Gilberto Rodríguez and Jorge Ochoa moved to Spain with their families. Gilberto has told me that the two of them plan to retire from the business to invest a large portion of their capital in Europe. He also says that he’s going to miss me and that he’d like to see me again very soon. He knows I am possibly the only woman and journalist with whom he can safely talk about his activity, his colleagues, and the problems of his line of work with the absolute certainty that I would never commit an indiscretion. The truth is, now that I know the vulnerabilities of his profession, the last thing I would do is cause divisions or contribute to those that already exist. I am perfectly aware that at such a pivotal moment for all of them, any disloyal act could even cost me my life. And so, my relationship with that entire world is based on a self-imposed code of omertà, in the finest Cosa Nostra tradition. I watch Gilberto go with something of the saudade you feel for someone you’re fond of but not in love with, having never been lovers. Although I tell him that I will also miss our long chats, the truth is I haven’t forgiven him for handling that fleeting affair with a dose of indiscretion unpardonable in someone of his talents.
In the following months, Pablo and I return to the joy of our early times together, but now that each of our encounters demands careful logistical planning, we take advantage of every minute we can spend together to be deeply, intensely, and completely happy. The planes I travel in are rented, and only the two men who pick me up at the airport, armed with R-15 rifles, know that I am going to see him. Since I live less than 330 feet from the gardens of the American ambassador’s residence in Bogotá, Pablo is terribly worried that the DEA could be watching me, or that I could fall into the hands of intelligence organizations. That’s why, to put him at ease, I never ask his pilots or his men where they’re taking me, or where he’s hiding. Our encounters take place at night, in little houses that always seem to be under construction or have very rudimentary facilities. We reach them after traveling several hours, over terrible roads that are muddy and full of potholes. As we approach our destination, I start to see sentry booths to either side, and the boys tell me that we’re going to one of Pablo’s many houses scattered over the Antioquian countryside. On the way back we always reach the highway in five minutes, and I conclude that everything is designed to make access impossible and facilitate Pablo’s flight if he finds himself surrounded. Only later do I learn that many of those incipient constructions were located within Hacienda Nápoles itself; as it was the only place on earth where he felt completely safe, he had begun to prepare the hideouts that would be his refuge during the long series of wars that—as he already knew and I was starting to sense—would consume what remained of his life.
Although we don’t say it, we both know that any one of these encounters could be the last. Each has the flavor of a final good-bye, and when I watch him go, I sink into a deep sadness, thinking about what would become of me if they killed him. I still hold out hope that he’ll retire from the business and reach some kind of agreement with the government or the Americans. I miss Fáber, the secretary who used to pick me up at the airport and was almost always the one to bring me money on the eve of my trips. But Pablo explains that his faithful employee is a good man, and that now he has to surround himself with young men who are unafraid to kill, because they’ve done it many times. The two who pick me up from the airport and bring me back are always different. We are all armed, me with my Beretta, Pablo with an M-5 machine gun or a German pistol, and the boys with mini-Uzi machine guns or R-15 or AK-47 rifles, the same ones the guerrillas use.
I always wait for him in the house, with the pistol in one pocket and the license for it in the other, completely silent. When I hear the jeeps coming, I turn off the light and look out one of the windows to be sure it isn’t the Dijín—secret police—or DAS or the army. Pablo has taught me that if it is any of them, I must shoot myself before they can interrogate me. What he doesn’t know is that I’ve also been mentally preparing myself to shoot him if he’s arrested in front of me, because I know that in less than twenty-four hours he’d be in a cell he would never come out of again, and I’d rather take his life with my own hands than see him extradited.
I only breathe easy when I see him arrive with a small army of men who immediately vanish. Then everything is silent again, and only the crickets’ song and the whisper of the breeze through the leaves can be heard. It seems to me that except for the two men who escort me there and back, none of those fifteen or twenty men in his convoy knows he is coming to see me. But from my window I begin to recognize some of the people who later on will become his most recognized mercenary assassins, baptized in Colombia as sicarios, or hit men, and by media and journalists on Pablo’s payroll as the “Military Wing of the Medellín Cartel.” In reality, his right-hand men are just a small gang of murderers from the Medellín ghettos, armed with rifles or machine guns and able to subcontract others just like them: hundreds of thousands of discontented youth who grew up with a visceral hatred of society and idolize Escobar as a symbol of anti-imperialist struggle; they are willing to do anything to fulfill his orders in the secret hope they’ll catch some of the legendary financial success of “El Patrón,” their boss. Some of his hit men have terrible faces, and others, like Pinina, are smiling and angelic. Pablo doesn’t have deputies or confidants because, though he loves his men, he doesn’t fully trust anyone. He is aware that a mercenary, no matter how well paid he is, will always sell his armed hand, his information, his heart and soul to the highest bidder, especially in such a profitable business. With some sadness, he admits to me one day that if he dies, he’s sure they will all switch to the ranks of whoever kills him. On more than one occasion I’ve heard him say:
“I don’t talk about my ‘kitchens’ with the accountants, or about accounting with the ‘cooks.’ I don’t talk politics with the pilots, or with Santofimio about my routes. I never ever talk about my girlfriend with my family or my men, and I would never talk to you, either, about my family problems or the missions of my boys.”
