by Mark Bowden
As soon as Major Aguilar shouted "Vivá Colombia!" over the radio, Murphy made a dash back to the American quarters to call his boss, Joe Toft.
Toft had already heard.
"You better get your ass out there and bring pictures back," Toft told him.
Murphy managed to flag down Colonel Martinez's vehicle as it was leaving the base.
When they arrived in the neighborhood, the colonel's men were setting up barricades in the street. Crowds had begun to form as word spread that Pablo had been killed. Murphy went into the house, climbed to the second floor, and was directed to look out the window to the rooftop. There he saw Pablo's barefoot body stretched on the tiles, with men from the raiding party standing around him, sharing swigs from a bottle of Johnnie Walker Scotch whiskey. The Search Bloc was celebrating hard already. They had fired off so many rounds into the air after Pablo was killed that neighbors had come to their windows to wave white handkerchiefs. Hugo thought at first that this was their way of applauding the Search Bloc's success. It didn't occur to him until later that they had been offering to surrender.
Murphy shouted to the men around the body and they posed gleefully, raising their rifles like big-game hunters around their trophy buck. The DEA agent snapped their picture. He then climbed out to the roof and took more pictures of Pablo's bloated body and bloody face, and more shots of the men posing around him.
Then Murphy gave the camera to one of the shooters and posed alongside Pablo's body himself.
Before he left, a Colombian officer confiscated his film. When he got it back, the roll was developed, but several of the negatives had been removed. The picture of Murphy, in a bright red shirt, posing beside the dead body would eventually cause a sensation in Colombia, suggesting that Americans were the ones who had tracked down and killed Pablo. That one and others on the roll, all of them grotesque, would eventually end up gracing the office walls of many in Washington and in the U.S. military who had taken part in the successful mission.
Moments before Murphy's call, Toft had gotten the news from his friend PNC general Octavio Vargas.
"Joe-ay!" Vargas shouted happily into the phone. "We just got him!"
Toft immediately stepped out into the hall on the embassy's fourth floor and shouted, "Escobar is dead!"
Then he ran upstairs to give the ambassador full confirmation of the kill. Busby was ecstatic.
Busby called Canas back.
"Got him," he said. "Dead. Gone forever."
Canas left his office jumping up and down. He walked across the street to the White House to deliver the good news, and no one was free to hear it. He did eventually meet with NSC assistant chief Dick Clark, and they sent a message in writing to their boss, Anthony Lake.
Busby felt a deep sense of satisfaction. After nearly twenty years of doing this kind of work, he felt that this was the most impressive feat he had ever been involved with. To have stuck with the chase for so long, sixteen hard, frustrating, bloody months, an effort involving military, diplomatic, and law enforcement agencies spanning two administrations, two countries! All the money and men and time devoted to this chase, most of which would never be widely known. It had been ugly. Hundreds of people had been killed, police, cartel members, and the innocent victims of Pablo's bombs. Busby thought about all the different agencies that had cooperated in an unprecedented way, the thousands of people who had worked on it, the hundreds who had been killed, and now…the son of a bitch was gone!
He left that afternoon to visit the Presidential Palace to congratulate Gaviria in person. The president was all smiles. Extra editions of the Bogotá newspapers were already on the street. El Espectador had a giant headline that read FINALMENTE SI CAYO (FINALLY, HE'S DOWN). Gaviria signed a copy for the ambassador.
The yellowed front page is now in a pillowcase with other memorabilia at Busby's home in Virginia. He is retired from the State Department but still does consulting work with various government agencies.
"I know it's unseemly to celebrate someone's death, but the effort to get Pablo Escobar was an amazing accomplishment," Busby said. "When I think of all the different forces involved, all of them dedicated to finding this one man…well, all I can say is, I wouldn't have wanted to be Pablo Escobar."
The former ambassador said he was unaware of some of the connections between Los Pepes and the Search Bloc, as noted by the DEA cable traffic from the period, and he still insists that the evidence is sketchy at best. "If I had believed such a connection existed," he said, "it would have been a showstopper."
