking out the sides to supply electricity and data, and a spray of antennae on the top, one at each corner and six more in the center. It had a screen no bigger than the palm of his hand that displayed a green line, which indicated both the strength and the direction of a signal. The whole contraption fit inside a bulky suitcase and was used in concert with the much larger French and German equipment, which was housed in three big gray vans. The vans would park on the hills just outside Bogotá and raise their antennae. To the uninitiated they looked like electric-company repair vehicles. The three vans would triangulate the target signal, placing it within a proscribed area of the city. Hugo would then cruise through the streets of the hot neighborhood with another officer in an unmarked car, wearing headphones connected to the box that picked up the radio signal and indicated its strength by varying the pitch of a homing tone. In theory, Hugo's team would pinpoint the signal to the correct building, even the correct floor and apartment.

  It never worked. The equipment functioned somewhat in flat, unobstructed terrain, but in the city, where they needed it most, the jumble of electrical wires, walls, and competing signals made it hopeless. They tried other systems. One, from France, was promptly dubbed "the Rooster." It had to be lugged around by the operator outside of a vehicle, with a box that hung on straps over his shoulders, attached by cable to a handheld antenna that looked like a Buck Rogers ray gun. The gun was held head-high as the operator moved, which made him comically conspicuous walking down a city street. Trying to use it on a real undercover mission in a dangerous neighborhood would have been like wearing a neon bull's-eye on his back. Hugo went back to working with the CIA kit.

  Their progress in direction finding was delayed because the team's simple eavesdropping capability was in demand. When President Gaviria learned that the national police could pull a van up to the curb outside a building and listen to conversations inside, Hugo's team was assigned to eavesdrop on guerrilla leaders who were in Bogotá for another of their endless rounds of peace negotiations. The snoop squad was able to supply government negotiators with inside information about the guerrillas' negotiating strategies, and alert them to new proposals before they were made. This service, of course, had nothing to do with the task of radio location. But Hugo found that his superiors were not especially interested in the technical details of his work, no matter how hard he tried to explain. They understood only that his unit could monitor more frequencies than any other equipment in Colombia, that they were portable and reliable, and that was enough. So the team developed a reputation for surveillance wizardry that overstated the actual case. In time, they got so good at analyzing the conversations they overheard that they were able to steer assault teams to the right places without having actually used any of their equipment.

  They were not really getting better at radio direction finding; for that purpose the equipment was still useless. But they didn't let on. Each small victory brought them a better assignment. In 1991 and 1992 they were used against guerrillas in the southern part of the country. It was only after these missions that Hugo's commander was able to return to Bogotá and resume testing. They worked there for eight months.

  And they got better. They combined the various components, American, French, and German, and developed techniques through trial and error. Hugo himself had fallen in love with the funny boxes. The more he worked with the kits, the more attuned he became to subtle nuances in the images they displayed and the sounds they emitted in his headphones, and what they meant. It was like learning a new language, or learning to navigate a terrain with an unfamiliar sixth sense. Hugo felt the box was telling him what he needed to know, but he had not yet learned to hear it.

  In the first three or four months after Pablo's escape, Colonel Martinez had banned all cell-phone use in Medellín and closed down all repeater stations for transmitting signals, which forced people to use standard phone lines and limited radio communications to point-to-point—that is, the radio operators could not use repeaters to amplify and relay signals over long distances, so the only effective way to communicate between two radios was for there to be a clear line of sight between the transmitter and receiver. The idea was to isolate Pablo. He was too smart to use normal phone lines, but if he tried to communicate through the uncluttered airwaves he would be much easier to find. Pablo responded by using messengers. He resumed regular radio communication only in the spring of 1993, as he grew increasingly concerned about Los Pepes and began scheming to get his family out of the country. Pablo found places where he could see the top of the apartment building, Altos del Campestre, wh
ere his family was living under heavy guard, and he spoke most often to his son, Juan Pablo.

