Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  Monthly bribery expenditures came to roughly 100,000 USD, but there was still a lot of money to play with. After buying off the man responsible for delivering food to the prison, as well as those who manned the six police checkpoints surrounding La Catedral, the floodgates were opened for anything Escobar’s heart desired: prostitutes, preferably around the age of 15; a bar stocked with 18-year-old whisky; potent marijuana from Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta. Plus furniture, artworks, artillery, appliances, and the latest in home electronics. In just a few short months the austere building, with its drab, concrete exterior, was dripping with luxury within the confines of its walls. Escobar purchased a motorcycle for his son and a playhouse for his daughter, for use whenever the family was visiting. According to his sister Luz Marina, this was a fantastic time: ‘La Catedral brought everyone together again, all the family,’ she said later in an interview for The Memory of Pablo Escobar. ‘There were lovely family gatherings.’

  By the end of his first year of imprisonment, Escobar had managed to revive his once invincible empire. He had also won back one of the classic cartel routes, La Fany, partly through a new agreement with two of his old companions, Gerardo ‘Kiko’ Moncada and Fernando ‘El Negro’ Galeano, both of whom were still at large. Each month, more than ten tonnes of narcotics made its way by ship from Buenaventura to Mexico, where it was transported by speedboat for the last leg of the journey, to its final destination in Los Angeles. In just one year La Fany generated 240 million USD, of which Escobar received a monthly cut of half a million. Yet this was not enough for him, so one day he lured his two companions up to La Catedral, where he had ‘prison guards’ execute them on the spot. From a short-term perspective it was a stroke of genius; in the long term, however, it was nothing short of disaster. If the assassination of Galán was Escobar’s first irreversible mistake, the assassination of Moncada and Galeano was his second-greatest blunder, and one that would bring him closer to his own grave.

  By now even those closest to him were starting to regard Escobar’s behaviour as irrational and dangerous, and were fully aware that he could just as easily have any of them killed at any moment. From this point on, several allies began seeking refuge with former enemies. In Colombia, virtually every aspect of one’s social, criminal, and political life is impacted upon by whichever armed authority one chooses to align oneself with — the guerrillas, the state, the paramilitaries, or one or another drug cartel. This implies a generalised paranoia and a state in which everyone needs permanent protection; the most dangerous situation to be in is to be ‘alone’. Survivors of the Medellín Cartel were thus forced to seek refuge with the Cali Cartel.

  As a result of the bloodbath at La Catedral, the government was beginning to suspect that the situation was getting progressively out of hand. An inspection was ordered, and the results were shocking. The report revealed that the prison was ‘completely lacking in security’: the stream of lawyers, drug dealers, journalists, doctors, beauty queens, and killers who wished to sell their services to Escobar was infinite. A gym, a go-cart track, and a soccer field had been built to entertain his family; several new apartments had also been built in the space created after blasting underlying rock, and it was from here that Escobar was able to run his business with state-of-the-art communications equipment. La Catedral was also replete with artillery. César Gaviria, the president of Colombia, was horrified by the images from the report, and plans for Escobar’s transfer to another prison were set in motion.

  But it was too late.

  Early in the morning of 22 June 1992, when the military at long last received the order to enter La Catedral and collect Escobar, the greatest security risk to South America was sipping coffee with a friend in Envigado, the area of Medellín where he had spent his childhood. The soldiers killed a guard on the way into the prison, and in order to locate the cell they were convinced Escobar was hiding in, they blasted out walls and floors, and ultimately destroyed the entire building. Yet all efforts were futile, as Escobar had escaped. Or ‘just walked out’, as President Gaviria would later admit to Mollison and Nelson: ‘It’s incredible, the way he escaped. He just walked out. What mistakes did we make? We basically underestimated the capacity of Escobar, his capacity for corruption.’

