by Austin Galt
Angie Sanclemente was crowned Colombia’s Coffee Queen in 2000. She later married a Mexican drug lord known as ‘El Monstruo’ or ‘The Monster’ but they split and she moved to Argentina, forming her own cartel with her new boyfriend. The ‘narcomodelo’, as she became known, would pay models to smuggle cocaine to Europe via Mexico. She was captured in the trendy Buenos Aires neighbourhood of Palermo in 2010 and sentenced to six years in jail. She was deported to Colombia after serving half her sentence.
Juliana Sossa won the Antioquia Miss Tourism pageant in 2008 before heading to Mexico where she hooked up with Mexican narco José Jorge Balderas known as ‘JJ’. While at a luxurious country house just outside of Mexico City, she felt the need to tell her Facebook friends just how wonderful it all was. Authorities were on the case and they promptly arrested both of them. JJ had warrants out for both drug trafficking and murder. Sossa was released the following year and returned to Colombia.
Sometimes the girlfriends become collateral damage from narco disputes. Liliana Lozano was Colombia’s Miss Bambuco in 1996. (Bambuco is a traditional folk dance popular in the south of the country.) She went on to star in a popular Colombian television series, Pasión de Gavilanes (Passion of Hawks), and in 2006, she became the girlfriend of Leonidas Vargas, a drug trafficking heavyweight known as ‘El Rey de Caquetá’ or ‘The King of Caquetá’.
Leonidas Vargas became a partner of Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha after they met at a horse show around the time cocaine was starting to take off. The narcos love their well-bred horses which are also a status symbol; Rodríguez Gacha was the proud owner of Túpac Amaru, the world’s best horse in its breed and valued at $1 million, a fair sum back in the 1980s. As with the other narcos of that era, Vargas had a penchant for the extravagant. At his home in Bogotá, he had a pool built in the shape of his home state Caquetá, while in Florencia he built a little replica of Madrid’s famed bullfighting ring, Las Ventas.
After going on the run for several years, Leonidas Vargas came back on the radar in Madrid in 2006, while on his way to the football World Cup in Germany. He was detained after travelling on a false passport but given bail due to health reasons. But by 2009 his end was nigh. Soon after checking himself into a Madrid hospital due to cardiovascular problems, he was killed by an assassin who pumped several bullets into his body using a pistol fitted with a silencer. The king was dead.
At the time of his death, his girlfriend Liliana Lozano had just flown back to Colombia with his brother Fabio Vargas. The following day, their bodies were found half naked with signs of torture and riddled with bullets in a ditch just outside the town of Pradera, to the west of Cali.
Colombia’s most famous model, Natalia Paris, was the partner of Julio Correa, known in the underworld as ‘Julio Fierro’. He worked for Pablo Escobar in the early 1990s. They had a daughter together in 2000 which Julio never got to see grow up. After being identified as the owner of a large shipment of cocaine decommissioned in Miami, he began cooperating with US authorities. Word of this had reached his fellow traffickers, and upon returning to Colombia in 2001, he was snatched just outside of Medellín. It is thought he was killed and his body incinerated in a crematorium. To add to Natalia’s misery, she had her US visa cancelled once American authorities learnt of her gangster connection.
Girls from all over Colombia would travel to Cali and Medellín in search of gangster boyfriends. I began to realise why the girl had smiled at me during my bus trip from Bogotá to Cali a couple of years earlier.
I was a touch apprehensive about the trip into Medellín from the Rio Negro airport as I had heard of people being kidnapped on this route before, including an Australian construction executive who was kidnapped en route to the airport in December 2001. He was released six months later.
There was nothing to worry about as we soon arrived at the edge of the Aburrá Valley in which lies Medellín. The view of the city was absolutely stunning. I would come to see this view many more times in the future and it always reminded me of a scene from the first Star Wars film. Looking down upon the Mos Eisley spaceport, Obi-Wan Kenobi turns to Luke Skywalker and says, ‘You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious’. Medellín certainly has its fair share of scum and villainy and one should definitely be cautious. However, unlike Mos Eisley, it is a beautiful city with a beautiful climate.
