He soaks it in like a sponge, he listens to me and learns, analyzes and questions, compares and memorizes, digests and processes. Writing for myself, editing for him, I store away in my heart the memories and conversations of those days, the last happy ones that he and I will spend together before our 360-degree universe explodes into two 180-degree halves, and finally, into a million atoms that could never be put together again, or even be recognized. Life is cruel and unpredictable, and “God works in mysterious ways.”
“Santofimio is coming tomorrow,” Pablo announces to me one night. “Needless to say, he’s going to ask me for tons of money for the presidential elections next year, and I’m begging you to come to the meeting and make a superhuman effort to hide all that hostility you have toward him. He’s been telling everyone that he hasn’t seen me since ’83, and I want there to be witnesses that he’s lying. Why? I don’t know yet, Virginia, but I need you there. Please don’t tell anyone; just listen, watch, and keep quiet.”
“You know it’s impossible for me to keep quiet, Pablo. You’re going to have to give me an Oscar!”
The next day we meet in one of those huge houses that Pablo and Gustavo rent and constantly cycle through. It’s night, and as always we are alone because the bodyguards withdraw when important people are coming. While Pablo talks on the phone, through the door to my left I see Santofimio arrive wearing the red shirt he almost always wears at political events. When he sees me, he makes a move to go back, but right away he realizes it’s too late. He comes into the small office and greets me with a kiss on the cheek. Pablo asks us to wait in the living room because he is finishing up a business matter; someone brings us two whiskeys and disappears.
Santofimio asks when I arrived, and I tell him many days ago. He seems surprised, and he asks about the reasons for my absence from TV. I tell him that I, like him, have paid a very high price for my relationship with Pablo. Gustavo joins us, and I know that when the moment arrives, his mission will be to rescue me so Pablo and “the Doctor” can stay and talk about money. There are a scant ten months until the presidential elections of 1986, in which it’s a virtual given that the Liberal Party’s official candidate, Virgilio Barco, will win. Barco is an MIT engineer from a rich and traditional family, and he’s married to an American. The other two candidates are Álvaro Gómez, of the Conservative Party—a brilliant man detested by the left, not so much for anything he did as for his father’s crimes during La Violencia—and Luis Carlos Galán of the New Liberalism Party, dissidents from the majority party dominated by the ex-presidents López and Turbay. For a while, I listen patiently to predictions from Pablo and “Santo” about the voting in towns adjacent to Medellín. Before I withdraw to leave them holding forth on the subject they both like best, I decide to lead the conversation toward the one they hate the most.
“Arturo Abella mentioned recently that according to one of his ‘trusted sources,’ Luis Carlos Galán is considering conceding to Barco so he’s not accused of dividing the party for a second time. Galán might even join the official party to help it reach an overwhelming victory over the conservatives, and in 1990, with the gratitude and backing of the liberal ex-presidents, he wouldn’t have any rivals for the presidency.”
“Abella’s source is perfectly crazy! The Liberal Party will never forgive Galán!” Escobar and Santofimio exclaim almost in unison. “Haven’t you seen he’s coming in third in all the polls, light-years from Álvaro Gómez? Galán is finished, and Virgilio Barco doesn’t need his four votes for anything!”
“Yes, yes, I know; but politics is the kingdom of Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Galán is finished now, but only because he faced down the whole ‘machinery’ of the Liberal Party alone. In ’89, with the machinery supporting him, you all are going to have to start thinking about what you’ll do, because Ernesto Samper is still too green to be president in ’90; he’s only thirty-four years old….”
“I’ll finance Galán before that fucking son of a bitch!” exclaims Pablo.
“Well, Galán will extradite you the day after he takes over,” comments Santofimio, annoyed. “If you eliminate him, on the other hand, you’ll bring the country to its knees! And you have to make him see that, Virginia.”
“No, Alberto. If you two take out Galán, you’ll both be extradited the next day. Don’t even think about it—we had enough with Rodrigo Lara! And what I’m trying to make you see is that for ’90, you need to be thinking about another candidate.”
“Galán is finished, and there are still five years until ’90, my love,” Pablo tells me with visible impatience. “The one we have to start maneuvering now is Barco, and that’s why the Doctor is here.”
“Come on, Virginia, I want to show you my latest diamond acquisitions,” proposes his cousin. I say good-bye to Santofimio and arrange to see Pablo the next day. While Gustavo is taking out big cases from his safe, he tells me, “I’m fed up with all the politics, Virginia. Plus, I am a conservative! What I like is my business, race cars, motorcycles, and diamonds. Look at these beauties….What do you think?”
I tell him that I hate all those politicians, too, but unfortunately, extradition depends on them. And with extradition in place, the only one of us who will be left is me.
“Please, God, let Barco be more reasonable than Betancur, because if he gives Galán the Ministry of Justice, I don’t even want to think about the war that’ll come next!”
