Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It

by Magnus Linton

  Everybody accepted us. The Chief Public Prosecutor, the police, the army, the Security Service, the Attorney General, and even president César Gaviria Trujillo. No one tried arresting us. Even the journalists secretly applauded our actions. Everything was just as it should be.

  But for the United States at this point, there was no other way out. The coup de grâce was near, thanks to the assistance from the Cali Cartel and the tactics of Los Pepes. By the end of November this joint venture between the United States, Colombia, and the next generation of drug lords finally led them straight to Escobar’s hideout; now it was a matter of striking while the iron was hot. The only dilemma was whether they should take him dead or alive. No one — absolutely no one — was in favour of the latter option, but both legal and religious law forbade anyone from being killed unnecessarily. Could they not, though, make just one exception?

  ON WEDNESDAY 1 December, Escobar had a long telephone conversation with his wife and children from his house in Los Olivos. It was his 44th birthday, and they offered their best wishes. The only people by his side on this special occasion were Luzmila and Limón. Escobar — as the story goes in Luis Cañon’s book El Patrón — celebrated with wine, cake, and marijuana.

  Everything had been going according to plan, with the exception of two incidents, which his friends regarded as bad omens. The day before, a large fly, the type that tends to buzz around decaying bodies, had insisted on circling around Escobar all day; and later, after they had all sat down at the table to enjoy the birthday dinner and Luzmila had poured the wine, a glass fell to the floor but did not break. ‘What good luck,’ she exclaimed. But Limón shook his head and explained that this was actually a sign that something bad was sure to happen. Escobar, who was less superstitious, ignored their pessimism and appeared quite content as he reached for a letter from his daughter, on which she had drawn a pink heart, and proceeded to read aloud the words she had written: Daddy, I love you and wish you happiness on your birthday. You are the heaven, the moon, and the stars to me. I adore you. Your girl.

  The next day he woke around lunchtime and had some lasagna before retiring to his room again with a cordless phone, a move that was cause for jubilation for the chief investigator at the Search Bloc. He was following it all on a monitor from a hotel room in Bogotá, and the phone call confirmed that Escobar was where they thought he was. Los Olivos was teeming with spies, snipers, surveillance vans, policemen, and neighbours who had begun taking orders from the commando. Everything was happening covertly, and all the organisations were present — the DEA, the CIA, Delta Force, Centra Spike, the Colombian police force, the military, and the security police, but most of all the elite force, which had been distilled from all available resources, the entity that would now close the deal: Bloque de Busqueda. The operation was ready to commence.

  Escobar was wearing sandals and jeans rolled up over his ankles when a man in charge of one of the mobile units, Hugo Martinez, coasted down the street in a white van. They knew which block Escobar was on but were unsure of the exact house. Suddenly Martinez saw a man he recognised, but at the same time did not, standing at a second-storey window holding a telephone. He had only ever seen Escobar in photos and on television, and he had always appeared well kept and clean-shaven, except for his famous moustache. This man in the window, on the other hand, had thick, curly hair and a full beard. Nevertheless, he was absolutely sure who it was. Something clicked: it was Escobar.

  Hugo Martinez, together with his father — head of the Search Bloc — had been working on the case for a long time, so it was quite exciting for him to get the chance to see Escobar in person. After so many years of hard work and effort, thousands of deaths, hundreds of failed police raids, several false alarms, millions of dollars, and all the humiliation experienced by the police and military, there he stood before them. Within reach. The most wanted man in the world. The street gangster who had become one of the richest men in the world, and for almost 20 years had reigned over an entire underworld. The godfather of Medellín; Colombia’s biggest living legend. He could hardly believe it. He was so close — just a shot away, in fact.

  ‘I see him,’ Martinez exclaimed to his father by radio, and then he dispatched two armed men, who carefully crept their way to the front door, pressing their backs up against the outside of the house on either side when they reached it. He called for reinforcements, circled around the block, and parked in the back. Escobar’s building was connected to the neighbouring houses on both sides, but in the back there was a possible line of retreat over the roof of one of the bungalows. But Martinez now had backup, as Bowden reports, with all spots covered. All possible escape routes were blocked.

  He gave the orders to begin.

  Martín, one of the commando lieutenants, broke through the front door with a sledgehammer and barged in, accompanied by five other men. They immediately began shooting. One after the other commandoes ran up the stairs; but just as Martinez had predicted, the thugs tried to escape out the back window. Limón was the first to attempt a getaway, jumping two metres to the bungalow’s roof, which would give him access to the street. He didn’t make it far, though, and was shot dead just as he began to bolt.

  Then came Escobar. After kicking off his sandals, he heaved his now rather corpulent body out the window and slid down the roof. Having witnessed Limón’s fatal error, he stayed close to the wall, which offered temporary protection. Commando marksmen, deployed like scattered birds, sat on the neighbouring rooftops, but Escobar’s position made it difficult for them to find a good angle from which to shoot. They held their fire momentarily. With two revolvers in hand, Escobar slid barefoot down the roof, coming to a stop at the edge, but from there his only option was to try and make it to the other side. With his next step he suddenly found himself in the line of fire, and the shooting resumed. The first bullet went through his chest, the second through his leg, while a third entered through the left ear, exiting the other side. The drug baron fell headfirst.

  Once the shooting stopped, one of the marksmen climbed up onto the roof and shouted: ‘It’s Escobar! It’s Escobar!’ Crowds formed in the street, and men from all the military units on the scene craned their necks to get a look at their catch. Major Aguilar, one of the Search Bloc officers, rolled the body over to get a look at his face. With his thick beard and the curly hair sticking out from behind his ears, Escobar, despite his obesity, resembled the world-famous image of the dead Che Guevara, also killed with help from the CIA. Aguilar called Bogotá and conveyed his message as loudly as possible so that everyone who had gathered on the street could hear: ‘We have killed Pablo Escobar! Viva Colombia!’

  MORE THAN ANYTHING else, Pablo Escobar was a product of Colombia. When the agrarian society, with its deep class divisions, became urbanised rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, injustices and inequality became even more visible than before. In this social soil of religious yet poor people with no prospects, the door was wide open for all kinds of people claiming to be saviours. Escobar was one of many. A little smarter. Definitely a lot wilder. The fact that his personal and political objectives were funded by illegal activity had very little, if any, bearing for the working class, which had never seen either the state or the oligarchy respect any laws other than those of economics. To the inhabitants of Barrio Escobar the conclusion was obvious: their Pablo had been opposed and pursued not because he was a drug dealer, but because he was not an organic part of the Colombian upper class — and because he was a threat to the United States.

  People liked him. At least in the beginning. The oligarchy supported him as long as he was successful, but were quick to turn their backs once things turned sour and they felt they had to protect themselves. Large parts of the working class, on the other hand, were faithful up until the very end. It made more sense for them to back an unadorned anti-hero from the hood than a member of the Bogotá elite. In Barrio Escobar today, many people living in the sma
ll single-family homes built by their saviour still have his portrait hanging next to paintings of Christ, and some of the older generation, who had the chance to shake his hand, insist that he is still alive and will show up one day with the refrigerators he promised them in 1984.

  But there is no doubt that Escobar was the worst perpetrator of violence to ever emerge from the global cocaine trade, and the romanticising of him and his deeds is sometimes shockingly distasteful. Yet what’s much more tragic is that Escobar’s downfall actually intensified a number of existing maladies in Colombian society, and there appears to be no cure for them. It was during these years that intimate, often secret relations between the Pentagon and the Colombian military — the latter notorious for human-rights violations — were established, an alliance that soon became a force to be reckoned with, and by the 2010s would come close to triggering a major war in Latin America.

  The intense focus on one individual, Escobar, instead of on the structures of society also made it possible to depict evil in an overly simplistic way, which has had devastating consequences for Colombia’s political development ever since; so many different representations of violence and barbarism were projected onto him that many became blind to just how sick the state and its internal organs were in their own right. General Miguel Maza Márquez — the security police chief during the Escobar era and depicted in all historical accounts as an unwavering public servant, as well as an incorruptible hero, for having brought down Escobar — is just one of many examples. ‘Of everyone Escobar wanted to kill, I am the only one who is still alive today,’ Maza Márquez has been quoted as boasting. His words have circulated over the years and been used to reinforce the image of a black-and-white dichotomy in which good and evil are mutually exclusive in an unadulterated, almost biblical way; the Lord sentenced evil to death and allowed goodness to live on. Such was the case at least until 18 August 2009, when Colombians were shaken once again. On the 20th anniversary of the assassination of Luis Carlos Galán, the attorney-general made public the disturbing news: General Maza Márquez, one of the national heroes of the 1990s, had been arrested and imprisoned, as mounting evidence implicated him as a participant in Galán’s assassination.

  Another phenomenon, for which Escobar is more directly liable, and one few other countries have experienced to the same extent, is the practice of making murder a business. The 1990s as well as the 2000s saw the emergence of a number of scandals, and when news of falsos positivos exploded, it only confirmed the deep structural problems. This confusión de valores — confusion over values — is still a greatest problem in parts of Colombian society, and its roots in poverty and an historically violent rural elite go back much further than the Escobar era. What Escobar did, however, was to propel ethical chaos to levels from which the country has never recovered. His Nadaismo, with its fierce oscillation between absolute atheism and absolute spirituality, combined with cannabis, revolutionary radicalism, and the confession/forgiveness logic of the Church, was in the beginning just an innocent part of a Wild West mentality. But when the dollars from the cocaine trade started pouring in and gradually infiltrated most institutions, the consequences of a get-rich-quick culture, dominated by arms, quickly rose to the surface, posing a threat to society.

  Once the images of Escobar’s body began circulating all over the world, the United States, Colombia, and even Europe assumed that the hub of the global cocaine wheel had been destroyed. This conclusion was drawn through simple but naïve logic: the Medellín Cartel controlled over 80 per cent of world production, and the collective belief was that if Escobar, the CEO, could be killed, then the entire enterprise would simply crumble. Yet this is not what happened. Other presumptive CEOs were waiting in the wings, and in terms of production, the pursuit of Escobar actually had the reverse effect. Between 1990 and 1994 presidents Bush and Clinton invested more millions of dollars than ever before on combating cocaine, but the global price during the same time fell by one-third. While the quality just got better and better. In only a year’s time, between 1993 and 1994, production doubled.