Colombian TV stations recorded the excited scene as Pablo's body, with his swollen, bloody face and the peculiar Hitler mustache, was strapped on a stretcher, handed down off the roof, and loaded into a police ambulance. It was driven to the Medellín coroner's office. Cameramen were allowed in the morgue to videotape and photograph his body stripped and stretched out on a slab. To the amusement of Pablo's killers, much was made of the mustache.
Within the special ops community in the United States, Pablo's death was regarded as a successful mission for Delta, and legend has it that its operators were in on the kill. If so, and perhaps by design, there is no evidence of it. Some of the Search Bloc members I interviewed said there were Americans among the assault force that day; others said there were not. It is possible they were there, and even might have killed Pablo, without being seen. The Search Bloc and the U.S. embassy had known for days the neighborhood where Pablo was staying. They may have known which house. If they knew exactly where Pablo was hiding, Delta could have positioned snipers for a shot at the fugitive when he came out of the house. The unit's snipers are among the best in the world. It would explain the precision of the killing shot.
Looking over autopsy photos showing the entrance wound, one Delta Force member told me, "Pretty good shootin', huh?"
Colonel Santos says he was in the United States when Pablo was killed. Over the duration of the manhunt, dozens of operators and SEALs had spent time in Medellín. A member of SEAL Team Six who was based in Medellín on the day Pablo was killed said that he had spent the entire day at the base "reading, studying Spanish, and playing video games; it was like being in a compartment on a ship." Once word got back to the base that Pablo had been killed, he said, "We were locked down tight for a couple of days. They were real paranoid about anyone discovering that we were there. Then we flew back to Bogotá and home."
Analyzing the hit, Centra Spike was convinced that, in the end, Lieutenant Hugo Martinez had found Pablo not because he had mastered the portable direction finder but out of pure dumb luck. The unit had told Colonel Martinez days before in what neighborhood they would find Pablo. The way the American experts saw it, the Search Bloc had blundered around the area long enough, following the imprecise readings on Hugo's equipment, until at last he had simply seen Pablo in the window.
The surveillance tapes showed that Hugo had been wrong about Pablo spotting him from the window. In the ten minutes while he and his men had waited for reinforcements, expecting to shoot it out with Pablo's sicarios at any moment, Pablo had made several other short calls, none of which betrayed any knowledge that there were police waiting for him out side.
No matter how the final one hundred yards finally had been closed, Centra Spike's commanders were delighted. Justice had been exacted against terrible odds. Killing Pablo would not end cocaine exports to the United States or even slow them down—everybody knew that—but the Americans had signed on for this job believing that it was about something bigger. It was about democracy, the rule of law, standing up for justice and civilization. Pablo was simply too rich, too powerful, and too violent. He was a would-be tyrant who had been faced down by an imperfect but nevertheless democratic, free society. And America had helped. Centra Spike had learned a lot in the last sixteen months, and they weren't finished in Colombia. There was still the Cali cartel and the guerrillas.
But this day was for celebration. There were parties in Medellín, Bogotá, and Washington. Ban
ners reading PEG DEAD! were draped and champagne corks were popped.
Major Jacoby told his men later, with satisfaction, that he had driven home and pulled off a shelf the dusty $300 bottle of Rémy Martin cognac he had bought in January 1990 when Centra Spike had first put Pablo in its crosshairs. He drank half of it all by himself.
Hermilda Escobar forecast doom after her son was killed.
"God forbid what's going to happen," she said. "A lot of horrible things are going to happen with the guerrillas and the one who sold him out. What's going to happen…it's not like I want it to happen…. I forgive them. I forgive them with all my heart the ones who did me wrong by taking my son away. I forgive them."
A reporter asked her if there would be retaliations for Pablo's death.
"There will be," she said, "but I pray to God a lot for God to help them [Pablo's killers] and for them not to go through what we went through."