  This was the weak link that the colonel wanted to exploit with the new, highly touted portable surveillance unit. They arrived in Medellín with Hugo, who had worn down his father's resistance. They found apartments in the city and were delivered six new CIA direction-finders, each with a Mercedes van. Three teams were created. Their arrival stirred high hopes in the Search Bloc. A CIA direction-finding crew had been working in the city since the previous November, with poor results. But the false reputation Hugo's unit had earned preceded it, and they had arrived in time to take advantage of an important new piece of information.

  Medellín prosecutor Fernando Correa, who had taken to meeting frequently with Pablo's family, had noticed some things. The family was virtually imprisoned in Altos del Campestre, and lived in terror of Los Pepes. Increasingly their energies were spent looking for a way out. They were despondent. Maria Victoria wrote in a letter to her husband at about this time:

  I miss you so very much I feel weak. Sometimes I feel an immense loneliness takes over my heart. Why does life have to separate us like this? My heart is aching. How are you? How do you feel? I don't want to leave you my love. I need you so much, I want to cry with you…. I don't want to pressure you. Nor do I want to make you commit mistakes, but if our leaving is not possible, I would feel more secure with you. We'll close ourselves in, suspend the mail, whatever we have to. This is getting too tense.

  Chubby Juan Pablo, a hulking, imperious sixteen-year-old who stood six feet tall and weighed more than two hundred pounds, acted as the man of the house, at least in Correa's presence, and appeared to be making all the decisions for his family, even his mother. He spent hours with binoculars observing the neighborhood from his high perch, locked in the apartment, keeping a nervous eye out for those who appeared to be keeping an eye on them. He was watching when three men stepped out of a car and fired a rocket-propelled grenade at their apartment building. No one was hurt in the blast. Juan Pablo calmly noted their appearance and the make and model of their car. He also wrote down the license numbers of cars driven by those he suspected of working for Colonel Martinez, photographed men outside the building he found suspicious, and indignantly pushed the prosecutors who visited the family to pursue and arrest those he described. Unlike his mother, who was clearly overcome by the situation, Juan Pablo seemed to relish it. He seemed to enjoy his dealings with Correa and other representatives from the attorney general's office and used their fear of his father to bully them and build himself up in their eyes. He received coded written messages from his father and wrote him sprawling, cocky, even jaunty letters, conspiring happily in the cat-and-mouse game. In an undated letter written that fall, Juan Pablo bragged about standing up to a representative from the attorney general's office:

  Remembered Father,

  I send you a big hug and warm wishes.

  I see that Corrales [Roberto Corrales, a liaison from the attorney general's office] is in high spirits, fighting Los Pepes. He doesn't have another choice anyway…. The prosecutor [de Greiff] played the fool about us leaving the country,…to test us, to check what we were going to say and how we were going to react. I have been firm about your conditions and I have persuaded them. I even told them that you had planned to deal with the Cali people after turning yourself in, because you were willing to have peace back in the country.

  Corrales was very rude to me. We were talking and he started to tell me, "I have to look for your father because that is my mission. I am not from here or there [I am not allied with one side or the other], I am a righteous person and he (you) knows that I am serious about that." So I told him that there was no need for him to tell me that to my face every time he came around here because he has been here three times and all three times he has said the same thing—that I knew that was his job but that he had to respect me, because it was my father he was talking about, and I told him he should calm down because my father was also after all those who were looking for him, and that destiny will say who finds whom.

  He answered: "I'm afraid because it's my job and no one has told me to stop looking for your father, because there are forty arrest warrants against him." I answered: "This is not for you to be afraid, but for you to show me some respect because I am with him [Pablo] and I support him," so he'd better cut it out or else. Then I told him that the prosecutor was the most fake guy in this country, that how did he expect us to believe him regarding you turning yourself in if he wasn't a man who kept his word, and that he had protected us so far only to trick us with false promises. And he answered: "I don't allow anyone to speak about my boss at my table," and I told him: "I, like a member of this family, cannot allow you either to say bad things about my boss, who is my father."