The “Financial Wing of the Medellín Cartel”—which sounds like a complex web of banks and corporations in the Bahamas, Grand Cayman Islands, and Luxembourg—is simply Pablo’s brother “Osito” Escobar; Mr. Molina; Carlos Aguilar, alias “El Mugre”; a few bill counters; and another half-dozen men tasked with packing the rolls of bills into appliances in Miami. Laundering one hundred million dollars is much more complicated than stuffing it in two hundred freezers, refrigerators, and TVs and shipping them from the United States to Colombia. There, the proverbial friendliness of customs agents makes things easy, and it cuts down on one of the worst vices of the Colombian state: tramitología, or endless bureaucratic paperwork. Needless to say, bureaucracy is for dummies—that is, for honest people because who would ever make the rich stand in line and fill out forms, or open their suitcases and boxes at customs, as if they were common smugglers?
Among a dozen big bosses, only Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela pays taxes down to the last cent on his legitimate companies and has a need for traditional banks, because he dreams that one day society will recognize his children as coming from businessmen and not drug traffickers. In Pablo’s and Gonzalo’s cases, their only use for their registered companies is to justify the acquisition of real estate, planes, and vehicles to the tax man. When it comes to serious money, and the purchase of weapons, giraffes, and luxury toys, they both laugh in the faces of domestic bankers, not to mention Swiss ones. They have haciendas of five to twenty-five thousand acres complete with landing strips, and in their minds big cans were invented so they could store their money under their own ground. They’ll withdraw it in an emergency without asking some little bank manager’s permission, and they’ll spend it on protection, girding themselves against war and having their large-scale fun, all without explanations to the treasury.
Those are the days when the poor director general of police in Bogotá earns some $5,000 a month, and the poor police of some village
s in semi-jungle territories earn between $20,000 and $50,000—and they don’t have to worry about pensions for disability, retirement, or death or about working their way up the institutional ladder. All those zones that the central government had forgotten about ages ago start to develop at vertiginous speed, sprouting discos full of multicolored lights and good-time girls, where you can find the police commander conversing democratically with the region’s trafficker, or the army captain chatting with the paramilitary commander, or the town’s mayor with the guerrilla front’s leader. And the next day, the Bogotá newspapers will be full of stories of these unlikely pairs killing each other, supposedly for political or military, ideological or patriotic, legal or judicial reasons, while, in fact, it had been spurred by alcohol and exacerbated by the whims of a common target in a skirt. Or else it’s over a betrayal of a deal, the kind of financial arrangement that cannot be registered with a notary. Everyone in the southeast of the country drinks Royal Salute whiskey, the villages fill up with narco-Toyotas, and the people in the jungle have an even better time than in the discos owned by Pelusa Ocampo in Medellín and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela in Cali. And they are, without a doubt, happier than in Bogotá, where it rains all the time and people live with crazy traffic jams, the lines at state offices, the raponeros who steal watches, handbags, and earrings, and thousands of buses that spit out black smoke during the day and white smoke at night. Another problem with the capital is that since Bogotá is not the jungle, drug trafficking is still taboo there and the narcos aren’t socially acceptable. Not because they’re illegal—who cares about that?—but because narcos come from lower classes and are short, dark, ugly, ostentatious, and covered with gold chains, or bracelets, or diamond rings on their pinkies. What is accepted and in fact very well looked upon in Bogotá—as in any self-respecting metropolis—is the consumption of pure cocaine rocks among the upper classes. They’ve also started to indulge in basuco (cocaine paste) and crack, because drugs fall into the same category as prostitution and abortion: it’s in very poor taste to produce or offer them, but it’s perfectly acceptable to consume them.
The King of Cocaine and founder and soul of Los Extraditables has a secret girlfriend, one who goes to target practice with the officers of the El Castillo police station and who, ever more elegant, frequents the presidential palace and cocktail parties at embassies and attends her cousins’ weddings at the Jockey Club of Bogotá and the Club Colombia in Cali. One morning at three, when a sink collapses in her apartment and the surge of water shooting everywhere threatens to flood it, four fire trucks arrive in less than three minutes, making a frightening racket. The sirens at the American ambassador’s residence sound, and her neighbors assume she’s been assaulted again. The firemen save her from drowning, and wearing a Burberry raincoat over her negligee, she signs autographs for her heroes until 4:30 a.m.
Another night, someone very important picks her up in a little car to go to dinner, and when she asks her friend about all those rolls of red and black cloth in the back seat, her friend replies, “It’s just that since you have such good taste, I wanted you to give me your opinion about the new flag for JEGA, the toughest urban guerrilla group of all time!”