After Pablo was killed, Hugo ran into the house and found the drug boss's portable phone. That was his trophy. He used it to phone his commanding officer, Major Luis Estupinan, and congratulate him.
That evening, the men of the Search Bloc in Medellín partied late, but Hugo and his father did not join them. Such overt displays were not the colonel's style. When the men started shooting their weapons into the air, the colonel put an end to the party.
The next morning, the colonel and Hugo and some of the other top men in the Search Bloc were honored in Bogotá. That evening, back at their home, the colonel's youngest son, Gustavo, who was ten, was looking through a sack of Pablo's personal items that the colonel had collected and brought home with him. In the bag was a small loaded handgun, and as Gustavo examined it, the gun went off.
Gustavo wasn't hurt badly, but the bullet passed close enough to scratch the skin of his belly. It was as though Pablo had fired one more shot from the grave. The colonel gathered all the items and put them back in the sack and delivered them that night to police headquarters, as though they were a curse.
He still feels haunted by the dead drug boss. Martinez got a great deal of personal satisfaction from killing Pablo, and he was finally promoted to general, but he paid a heavy price. The years he spent in pursuit of the drug boss were years he lost with his wife and children.
"When I think about Pablo Escobar, I think of him as an episode in my life that completely altered the way I was living," Martinez said in his home in the village of Mosquera. "What I wanted to do with my children and my family was considerably altered. I don't blame him as a person or anything like that. However, being involved in those operations, I abandoned my family and my sons, who needed me in what was a crucial time in their lives. The challenge reminds me of something negative about my life as a policeman, negative in terms of personal satisfactions. We had very few professional satisfactions resulting from those operations, because I was the victim of what happens to any person whose name becomes public."
Martinez was accused of accepting money from the Cali cartel and of being involved with the illegal activities of Los Pepes, accusations he denies.
"The saddest part was that there were even some chiefs of police who thought we were sold out, and they let us know what was on their minds," said Martinez, who argues that the allegations against him originated with Pablo. "[He] accused us of running Los Pepes. Pablo Escobar made the accusations against me in writing, against General Vargas and members of the Cali cartel, saying we were Los Pepes. Those accusations were published by the press, almost everybody heard about them, and perhaps those accusations sparked the rumor about us having some kind of link with them."
There is strong evidence from a variety of sources that the Search Bloc cooperated with Los Pepes. Fidel Castaño, before he was killed in 1994, acknowledged that he was one of the leaders of the death squad, and Martinez admits that Castaño collaborated with his men. Americans at the Holguin base remember Don Berna, Diego Murillo, another of the Los Pepes leaders, working closely with the Search Bloc officers on a regular basis. Murillo got to know DEA agent Javier Peña so well that he once presented him with a gold watch. Perhaps Martinez knew nothing about the extracurricular efforts of the men under his command, but it seems unlikely. What is more likely is that today, years later, the general would like to be remembered as the man who led the lawful forces that pursued Pablo, as the man who won a battle to the death with the world's greatest outlaw. He would prefer that the work of Los Pepes stay in the shadow, and he says their contribution was unimportant. "They were a nuisance, a distraction," the general says. He is the only one who makes this argument.
"Los Pepes were key," said one American soldier involved in the hunt. "But you aren't ever going to get to the full truth about them, because nobody is going to tell you. You have to surmise."
No one has been prosecuted for the murders committed by Los Pepes. In the official DAS total of "Medellín cartel members" killed during the second war, the deaths attributed to the death squad are (perhaps tellingly) lumped together with those laid to the Search Bloc: one hundred and twenty-nine. Members of the vigilante group boast that they alone killed as many as three hundred. One hundred and twenty-seven people were killed by Pablo's bombs. One hundred and forty-seven police officers were killed in the manhunt, and one hundred and thirty-two cartel members were arrested—many of whom are already out of jail.