  When the news of Escobar’s escape got out and spread across the world, the Colombian government became a laughing-stock. All credibility was lost. And people in Medellín were laughing especially hard. They loved the way that Pablo was provoking the United States. What was paradoxical about the situation was that many people, particularly those living in Antioquia, interpreted Escobar’s atrocities as the fault of the Colombian and US governments — those who had chased him down, those who wanted him extradited. On the one hand the United States was demanding all those thousands of tonnes of cocaine, but on the other it was punishing those who were simply trying to satisfy that demand.

  When Escobar found out a few days later that extradition to the United States had not been on the cards — that the intent had just been to transfer him to another prison — he contacted Alberto Villamizar, a liberal politician who had been one of the mediators when Escobar turned himself in the year before, and explained that he had misunderstood the situation but was now ready to surrender. But when Villamizar reported El Patrón’s ‘offer’ to the president, the government’s patience had evaporated. Escobar had disgraced the state for the last time. Gaviria just shook his head and, according to Villamizar, fired back with a curt response: ‘No, no, no. Not this time. We are going to kill him.’

  ON 31 JANUARY 1993, with Escobar still at large, an estate owned by his mother was burned to the ground. Shortly after that, two car bombs went off right in front of his cousin’s house.

  Then one of Escobar’s properties, in which an aunt and his mother, Hermilda, had sought temporary refuge, was blown up; both women were injured but survived. Soon after, yet another of his estates went up in flames, along with his entire vintage-car collection.

  In May Escobar’s nephew was kidnapped, and a month later his brother-in-law Carlos Henao also met a similar fate. Two weeks after he disappeared, Henao’s body was found.

  All of these criminal acts were aimed at Escobar’s relatives, who had not committed any crimes themselves. A violent campaign had been launched against everyone around him. The terrorist cell Los Pepes — with the motto ‘perseguidos por Pablo Escobar’, ‘people persecuted by Pablo Escobar’ — was formed by individuals who had fallen victim to his wrath and had now decided to do what the government apparently couldn’t: kill him.

  After Escobar had escaped from La Catedral, Gaviria had asked the DEA and CIA to take a more active role in tracking him down. The Pentagon deployed several planes from the US Air Force, while the Navy sent a P-3 espionage plane to supplement what the CIA and the American reconnaissance unit Centra Spike already had. The hunt for Escobar was the perfect way to test American war equipment, and in the spring of 1993 the air space over Medellín was full of all sorts of military aircraft. While this was going on, Escobar, assisted by his US-loathing sympathisers, relocated from house to house within the city’s urban centre. He would prove impossible to find.

  Almost.

  The DEA, formed in 1973, had a new head in Joe Toft, whose career was in need of a jumpstart, according to Mark Bowden. Capturing Escobar would be the perfect way to do it. By now the United States had so many units and commanders involved in Colombia that internal rivalry arose as competition ensued over who would do what and, especially, who would get the credit — the winning unit to receive a greater cut of funding in future defence budgets. Colombian law forbade foreign troops on national territory, and the Colombian military had all sorts of assistance except that which it most needed: an effective, high profile commando on the ground. It was a dilemma. Delta Force, the top-secret US Army anti-terrorist force, was what was really needed. But the law would not allow it.

  Yet the con
stitution was not the only obstacle; there was also public opinion. The sordid history of the United States in Latin America was hardly forgotten, even if the Cold War was over, and if César Gaviria was going to have any sort of future in politics it was important that the already enormous US military presence in Colombia remain hidden from the public. Delta Force lay in wait as Gaviria mulled over what to do. Twenty-four hours passed. Then came a historic decision, which reinforced a tradition that would later become the most devastating hallmark of many Colombian institutions, manifest in all the human-rights tragedies of the coming decades: it decided that the end justifies the means.

  Four days after Escobar made his escape, Delta Force touched down in Bogotá. According to Killing Pablo, the Colombian government and the White House concluded that the special American force was practised enough in operating incognito that the Colombian media would never discover it. The risk for scandal, they calculated, was minimal.