Medellín, the country’s second largest city, is very green due to receiving rain more days than not, while the average temperature each day is around 23 degrees Celsius, making it a very pleasant place to be. It is called the Cuidad de la Eterna Primavera or The City of Eternal Spring.
The city is famous for its Feria de las Flores or Flower Festival, which is held each year around the beginning of August. The main event is a flower parade where locals, known as silleteros and mostly from the nearby township of Santa Elena, carry an arrangement of flowers on their backs. It represents the end of slavery specifically where the slaves used to carry people on their backs. The festival also features a procession of classic cars, while the cabalgata or horse parade was cancelled in 2014 due to the mistreatment of the horses, not to mention the parade had become a catwalk of gangsters getting liquored up as they rode around town.
Lily’s parents had also arrived in town, so I was meeting them now whether I wanted to or not. While they kept a residence in Medellín where Lily’s two siblings lived, they lived and worked in a town located a few hours drive to the north-east of the city. The town is located in a mountainous region of Antioquia where both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries operated. Medellín was just coming out of a period when it was known as the most violent city in the world and also the world’s kidnapping capital; it was certainly not an oasis of security and tranquillity. But it was a respite from the wild rural regions of Antioquia.
A few weeks earlier in the rural municipality of Urrao located just over 60 kilometres to the west of Medellín, the FARC had massacred eight soldiers and two politicians – the governor of Antioquia, Guillermo Gaviria and the ex-governor of Antioquia and then Colombian defence minister, Gilberto Echeverri. They had been kidnapped in April 2002 while participating in a peace march in the nearby town of Caicedo. It was perhaps a little naive on their part to travel to such a dangerous region.
On 5 May 2003, the Colombian military launched a rescue mission after receiving intelligence on the location of those being held captive. The FARC had standing orders to kill hostages should the military attempt a rescue and, as army helicopters approached, the guerrillas took aim. Guillermo Gaviria shouted, ‘Boys, don’t kill us’. He was slaughtered in response. Gilberto Echeverri survived the first onslaught and was moaning, ‘I’m injured, help me’. The guerrillas heard his cries for help and one of them returned to finish him off. One of the surviving soldiers had pretended to be dead after being shot and he was able to tell the story of what happened. It was yet another act of barbarity by the FARC.
These heinous crimes seemed a world away as Lily’s mother prepared lunch, which smelled great. Home-cooked meals were rare these days so this was a treat. On the menu was bandeja paisa, which is the traditional dish of Antioquia. It includes red beans, ground meat, pork sausage, fried pork belly, blood sausage, avocado, fried egg, white rice and patacón. The only danger here was eating too much!
With Lily incapacitated, I decided to go off and explore the city which is rich in history. After all, Medellín is the city made famous by Pablo Escobar.
14
MEDELLÍN CARTEL
The first time Colombia really came on my radar was in 1992, a year after leaving school. I knew the 1984 film Romancing the Stone was based on an adventure in the country but it wasn’t as impactful as a small item in my local newspaper which caught my eye. It detailed the incredible story of a Colombian drug kingpin who built his own prison featuring a football pitch, bar, discotheque and spa. He had also chosen his own prison guards. If that wasn’t extraordinary enough, he then decided to
leave his jail one day, of his own accord, with government forces subsequently launching a manhunt.
Where on earth does something like this happen?! I began to take more of an interest in Colombia and would eagerly read any further news snippets that appeared in the papers. I would learn that this prison escape would set in motion the final chapter of Pablo Escobar’s life.
El patrón de los patrones. El capo de capos. Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was born in Rio Negro before moving to Envigado which is the municipality bordering El Poblado in Medellín. He was one of seven children brought up by their father, a farmer, and their mother, a school teacher. The family were poor and weren’t able to afford much beyond the basic necessities. Pablo took a few family members along for the ride, including his brother Roberto who acted as the Medellín Cartel’s accountant, and his cousin Gustavo Gaviria who was Pablo’s right-hand man and in charge of the finances.