  Those who came out on top after the Medellín Cartel was toppled were not the state or its citizens, but Escobar’s adversaries: Gilberto José Rodríguez Orejuela, the Castaño brothers, and the man who founded Los Pepes, Don Berna. From this point on, the latter would be the new leader of Medellín’s crime syndicate, and he and his men would never repeat Escobar’s biggest mistake — making an enemy of the state. Nor would Escobar’s successors repeat his over-the-top and violent megalomania. After his murder, keeping a low profile and cooperating with the state became hallmarks of the modern cocaine industry. While the Cali Cartel, like the marimba kings, had always striven for peace with the political class, and in doing so had won every battle, the Medellín Cartel, which had mostly sought out war, had always lost in the end. So it was after Escobar’s death: his adversaries took over all his routes and created a smuggling machinery five times as lucrative as the former drug king’s empire.

  Although the Escobar era left a vast number of problems in its wake, the two most devastating phenomena, which quickly started to infect politics and culture, were: for the state, the military’s tendency to believe that the ends justifies the means, and for the citizens, the development of a fast-cash culture. While the defeat of Escobar didn’t reduce cocaine production and consumption, it strengthened the ties between the criminal Castaño brothers and the military. Los Pepes came to rewrite Colombian history, and with the help of expanding drug revenues, Carlos, the middle brother, was able to transform the small right-wing militias into a single giant organisation called Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia, the AUC: a national, albeit illegal, communist commando unit equal to the FARC in size, which by the late 1990s and early 2000s was wreaking havoc, with military approval. Over 30,000 people, mostly civilians, were killed. An entire left-wing party, Unión Patriótica, was eliminated after 3000 elected representatives were assassinated. The number of refugees, displaced from their homes during the three-way war between the AUC, the FARC, and the military, would skyrocket to four million by 2010, a number of internally displaced people surpassed only by Sudan. The military refined the Castaño brothers’ ‘everything goes’ strategy and cooperated with the AUC, which the European Union labelled a terrorist organisation due to its involvement in a number of massacres.

  Just as devastating as the state’s merger with the successors of Los Pepes was the idea about fast and easy money, a seed planted in Colombia by the cocaine bonanza. The notion that working, saving, and planning were necessary for achieving wealth was negated by the thousands of people who had succeeded in making their fortunes by participating in one or another link in the drug chain. At the time of Escobar’s death Colombia was producing 120 tonnes of cocaine a year, and ten years later it was producing 550 tonnes annually. Gustavo de Greiff, attorney-general during the hunt for Escobar and one of the key people interviewed in The Memory of Pablo Escobar, revealed that it was during the second cocaine wave he decided to reconsider his entire approach to the war on drugs, an evolution that eventually led him to become one of Latin America’s most outspoken proponents of legalisation:

  In terms of the drug business, when Escobar died, the same thing happened that had happened when Gacha died — absolutely nothing. This was one of the things that made me think about the hopelessness of the fight against drugs and prohibition. When they extradited people, when they put Escobar in prison, when they killed Gacha, when we put more than a thousand smugglers in prison, nothing happened to the drug-smuggling business. The cocaine kept arriving.

  AT 6.00 A.M. on Tuesday 18 July 2006, three bulletproof vehicles dispatched by the US ambassador stopped outside Virginia Vallejo’s mother’s apartment in Bogotá. And Virginia was ready. The night before, security personnel from the embassy had given her strict rules to follow, including not to stand in front of or look out the window, and under no circumstances to open the door.

&
nbsp; Still a diva, she had packed her Gucci and Vuitton suitcases full of designer-label clothes by Chanel and Armani, but knew that from that day on her life would never be the same. She would be a refugee, a lot in life which was becoming increasingly common for all kinds of people who, like her, dared to do the most dangerous thing imaginable in the country: speak out about the past.

  The historic crimes committed in the 1980s — the attack on the Palace of Justice and the assassination of Galán — were still unresolved. While Escobar’s involvement had been assured, the role the state and the political class had played in the bloodbath had not. And the deeper investigators and journalists delved into the case, the more convoluted things became. The military clammed up, lies were concocted, and truths went untold.

  Over 20 years had passed since the Palace of Justice tragedy and Virginia’s time with Escobar, and after having watched his old friends come to power one after the other, she decided that she had had enough of the hypocrisy. Álvaro Uribe — one of Escobar’s early partners, according to Vallejo — had been elected president, and a third of the Congress was now made up of individuals with ties to the mafia. She thought it was time to give her side of the story. Galán’s widow and sons were convinced that the head of the National Intelligence Service at the time of the assassination, General Maza Márquez, had been integral in Galán’s murder, but in a recent interview with The Miami Herald Vallejo had maintained that the original architect of the crime was in fact Alberto Santofimio, former justice minister, senator and, on two occasions, the Liberal Party’s presidential candidate.