  In 1989 the Colombian government had created the Bloque de Busqueda, the Search Bloc, a renaissance force formed specifically with Escobar in mind. To avoid a possible scandal and accusations of an American invasion, the Bloque de Busqueda would stand on the front line, masquerading as the unit in charge. All others would assist — or at least look as though they were assisting. That way Delta Force’s involvement would go completely under the radar.

  Yet there was one group that was even keener on seeing Escobar dead than George H.W. Bush and César Gaviria. During the dismantling of the Medellín Cartel the Cali Cartel had calmly been lying in wait, and by now had several million dollars to gain from getting rid of Escobar once and for all. Various stakeholders suddenly began to converge, and an alliance that spanned the spectrum from the White House and the Colombian government to Cali drug barons and former partners of Escobar — by now his most sworn enemies — was built around the one objective that mattered. Although no one could have fully imagined the consequences, that year, as revealed in Natalia Morales and Santiago La Rotta’s book Los Pepes, saw the incipience of a tumour in Colombian military life and politics: the paramilitary complex, whose metastases would spread throughout the state in the 1990s and 2000s, leading to a decade-long bloodbath whose horrors would surpass the Escobar era.

  Los Pepes was led by former Escobar allies Fidel and Carlos Castaño, who had been forced to decide whether they wanted to work for or against him following the assassination of Gerardo Moncada and Fernando Galeano at La Catedral. After the FARC had murdered their father, the brothers had become impassioned anti-communists who offered their services as hit men to the military: they offered to execute the sorts of people the state wanted to do away with, but could not do on its own. The Colombian army could kill the green-clad guerrilla soldiers with no legal or moral quandary, but they couldn’t kill ‘the water’ — the peasants, trade unionists, feminists, and other potential left-wingers. In northern Colombia the Castaño brothers had built up a large private army designed specifically to combat the guerrillas, and the two of them had, for that very reason, good contacts among the members of the military, who were increasingly coming to view the guerrilla expansion as a problem much bigger than Escobar. Eight years after Escobar’s death, Carlos Castaño would explain in his autobiography how he assembled ‘the six’, a group of six politicians and generals of ‘the highest level’, who gave him orders about which people to have executed. Carlos would submit a list of all sorts of ‘enemies of the state’ and inquire about who to kill next, after which the six would disappear into another room and return with their choice. The Castaños carried out the deed, and Carlos, until the day he died, would insist that there were simply certain ‘types of military actions that others had to carry out so that the state wouldn’t have to’.

  The murders at La Catedral made the brothers ally themselves with Escobar’s opponents, and Los Pepes was an illustrative example of Castaño’s theses: the Colombian and US governments needed their help. But everything had to remain top secret. They contacted Cali Cartel leader Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the new national cocaine strategist, and a network of money, threats, intelligence, assassinations, extortion, drug interests, and Colombian and US military operations all started to become intertwined. The Cali Cartel offered huge sums of money in exchange for information that revealed the movements of Escobar and his men, and paid handsomely for sanctioned killings; Los Pepes offered protection to the last of Escobar’s allies who wanted to switch sides.

  Much later, when his career was back on track and everything had cooled down, DEA head Joe Toft spoke to the author of The Memory of Pablo Escobar, offering his insights into what the connection between Los Pepes, the Cali Cartel, and the Colombian government actually entailed:

  They all ran up to Cali and worked out a deal with the Cali Cartel. Cali accepted them and provided them with the intelligence that they had been collecting for a long time. In the process there was also a connection made with the government, although it is not clear how that happened. Cali went and said, ‘We will help you get rid of him’, and the government just looked the other way.