And I start admiring those hundreds of rings that shine in an interminable succession of black velvet trays, twelve by sixteen inches. Gustavo clearly prefers diamonds to freezers full of cash and big cans buried underground. I have never coveted expensive jewels or valuable paintings, but as the saying goes, “diamonds are forever.” And, as I look at them, I can’t help but wonder with a certain sadness why it is that the man in the next room with three billion dollars to his name and who says he loves me, desires me, and needs me so much has never told me to choose one. Just one.
That Palace in Flames
PABLO ESCOBAR has the most modern mind I have ever encountered. A true expert in Caribbean geopolitics, he has built the most profitable industry of all time in under a decade, and now he controls it with an iron fist as if it were a multinational corporation. He combines an exceptional talent for seeing the future with a kind of ancient wisdom that lets him resolve life’s practical or urgent issues in a matter of seconds. Presented with a problem, somehow he always has an instantaneous solution ready, the kind that for another human being would be inconceivable and almost impossible to put into practice.
Pablo feels true passion for one thing: the exercise of power to the benefit of his interests. Everything in his life fulfills this purpose, and that obviously includes me. Since I love him and punish him in equal measure—and since I never give myself completely—I am a constant challenge for him. Because of that, he practices the same seduction with me on an individual level that he has started to employ on the collective level, with a country that he sees, treats, and tries to use as if it were merely an extension of Hacienda Nápoles. I am not just the only woman his age he will have in his entire existence, but also the only freethinking and educated one, and because of my profession, to him I will always be his lover behind a camera. When he needs to measure possible reactions to his political discourse, he coldly uses me as an interlocutor—a mixture of defense attorney, prosecutor, witness, judge, and audience—aware that while he is seducing the trophy woman, the camerawoman is analyzing, questioning, cataloging, and almost certainly comparing him with others of his stature.
Escobar is one of the most ruthless men produced in the entire history of a nation where men are often breastfed on hatred, envy, and revenge. But as time goes by and our love evolves, I’ve begun to see him as an overgrown child burdened with a cross that grows ever heavier. It is made of the responsibilities—some imagined and some bred in anger—typical of those whose ambition fuels an obsession to control and dominate absolutely everything: his c
ircumstances, his environment, his destiny, and even the human beings who form part of his past, present, or future.
My lover is not only one of the country’s best-informed men, he is also, like any good son of a teacher, ultimately a moralist, and when he is facing someone whose love or respect he wants to gain, he displays a rigorous ethical code. Every week, someone asks me for an appointment so he or she can offer him, through me, the most fabulous properties at the most laughable prices; with a smile and a caress, Pablo invariably replies, “No.” A clear example of the reasons is his answer to the intermediary of Minister Carlos Arturo Marulanda:
“He’s offering you his thirty thousand acres in the south of Cesar for only twelve million dollars. Bellacruz doesn’t exactly border Nápoles, but with a few additional purchases that aren’t worth much, here and here,” I tell him, pointing at the maps they have left me, “you can join them farther on and build a gigantic corridor in the center of the country that will take you out toward the coast and into Venezuela. Soon it will be worth much more, because we all know that with the demand from your guild, the prices of land and real estate in Colombia are going to go sky-high.”
“Marulanda is Enrique Sarasola’s brother-in-law. Tell his emissary that I know Bellacruz is the largest hacienda in the country after some of the Mexican’s in the Eastern Plains, where land is worthless, but that I won’t give him even one million dollars for it because I am not a heartless bastard like the minister’s father. And of course the value is going to double, my love! But first he’ll have to find himself some other guy who’s as unscrupulous as him and his brother, who’s willing to kick out the descendants of all those poor people his father forced from their land in all the chaos during La Violencia.”
He explains that there’s a ticking time bomb in Bellacruz that sooner or later will end in a bloodbath. The minister’s father, Alberto Marulanda Grillo, bought his first fifteen thousand acres in the forties and doubled the size of his huge estate with the help of “Chulavitas,” the conservative police who set fire to ranches and raped, tortured, and murdered in the name of whoever contracted their services. Carlos Arturo Marulanda’s sister is married to Enrique Sarasola, who is linked to the Spanish company Ateinsa. Sarasola, a close friend of President Felipe González, made 19.6 million dollars on commission and handled the awarding of the so-called engineering contract of the century, the Medellín Metro, to the Hispano-Alemán Metromed Consortium and its partners, among them Ateinsa. The manager of the Metro project, Diego Londoño White—a great friend of Pablo’s and owner, with his brother Santiago, of the mansions that Pablo and Gustavo rent as their offices—was in charge of negotiating the contract and processing the juicy commissions. According to someone who had witnessed the rapacity and greed of the group headed by Sarasola, the awarding of the Metro “was more like a gangster movie than an auction for a civil engineering contract,” with extravagant honoraria paid to everyone from Colombian lawyers Puyo and Vasco to the German spy Werner Mauss. It’s an approach that another social democrat like Pablo Escobar seems fully to share.