Escobar began his criminal career as a thief and gun-for-hire, and he was allegedly part of the criminal gang that kidnapped and killed the wealthy businessman and philanthropist Diego Echavarria in 1971. The victim’s home, El Castillo or The Castle, in the El Poblado neighbourhood was subsequently donated to the state and has become a popular tourist spot.
After finding success in the contraband smuggling business, Pablo Escobar turned his attention to cocaine in the mid-1970s and partnered with cousins Pablo Correa Ramos and Pablo Correa Arroyave. They became known as Los Pablos and Escobar would have them killed many years later after deciding Medellín was only big enough for one Pablo.
Escobar expanded on the drug-smuggling routes set up by cocaine pioneer Benjamín Herrera who disappeared from the scene in 1980 after gaining too much notoriety only to return several years later once the heat was off him. Escobar would source the coca paste from other Andean countries to the south before bringing it up to the laboratories in Colombia where it would be processed into cocaine. He was arrested early on during one such trip as he returned from Ecuador with a batch of paste. When he was unable to bribe his way out of trouble, he resorted to having the arresting officers killed. The case was then dropped and Pablo’s creed of ‘plata o plomo’, ‘money or lead’, was born.
As demand for cocaine exploded, Pablo began to source more high-quality coca paste from Bolivia which was generally supplied by that country’s top drug baron, Roberto Suárez, who was the inspiration for the character of Alejandro Sosa in the 1983 film Scarface. He built up a massive distribution network, including a fleet of aircraft, boats and submarines, and used many routes to smuggle cocaine into the United States.
Escobar, along with the other cartel leaders, bought up huge tracts of land in the Middle Magdalena which is the north-western region of Colombia between the Cordillera Central and the Cordillera Oriental. One of those tracts of land covered 20 square kilometres in the municipality of Puerto Triunfo, Antioquia. Located on the road that connects Medellín with Bogotá, Hacienda Napoles was Pablo Escobar’s childhood dream home lavishly brought to life.
Having grown up poor, he now had all the wealth and more to last many lifetimes. He bought all the toys one could possibly want, including jetskis, hovercraft and motorbikes, while he stored a collection of classic cars in the garage. He owned a 1930s Cadillac similar to Al Capone’s which he sprayed with gunfire to give it a more authentic touch.
When he ran out of toys to buy, he started building his own zoo by importing exotic animals from all over the world. These animals needed to be smuggled in, but that was Escobar’s specialty. The zoo consisted of four hippos – three females and a male – giraffes, elephants, rhinos, zebras, antelopes, emus, kangaroos and many exotic birds such as flamingos.
There were some animals that money just couldn’t buy so he built replicas of them. Statues of a Tyrannosaurus rex, triceratops and several other types of dinosaurs were constructed around the property. Other animals only existed in fairytales but that was not a deterrent to Pablo. His daughter, Manuela, once requested a unicorn for Christmas so the drug lord ordered his men to purchase a white horse and staple a horn to its forehead and attach paper wings to its torso. The ‘unicorn’ died shortly after from an infection.
The small plane that adorns the entrance of Hacienda Napoles was reported to have carried his first cocaine shipment, but that is just a myth which Escobar even admitted to. He constructed a bullring, go-kart racing track and a helipad, while also paving a runway to land his Learjet. He had come a long way since his childhood.
Pablo had become accustomed to politicians promising to make ordinary people’s lives better but never delivering. It had a profound effect on him and helped influence him to enter politics once he had the means to make a real difference. In 1982, he was elected as an alternate member of the Senate and by now he certainly had the means with cocaine overtaking coffee that year as the country’s main export for the first time.