  Bloque de Busquda, the government’s tool against Escobar, had conducted thousands of raids against what remained of the Medellín Cartel and its operations since the 1989 assassination of Galán; 1314 people had been arrested while 1215 firearms, 7000 kilos of dynamite, and 1.4 million USD had been confiscated. The latter figure was surprisingly low, and Escobar’s men maintain that the police made off with large sums of money that they divvied among themselves. Popeye, one of the few of Escobar’s men to survive, would later claim that on just one of the cartel’s sites the police took over there was three million USD.

  Today there are an abundance of incredible stories about how certain poor policemen got rich during these years, and it’s hard to know which are true and which are myths. More certain are the accounts of all the people whose lives went up in smoke during this time. In the six months that Escobar was on the run, a total of 3479 people were killed in Medellín alone — approximately 20 a day — and the war between the Search Bloc and Los Pepes, on the one hand, and the gangs still loyal to Escobar, on the other, seemed only to intensify. For every policeman shot, large numbers of young people were killed in a series of sweeping purges, and when a human-rights commission began to investigate the wave of violence, the state was forced to come clean about the active role it had played in various massacres.

  By mid 1993 Los Pepes and all the military actions were putting Escobar under more pressure than ever before. It became increasingly difficult for him to access money from his stashes and to move about freely. In February several of the men closest to him surrendered, throwing a wrench into his armed network, and what freedom he had been able to retain was further curtailed. In November he took over a house in Los Olivos, a middle-class area located behind the city’s bullfighting ring, where he was happily oblivious to just how little time he had left. His mother’s cousin Luzmila Gaviria and his last remaining bodyguard, known as Limón, were two of the few people who looked after him. Luzmila felt him to be in good spirits, though ‘changed’.

  Escobar was a guy from the streets, and his aim in life was to use cocaine not only as a means to become wealthy but also as a weapon to rebel. Against the United States. Against the Colombian upper class. Against the members of elite society, who gave him congratulatory pats on the back and were happy to spend time with him at the height of his popularity but who, as soon as the United States took over, turned their backs on him. Against the political class, which — unlike him, at least in his own mind — had never lifted a finger to help the poor masses up out of the misery in which they lived and into homes of their own.

  While Luzmila made his meals, Escobar kept mostly to himself. He read the papers, watched television, and smoked grass. When US aid to the Colombian army forced Escobar into further seclusion, he gradually began to morph into a sort of warped Che Guevara figure: he started plotting an esca
pe to the mountains, where he would make a temporary home for himself in the jungle and recharge his batteries, after which he hoped to return to society with a vengeance, and with his own guerrilla movement: the Antioquia Rebels.

  The Colombian and US governments saw the future of the nation as dependent on how the Escobar story would end and were anxious for a resolution. Meanwhile, the Cali Cartel calmly began setting the infrastructure in place that would revolutionise cocaine production in the 1990s, forging an increasingly intimate collaboration with the military. At one point a tape recording turned up in which Cali leader Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela explained to a senator that he and the Colombian National Police had agreed to make a payment of ten million USD as soon as Escobar was captured or killed: eight million to the Search Bloc and two million to whoever provided the information essential for a successful operation.

  Joe Toft was alarmed by the disclosure. What were they up to? The Pentagon, the White House, the DEA, and the CIA were all now deeply involved in an operation that was apparently infected with the same criminality they were supposed to be putting a stop to. Colombia seemed a hopeless case. Its layers of crime were infinite. A sense slowly developed among those working in various local DEA branches that the excessive concentration on Escobar was actually strengthening structures within the Colombian cocaine industry, rather than weakening them. Los Pepes continued to wreak terror everywhere and with everyone’s consent, and the Escobar family watched in horror as those nearest and dearest to them began falling like flies: on 5 November Juan Herrera, a friend residing with the family, disappeared; on 8 November the family’s domestic servant was murdered and the manager of one of their apartments killed; on 10 November the children’s private tutor disappeared; and, according to Escobar’s son, on 15 November police attempted to kidnap their chauffeur. A few years later, Carlos Castaño would boast in his autobiography, to many readers’ despair: