by Austin Galt
The suburb also features the city’s bullfighting arena with events held in January. This is traditional bullfighting as opposed to the more informal correlejas which are popular on the Caribbean coast and involve mostly liquored-up Colombians fancying themselves as matadors. Not surprisingly, this has led to many deaths and many more injuries.
I moved into the top-floor apartment of a four-storey building. The bottom floor was occupied by a charming little French restaurant. Living there helped to reduce the time it took to travel to work and I would catch a bus down at the main road known simply as La Septima or The Seventh.
Across the road lay the Hotel Tequendama made famous by Pablo Escobar when his family stayed there in 1993 while he was on the run. Other guests cleared out as soon as the Escobars moved in fearing they would be collateral damage should any attack be made against the family. Pablo would call the hotel to speak with his family and it was during one such call to his son, Juan Pablo, when police tracked him down in Medellín leading to his death.
The Tequendama building is also known for its restaurant on the thirtieth floor which provides great views of the nearby mountains. This was the scene of a FARC attack a few months earlier in December 2002, after two rebels dressed in smart attire entered the restaurant and, upon leaving half an hour later, left a bomb under a table.
At 10.30 pm on the night of the 13th, a Friday no less, the bomb was activated by a mobile telephone. Over two dozen people were left injured, several with grave third-degree burns. It was a logical target being owned by the Colombian military and being where many politicians stayed and ate at the exclusive restaurant. On this occasion, however, the only victims were regular civilians and the restaurant’s employees.
It wasn’t the only restaurant in the area to be targeted by the FARC. Arriving home one day, I found many police officers positioned all around my street. I asked one of them what had happened, to which he replied that a cache of weapons, including a grenade launcher, had been found in an apartment directly across the road from my building. It was attributed to the FARC who were planning an attack on the restaurant below my apartment known to be a favourite with some politicians who were to be the target.
This was all a bit disconcerting! I was obviously glad the police had uncovered the plot before it happened. If not, I could well have ended up as collateral damage. I decided I didn’t want to live above a FARC military target and it wasn’t long before I headed north once again.
*
Lily was a student of mine who worked in the Bogotá offices of a US multinational company. She was an intelligent and attractive morena which refers to tanned-skin Latinas with dark brown hair and dark eyes. She was also a paisa from Medellín. The word paisa generally refers to someone from Antioquia and its capital Medellín, although it more generally covers all those people from the states of Caldas, Risaralda and Quindio which make up the coffee region.
The most famous paisa of all is the fictional character Juan Valdez who represents the Colombian coffee farmer. He is seen on television commercials for the National Federation of Coffee Growers of Colombia wearing his sombrero and poncho alongside his mule carrying sacks of harvested coffee beans. His rugged and moustachioed appearance has become synonymous with both Colombia and coffee. As for the most infamous paisa of all, that title goes to Pablo Escobar.
I had been taken with Latin women after my first visit to the continent. I found their femininity enchanting which, combined with intelligence, was very attractive. Latinas also have a sexy dressing style – from a male perspective, at least. They often wear tight-fitting clothing that shows off their figures.
There was an obvious mutual attraction between Lily and me but I was hesitant to act. I wasn’t sure if it was right to commence a relationship with a student. We were both the same age but I just wasn’t sure of the protocol and didn’t want to lose my job. I went back and forth in my own mind about what to do. In the meantime, the flirting increased and our minds circled each other in class. Eventually, it all became too much to ignore. I plucked up the courage and asked her out. To my relief, she said yes.
On our first date we visited the town of La Calera which is located on the eastern side of the mountains that shadow the city. It’s a popular weekend destination for rolos, as people from Bogotá are called, with several parrilladas or barbeque restaurants in the area. This is where I was introduced to chunchurria which is fried cow intestines. It has to be well cooked and crunchy otherwise it’s not so great.
Lily even let me drive her car which was my first time driving on the South American continent. It was a much more frenetic pace on the roads of Colombia to what I was accustomed to in Australia. I would describe the driving style of Colombians as defensive offensive. Everyone pretty much drives like a maniac and they expect others to do the same so they are always wary of other drivers.
Lily owned a Mitsubishi Montero which is called Pajero in Australia; however pajero means wanker in Spanish. Clearly, a Mitsubishi Wanker is not going to sell very well. When driving into the car parks of shopping malls, there was always tight security with sniffer dogs at work, and I would have to open the boot so the dogs could sniff for explosives. Once again, this was all part of the ordinary life of Colombians.
I had used a short holiday period to travel to Cali to catch up with Pedro and Dave at the Calidad hostel where I stayed, while Lily had travelled to Medellín to see her family. Our relationship was still too young for an introduction to her parents. Still, I felt we had promise and I was excited to tell Pedro all about her. In fact, I had just done so when my phone rang. I answered, only to hear Lily crying on the other end.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
She explained how she had been in a bad accident. As she travelled to Medellín in a car with a couple of friends, one of the car’s wheels came loose causing the driver to lose control. The car careened onto the other side of the road and into an oncoming motorcyclist and his wife who were killed instantly. The car rolled several times and Lily was thrown from the vehicle. She was left lying on the highway for the next two hours until an ambulance arrived.
‘Are you going to be okay?’ I honestly had no idea how she would respond and feared the worst.
‘The doctor doesn’t know how bad the damage is yet’, she replied as her voice wobbled in shock.
She was afraid. So was I. I had already suspected she could be the one for me. Perhaps now I wouldn’t get the chance to find out. The good times in Cali came to an abrupt halt and I arranged to fly to Medellín the next day.
13
WITHOUT TITS THERE IS NO PARADISE
After an hour-long flight I was finally there – Medellín. It had been a long time coming. I had wanted to visit the city on my first trip to Colombia but had run out of time. I was glad to finally be there, although not under the circumstances.
Mercifully, tests revealed Lily had no serious internal damage. She was able to leave hospital and stay with her siblings who lived in the Laureles neighbourhood. Lily couldn’t walk without assistance and was still in mild shock. I asked why the ambulance took so long to arrive, and she explained it was due to the remoteness of the accident site. Two other occupants in the car were only slightly injured. I was very relieved that she wasn’t badly injured.
On the flight north I had noticed a mean-looking fellow travelling with a glamorous companion. She was very curvy both topside and down low. Plastic surgery is very popular in Colombia and this girl clearly appeared to have been surgically enhanced.
I was looking at her innocently. Well, innocently enough. Perhaps I was staring without realising, but her boyfriend caught me and gave me a long hard glare – if looks could kill! It reminded me that I had just flown from one gangster capital to another. The Cali to Medellín route was the ‘gangster corridor’.
Colombian gangsters generally like their women to be well endowed and to also show off their assets. Many Colombian women have plastic surgery in order to attract the nar
cos. This part of Colombia’s gangster culture was illustrated in the popular television series, Sin Tetas No Hay Paraíso (Without Tits There Is No Paradise), based on Gustavo Bolívar’s book of the same name. Produced in 2006, the show tells the story of a girl who desperately wants to get breast implants in order to improve her poverty-stricken life. She becomes a prostitute to narcos in exchange for money, gifts and even social status but without big breasts she struggled to compete for their affections against the other more endowed girls.
Many young girls seek out the narcos or traquetos as drug traffickers are commonly referred to in Colombia. Sandra Muñoz grew up anything but wealthy in her home town of Manizales, the capital of Caldas. Her mother worked at a newsstand but the pretty blonde dreamed of something bigger. After promising her mother she would not have to sell sweets and magazines for the rest of her life, she set off for Bogotá to seek fame and fortune.
While still a teenager starting out in the acting and modelling scene, she met Bogotá Cartel leader Luis Reynaldo Murcia known as ‘Martelo’. The attraction was immediate and she became the capo’s girlfriend. It wasn’t long before her star began to rise. After doing some work as a presenter on one of the lesser well-known television channels, she landed a role in the popular daytime television series, Padres e Hijos (Sons and Daughters), while the TV y Novelas (TV and Soap Operas) magazine voted her ‘Best Bum’.