He put his money where his mouth was by building football fields, hospitals, schools and churches. He also built a whole neighbourhood for the poor, popularly known as Barrio Pablo Escobar, which sits on the eastern slopes of the city. It was the realisation of his ideological platform of Medellín Sin Turgurios or Medellín Without Slums, and helped him gain the moniker the ‘paisa Robin Hood’. Built in 1984, it is home to around 2500 families, who were previously homeless. It remains an enduring legacy of Pablo’s affection for the less privileged in society and his revulsion for self-serving and narcissistic politicians. And its residents still adore him for it!
The other cartel leaders advised against his decision to enter the murky world of politics. They preferred to stay in the shadows. While the other leaders maintained equal status within the organisation, they generally deferred to Escobar, who essentially became the unofficial head boss of the cartel.
It is debatable as to which profession is more treacherous – drug trafficking or politics. Pablo had successfully navigated the drug-trafficking world, but politics was a whole other ball game. Many Colombians regard politics as the best business of all as it can be very financially rewarding without the risks of drug trafficking. The real mafiosos walk the corridors of power!
Pablo was arguably out of his league here. Not long after entering the fray, he was denounced by rival politicians as having derived most of his wealth from drug trafficking. Escobar tried to explain his way out of the mess saying he was just a successful businessman involved in cattle ranching and construction. However, as they say in politics, ‘When you are explaining, you are losing’.
Escobar was a sitting duck for such smears which eventually led to him being expelled from Congress in late 1983. The two main instigators of the attacks were Luis Galán and Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, who exposed the Medellín Cartel’s influence on politics and sports. Both men would ultimately pay the dearest of prices for their public accusations against the country’s most fearsome capo.
Rodrigo Lara was the minister of justice under President Betancur. He waited for Escobar to take his seat in Congress before publicly shaming him. Escobar had anticipated this and had laid a trap beforehand by arranging for one of his close associates to write a cheque made out to Lara and record a telephone conversation between the two. Lara apparently had no idea he was speaking to a drug trafficker and the revelations were aimed at attacking his credibility.
The man who executed the ruse was Evaristo Porras, the Medellín Cartel’s member based out of the Amazonian city of Leticia. He was the leader of the Cartel de Amazonas or Amazon Cartel and the main supplier of coca paste for laboratories in the south of the country during the 1970s. He had his eccentricities which included building a replica of the Carrington mansion from the US television series Dynasty. Porras was first arrested in Peru in 1978 but was able to get out of jail with the help of his Peruvian lawyer, Vladimiro Montesinos, who went on to become Peru’s spy chief before his downfall which saw him convicted in 2006 for supplying arms to the FARC guerrillas. Porras was arrested again in 1995 and spent the next decade behind bar
s. He maintained his fortune came from lottery winnings, but he died penniless in 2010.
Despite being under enormous pressure, Lara kept up the attacks against the drug barons by hitting their operations and confiscating many of their assets, while continuing to argue for extradition. In 1983 he became the first person to talk about ‘hot money’ in football, publicly accusing several of the country’s football teams of being under the influence of drug traffickers, including Atlético Nacional.
The president and majority owner of Atlético Nacional at the time was Hernán Botero. His wealth had increased dramatically in the 1970s and he also owned Medellín’s most luxurious hotel, Hotel Nutibara, as well as several money-exchange houses and a real estate company. He was famous for once waving a wad of cash at the referee to signify he had been bought during a match in 1981. He was arrested in 1984 and became the first Colombian to be extradited to the United States despite not being a drug trafficker. He was convicted of money laundering and spent 17 years behind bars. His extradition essentially led the top drug traffickers to form the group Los Extraditables or The Extraditables, with the motto ‘Better a tomb in Colombia than a jail cell in the US’, and an image of a chained Botero as its logo.
Escobar eventually had enough of Lara’s attacks and ordered his assassination. On 30 April 1984, a motorbike pulled up alongside Lara’s Mercedes-Benz and the pillion passenger opened fire. Lara died as he sat in the back seat. The gunman was also killed by Lara’s bodyguards, while the motorbike rider was later captured and spent over 10 years in jail.