  Juan Pablo then passed along some information about where he thought Colonel Martinez sometimes stayed overnight in Medellín, and wrote out two pages of description of the men and cars he had been cataloging outside the apartment building. He concluded by suggesting that his father send a scare into a local TV station that had aired pictures of Altos del Campestre: "It would be good to tease the TV people so they won't make the building stand out so obviously, because when they came here they told me they were going to erase the tape and they didn't do it. Take care of yourself. I love and remember you. Your son."

  On one official visit, Correa noted that Juan Pablo carried a beeper, and when it went off (at regular times during the day), he would abruptly leave the apartment. Correa presumed it was to speak on a phone or radio with his father. The prosecutor had seen cellular phones in the apartment, and on one of his trips he'd found a radio transmitter/receiver hidden behind the trapdoor on the ceiling of the building elevator. Colonel Martinez instructed Correa, on his next visit, to note the make, model number, and frequency range of the radio. He also asked Correa to do what he could to encourage Juan Pablo to speak for longer periods of time with his father.

  Armed with the knowledge that Juan Pablo's radio had a frequency range of 120 to 140 MHz, and with a rough idea of when the Escobar father and son spoke, Hugo and his teams set about intercepting these calls and locating Pablo. They at first tried working with the CIA team. Hugo told his father, "With me there, you know you will get everything."

  One of the first problems faced by the new unit, when they got out into the streets of Medellín, was deciphering the deceptive lingo Juan Pablo and his father had constructed to confuse their pursuers. They used code words and phrases as a signal to switch frequency, which they did quickly and often. At first it prevented the surveillance teams from getting even a general fix on Pablo's location, because every time father and son switched frequency, the signal would temporarily be lost. The direction-finding cars drove in random fits and starts throughout the city, racing a few blocks in the direction of a signal and then pulling over to the curb when they lost it. After a few days of this it became clear that with so many walls, overhead wires, high-rises, and other obstructions, central Medellín was the worst kind of environment for direction finding. They would fix on a signal coming from one direction, then lose it, and when it returned, it would send them in an entirely new direction.

  In the first few weeks, the excited Search Bloc followed the efforts of Hugo and his teams with great interest. Once or twice they launched raids, breaking into the houses of frightened Medellínos who had no connection to Pablo Escobar. Very quickly, enthusiasm for this new tool dried up. The new little vans and CIA equipment were just another disappointment. The colonel told them to keep at it, but in time everyone assumed the only reason the teams were still around was because Martinez's son was working with them. This was humiliating for Hugo, because he knew it was true. But it wasn't true in the way everyone suspected.

  Without a doubt, the rapid series of complete failures they produced would have sent any other unit packing, their antennae and weird little boxes heaped with scorn. But Hugo had his father's ear. They would sit toget
her until late at night with the son working his evangelical spell, selling his father on the amazing potential of the machine, how clever its theory, how close they were to actually making it work. When it failed again and again he would explain to his father exactly why, his crew-cut head hunched over paper as he sketched out his diagrams with arrows and filled the margins with math. "It isn't something simple and straightforward," Hugo explained. His father listened and listened and asked questions and, in time, was converted. The rest of the Search Bloc may have considered the technology a useless whim, a father's indulgence, but the colonel had become a believer.

  He believed it in part because of Hugo, but also because he needed to believe it. There had to be a way out of this endless struggle. The chase had boiled down to this contest between two men and their sons. Pablo's son was his weakness. The colonel's son might yet prove to be his strength.

  2

  In July 1993, Eduardo Mendoza, the idealistic young vice minister of justice whom Pablo had taken prisoner the night of his escape, was living a new life in America. He had sat through four months of stinging, humiliating, televised investigation before the Colombian Senate. He was lectured, insulted, and scoffed at as he tried to explain the mountain of circumstances that had made him look so guilty. He lost everything. When the Senate finished, retreating to prepare its report, Mendoza left the country. Giving his stereo to his brother and his law books to a friend, the lawyer who had sat beside him during those long months, trying to defend him, Mendoza flew to New York City.