By 1998, her relationship with Martelo was over but she would not be lonely for long. A friend introduced her to Nelson Cabrera, yet another narco with whom she had a son by the end of that year. Dating the ex-girlfriend of the city’s leading capo was a bold move. Cabrera, along with his brother and another man, were assassinated the following year as they stood outside a gymnasium. Deciding it was time to leave the country, Sandra packed her bags and travelled with her son to Miami where she continued her successful television career, becoming known as the ‘Latin Pamela Anderson’.
With Hollywood beckoning, she first made a trip back to Colombia where she was asked by justice officials to testify about Cabrera’s death. She didn’t know anything; however, in the meantime the United States authorities decided to cancel her visa. After that, she disappeared from television screens and magazine covers. It wasn’t until 2010 that she resurfaced after the leaking of an explicit home video of her having sex with Puerto Rican drug trafficker José David Figueroa, known as ‘The Pablo Escobar of the Caribbean’. Sandra Muñoz just couldn’t escape the gangster life. As she once said in a television interview, ‘For me a narco is a normal person’.
For his part, her first gangster boyfriend, Martelo, couldn’t escape beautiful women either. When the police raided his residence in 1998, he was asleep in bed with Paula Salazar, who was a contestant in the running to become Miss Caldas. During a search of the apartment, the police found his photo album which included photos of television presenter Alexandra Serrano, Miss Caquetá – Adriana Torres, and Miss Cundinamarca – Rocío Bernal.
Martelo explained, ‘I like women and each week I changed but Schuester was always the woman of my life.’ Leila Christine Schuester was Brazil’s entrant for the 1993 Miss Universe contest reaching the top ten. Nice work if you can get it!
Beauty queens are the ultimate trophy for drug lords and there are plenty of ‘trophies’ to choose from with all the different beauty pageants in Colombia. The first trophy of note was 1974’s Miss Colombia, Martha Lucia Echeverry, who would go on to marry Cali Cartel boss Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela. They had met in 1980 after she began working in public relations for the América de Cali football club.
Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela also got in on the action. In 1987, he met the 20-year-old college student Aura Rocio Restrepo who went on to represent Valle del Cauca in the National Tourism beauty pageant the following year. Up until his capture in 1995, she remained the lover of the Cali Cartel boss who was 27 years her senior.
Maribel Gutierrez, winner of the 1990 Miss Colombia contest, was the girlfriend of North Coast Cartel member Jairo ‘El Mico’ Durán. On the day of the pageant, he flooded her room in the Hilton Hotel with flowers and after she won he boasted that he had bought her the title as a birthday present. They went on to marry the following year; however, wedded bliss would not last long with Durán killed less than two years later.
Pastor Perafán, another leader of the Bogotá Cartel, got married for the sixth time to 1993’s Miss Vichada, Luz Adriana Ruiz. Perafán took her to that year’s Miss Colombia pageant which she lost, but he was rumoured to be sponsoring several other contestants as well.
Natalie Ackermann was Miss Atlántico in 2000, while her boyfriend was Norte del Valle Cartel leader Wilber Varela. She went on to represent Germany at the 2006 Miss Universe pageant despite being born in Colombia. Varela also sustained a long-term relationship with Yovanna Guzmán, the 2001 winner of Chica Med which was a beauty pageant sponsored by the drug chief.
The Chica Med contest was notorious for its narco infiltration, with many of its contestants sponsored by their gangster boyfriends. The event’s organiser was killed by sicarios shortly after the 2003 contest and it was speculated that this was due to the ‘wrong’ girl being crowned.
Occasionally, these narco trophies became traquetas, or female drug traffickers, themselves. Sandra Murcia was a top international model appearing for well-known fashion designers, such as Karl Lagerfeld, Christian Dior and Gianni Versace. Back in her home city of Bogotá, she met Efraín Hernández, one of the country’s top drug traffickers from the Norte del Valle Cartel.