Every well-informed person knows that some of the most interesting, attractive, and important women in the media are girlfriends of the M-19 commanders, but none of us talk about those things because we’ve been educated in the torture methods of the Holy Inquisition, and we prefer to keep a respectful distance. In 1984, there are some very pretty women in the Colombian media, some upper-class and a few very brave ones. On the other hand, the male journalists, actors, or commentators are incredibly boring, conceited, archconservative, fairly ugly, and from the middle or lower-middle classes, and neither those women nor I would ever consider going out with any of them. What they do have—like my colleagues on the board of directors of the Colombian Association of Announcers—are the most lovely and full professional voices I have heard in any Spanish-speaking country. None of my female colleagues ask me about Pablo Escobar, nor do I ask them about the commandantes Antonio Navarro or Carlos Pizarro, and I presume that after Martha Nieves Ochoa’s kidnapping, Los Extraditables and M-19 must hate each other to death. But I always figure they tell their boyfriends everything, just as I tell everything to mine. Pablo laughs at the story of the firefighters for a long while, but then turns very serious and asks me in alarm, “And where was the Beretta while you were signing autographs for two dozen men in that negligee from Montenapoleone?”
I tell him it was in the pocket of the raincoat I put on top of it. He tells me not to insult his intelligence, because he knows perfectly well that when I’m in Bogotá I keep it stored in the safe. I promise that from now on I’ll sleep with it under my pillow, and he only relaxes after I swear it over and over while I cover him with kisses. Although we’ve been nicknamed “Coca-Cola”—supposedly because Pablo supplies the product (coke) and I the anatomical part (cola means “tail” in Spanish)—the truth is that almost no one knows about this clandestine phase of our relationship. I tell anyone who tries to find out about Pablo that I haven’t seen him in ages. I never ask him what he says when he’s asked about me, because I don’t want to risk hearing words from his mouth that could hurt me. Pablo thinks women suffer much more than men; I tell him that’s true, but only during wartime, because in everyday life it’s easier to be a woman than a man: we always know what we have to do—take care of the children, take care of the men, take care of the old folks, take care of the animals, take care of the crops or the garden, and take care of our house. With an expression full of compassion for his gender, I add that “being a man is much more difficult, just such a challenge every day.” I do it to get rid of some of that blessed gender superiority of his, because Pablo only admires other men—the women he truly respects can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Though he’ll never admit it to me, I know he divides the feminine sex into three categories: family, whom he loves although they bore him; the pretty ones, who entertain him and whom he always pays for one night of love before he says good-bye; and all the rest, who are “ugly” or “chickens,” and to whom he is largely indifferent. When it comes to me, however…I come from another class and I am not impressed with him: he isn’t tall or beautiful or elegant or wise. I am a real woman who makes him laugh, and I’m not nearly as disfigured as people say I am. I walk around armed and protect him with my life. I am his “panther.” I talk to him about the things men talk about, and I know how to speak their language. Because of all of that, and because Pablo only admires and respects brave people, I think he has me in some kind of emotional limbo alongside Maggie Thatcher: not at all feminine but certainly 180 degrees from his masculine universe.
After his family, the most sacred thing to him are his partners. Although he would never say it, I get the feeling that the men in his family, except for his cousin Gustavo and his brother “Osito,” bore him with their conventionality. Much more exciting are his friends Gonzalo, Jorge, and crazy Lehder, just as audacious, rich, hedonistic, gutsy, and unscrupulous as he is. I know that the departure of Jorge Ochoa, whom Pablo loves like a brother, has hit him terribly hard, because he may never return to Colombia. With the exception of Lehder, none of them have been requested for extradition because the United States still doesn’t have concrete evidence that they are drug traffickers. All this is about to change.
After a few weeks of idyllic happiness, Pablo tells me he has to return to Nicaragua. I try to dissuade him with every argument I can think of, because I’m convinced the Sandinistas bring him bad luck. I tell him it’s one thing that they are communists and he is a trafficker, and quite another that as sworn enemies of Uncle Sam they are linking the ideology of the former with the latter’s billions. I insist that the gringos don’t care about Marxist dictatorships as long as they don’t directly challenge them or have any money. But take one that’s a neighbor of both the United States and Fidel Castro, and enrich it with drug traffi
cking money, and with time it will become a dangerous threat. I also insist that he can’t risk his life, his business, and his mental health for Hernán Botero and Carlos Lehder. He replies, offended, that the cause of each and every one of the Colombian extraditables, large and small, rich and poor, is, has been, and will be his as long as he lives. He promises he’ll be back soon and we’ll see each other again, or that we’ll meet in the near future somewhere in Central America so we can spend some time together. Before he says good-bye, he warns me again to be very careful with my phones, with my friends, and with his gun. This time when I watch him go I’m not just sad, I’m terribly worried about his simultaneous dalliances with the extreme left and the extreme right. I wonder which of the Colombian rebel groups acted as mediator with the Sandinistas. Every time I try to bring the subject up, he replies that I’ll know when the time is right. Not only does the beginning of an answer arrive in the most unexpected way, but it also makes me realize immediately that what is at stake is much more complex than it appeared at first glance.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 18