Both Colonel Martinez and his son were decorated by the police for their efforts. Hugo was offered a commission abroad and spent two years in Washington working with the Colombian embassy. When I interviewed him he was a captain and was station commander for the city of Manizales. He has since been transferred back to his old electronic-surveillance unit and lives in Bogotá.
After the colonel was made a general in 1994, he went on to serve for a year as director of DIFIN. He served for a time as head of instruction for the PNC, and as its inspector general, and in 1997 he followed his son to Washington, where he spent a year as military attaché to the Colombian embassy. He left the police force the following year, when General José Serrano was appointed to the top post. General Martinez did not see eye to eye with the new PNC chief, the man whose new uniform had inspired him to join the police so many years before, so he retired. He now maintains a small farm and spends time there and in Bogotá.
For a while, for safety reasons, Martinez considered moving with his wife and family to another country. They toured South America together, visiting Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, and decided that Uruguay and Argentina were the places where they would feel most comfortable. Just as he began to inquire about emigrating in 2000, there were news reports that Pablo Escobar's wife and son had been arrested in Argentina. So the one place he thought safest turned out to be the very place where the Escobar family was hiding!
Oddly, Martinez said he felt sorry for them.
"Just as I was trying to go someplace else for security, so were they," he said. "I hurt to see they are still suffering for something that happened so long ago. They are also trying to escape from all that."
In the days after Pablo's death, his wife and children were interviewed up in their suite at the Hotel Tequendama by a Bogotá TV crew. Looking haggard but composed, Maria Victoria portrayed herself as just another victim of the country's violence.
"There's no positive response to any of this," she said. "I don't know if you notice, but we are also a family who feel we've gone through the same despair the country has. And psychologically, I'm very concerned whether my children will be able to survive this complex situation."
Little Manuela, perched on a windowsill, defended her father.
"You can't say anything about my dad…absolutely nothing, because no one knows him, just God and himself…. I see my dad as an innocent person. It seems to me very painful that the president of Colombia has congratulated those who [killed my father]…because they got the most wanted man in the world. And I don't think it is fair that my father had to be killed."
A subdued-looking Juan Pablo told
the reporter that he wanted to get on with a normal life.
"I don't want to die violently," he said. "I want to give a gift of peace to my country…. The truth is that we've been here a lot of days. We can't take it. We're desperate. What people want most at Christmastime is freedom and so many marvelous things that the world can offer you. Unfortunately, because of fate, we're confined to this place. We're getting to desperate limits. My little sister cannot take it anymore because this is a jail…. We don't have much hope."
Not long after Pablo's death, his teenage son paid an unexpected visit to the embassy in Bogotá. He asked to see Busby, who refused to meet with him. The ambassador called downstairs to Toft.
"Hey, Joe, Pablo Escobar's son is downstairs. I'm not going to see him, okay?"
Toft agreed to meet with Juan Pablo, who was suspected of having been involved in murders and in plotting against the Search Bloc. He had heard Juan Pablo's rants on the surveillance tapes. He stepped into the room to encounter a worried, fat, soft-looking young man. Toft was impressed with the boy's poise under the circumstances.
"He told me that he and his family were in great danger, and they were appealing for visas to save their lives," Toft remembered later.
"What will it take for me to get a visa?" Juan Pablo asked.
"All of the cocaine and cocaine money in the world would not get you a visa," Toft told him.
Juan Pablo did not appear surprised by the answer.
"Are you sure we can do nothing?" he asked again. "Is there anything, anything we could do to earn a visa?"
"Even if you helped put the whole Cali cartel in jail, we would not give you a visa," Toft told him.
And Juan Pablo left.
The family eventually fled to Buenos Aires, where they lived quietly until their arrest in 2000. An accountant who had been linked romantically with Maria Victoria and had been rejected by her went to the authorities and alleged that the family had been illegally laundering money. Maria Victoria and Juan Pablo were charged with conspiracy, and now face the possibility of jail in Argentina or deportation.