Don Efra, as he was known, used his vast cocaine fortune to set up many legitimate businesses in various industries, such as construction, real estate, aviation, hotels and bakeries. He was smitten the first time he laid eyes on Sandra and they married in late 1993 with a huge wedding in Quito. About 2000 guests, including a who’s who of the Colombian showbiz world, were flown in from Colombia and Europe on chartered planes.
Guests at the three-day event included the policeman-turned-entrepreneur Jesus ‘Chucho’ Sarria and his wife Elizabeth Montoya de Sarria, known as ‘La monita retrechera’ or ‘The sneaky little blonde’. (Her hair was actually more brownish than blonde.) After marrying they established several businesses and bought luxurious properties in Miami and Los Angeles, while investing heavily in Colombia’s Caribbean island of San Andrés. They also bought a Paso Fino or Fine Step horse stud back in Colombia, which they named Hacienda Lady Di. Elizabeth used to show those in her inner circle a famous blue diamond that had belonged to Imelda Marcos, the ex-first lady of the Philippines, which was valued at $5 million. This blatant exhibition of wealth clearly signalled they were involved in the cocaine business.
In 1993, a plane carrying nearly 6 tons of cocaine was confiscated in the El Salvadorian capital, San Salvador. Arrested was Colombian pilot Luis Farfán, along with three other Colombians and two Mexicans. It was determined the cargo was destined to end up in the hands of Mexican drug lord, Joaquín ‘El Chapo’ Guzmán.
Sensing the danger he was now in, Farfán rolled over and identified Chucho Sarria as the owner of the plane and its contents adding, ‘He is one of the leaders in Cali and is the owner of many properties in Colombia’. He subsequently laid out the connection between Sarria, Montoya and Ernesto Samper, and that a top police colonel on Sarria’s payroll would act as the go-between. Chucho Sarria and his wife Elizabeth were essentially in charge of collecting all the money from the drug traffickers in Cali to give to Samper’s presidential campaign. The Case 8000 also revealed a recorded conversation between Montoya and Samper, while a photo of the two made its way into the public domain.
The sneaky little blonde was assassinated on 2 February 1996, less than two weeks after Samper’s presidential campaign chief, Fernando Botero Zea, had implicated the then president in the Case 8000 scandal. As they say in Colombia, it was ‘los ajustes de cuentas’ or ‘the settling of accounts’. Her husband Chucho was imprisoned on drug-trafficking charges in 1995 before being acquitted in 2
002. He always maintained his fortune came from being tipped off to a buried treasure and winning two big lottery jackpots. He is wanted in relation to the 2008 murder of one of the country’s top esmeralderos or emerald dealers. He was captured in the Colombian border city Cúcuta in June 2017.
Don Efra and Sandra’s marriage only lasted a few months and they had already divorced by the time Sandra began a new venture – drug trafficking. It was a short and unsuccessful stint, although she did acquire the nickname ‘Miss Coca’. She was arrested at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris in 1996, attempting to smuggle in over 5 kilograms of cocaine. She pretended to be a Miss Universe contestant but the game was up, and she spent the next four years in a French prison.
Don Efra soon got himself a new trophy in Maria Marcela Serrano, who represented the state of Guainia in the 1993 Miss Colombia contest. They married quickly, albeit not in as extravagant fashion as his previous wedding, but once again the marriage didn’t last long. Don Efra was assassinated in late 1996 at the Hacienda Santa Bárbara shopping mall in Bogotá. After his murder, Serrano retained a decent share of Don Efra’s fortune and headed for Cartagena where she began a serious relationship with Christian Sale, the son of Georgio Sale – an Italian reputedly belonging to the ’Ndrangheta mafia outfit and accused in Colombia of associating with right-wing paramilitaries.
Maria Marcela Serrano was arrested in 1999 in relation to Don Efra’s business dealings and was sentenced to over five years in prison for illicit enrichment, although she spent only a short time behind bars. After being granted home detention, she married Christian, but wedded bliss was fleeting and they separated shortly after amid accusations he had cheated her out of a huge sum of money left to her by Don Efra. The drug-traffickers curse plays out in all forms!