The time bomb at Enrique Sarasola’s brother-in-law’s hacienda would explode in 1996, when Carlos Alberto Marulanda was ambassador to the European Union during the government of Ernesto Samper Pizano. Pursued by squads much like the Chulavitas his father had used half a century earlier, nearly four hundred peasant families would be forced to flee Bellacruz after their houses were burned down and their leaders killed in front of the army. Marulanda, accused of putting together paramilitary groups and violating human rights, would be arrested in Spain in 2001 and extradited to Colombia in 2002. Two weeks later he would be freed on the grounds that the crimes had been committed by paramilitary groups operating in the Cesar region, and not by the president’s millionaire friend. According to Amnesty International, what happened on the Bellacruz hacienda constitutes one of the most abhorrent instances of impunity in Colombia’s recent history. Diego Londoño White, like his brother Santiago, would later be murdered, and nearly all the beneficiaries of the Metro looting and the crimes of Bellacruz, or their descendants, today enjoy the most gilded exiles in Madrid and Paris.
“I think the time has come to introduce you to my friends who put me in touch with the Sandinistas,” Pablo tells me as we’re saying good-bye some days later, before I return to Bogotá. “We’re preparing something very important, and I want you to tell me what you think of them. If things turn out according to plan, we’re going to be able to live in peace. For security reasons, this time I can’t even call you: in ten or fifteen days, a pilot will call and invite you to lunch in a certain restaurant. That’s the password, and you can decide when during the following two days you want to travel.”
In Bogotá I find a letter from Channel 51 in Miami. They want to do a second test and discuss a possible contract. The salary is $5,000 a month, and every day I have to be in the studio at 5:00 a.m. for makeup before taping several programs. A few days later, Armando de Armas calls to tell me that the offer is my best chance to restart my career in a big way, and he insists I not pass it up. I reply that in Colombia I was already making that much in 1980 on the 24 Horas newscast, for only one daily program at 7:00 p.m. What I can’t admit to him—or anyone else—is that I’m afraid that the moment someone sends photos of me with Escobar to a Miami newspaper, my contract with the American channel could be canceled amid a massive scandal. Back in Medellín I show the offer to Pablo, and I’m horrified to learn that he has continued to wiretap my phone calls:
“Five shows a day for $5,000 a month? What are those Cubans thinking?” And as he starts to burn the letter, he adds: “We’re going to do something, my love: I’m going to give you $80,000 while you find work with a broadcaster here that knows what you’re worth, or with a channel in a country I can visit often. But I’m not going to send you all the money at once, because you’ll run off to Miami with some Venezuelan millionaire, and I won’t ever see you again. Even if you and I can’t be together every week, now that you’ve come back I need you more than ever. I want you to be with me through a series of key events that will be happening in this country over the coming months.”
What Armando de Armas said, then, is true: Escobar did run him out! But I still entirely dismiss the absurd idea that he tried to kidnap him. Since it’s clear Pablo already found out who was behind the offer from the Cuban channel, I decide not to ask any more questions. Instead, I tell him about the Italian journalist’s interest in his story for a possible film by the Cecchi Gori producers. At the possibility that his life could be brought to the big screen, he is bursting with pride. But even when he’s radiant with happiness, Pablo Escobar is, before all else, a businessman.
“You see that there really are other work opportunities, and much more important and profitable ones for someone like you? Tell Valerio Riva that if he wants to meet with me through you, he’ll have to pay you $100,000 for the synopsis and as an advance for the script. And that if he doesn’t write the script in collaboration with you, there’s no deal. If he refuses to pay, it’s because those multimillionaire Italian producers aren’t behind the project, and the guy just wants to use you to earn a fortune off the story that the whole world wants to know—and only more so after what’s going to happen soon, because they won’t be able to extradite me. You and I are going to be free to travel together almost anywhere, except the United States, of course. And in any case, you can keep going there anytime you want a break from me…for a few days.”
Exactly two weeks later, halfway through August 1985, I’m back in Medellín. Late in the afternoon, two boys pick me up at the airport in a discreet car, and the whole time we are on the highway, they never stop looking in the rearview mirror to be sure I haven’t been followed by some persistent person wanting to learn Pablo’s whereabouts. I don’t ask where we’re headed, and I nod off to sleep. I wake up when I hear the men talking on the radio, informing their boss we’re almost there. As we are approaching the Nápoles
gate, a small white car with three men shoots out like a bullet and disappears into the shadows and the silence of the night. The boys tell me the car belongs to Álvaro Fayad, top leader of the M-19. I am very surprised, because I was convinced that the rebel group and MAS hated each other unto death—and I turn around to try to see him. The man in the back seat of the car also turns around to see me, and for a few seconds our eyes meet. My car speeds onto the property and stops in front of the main house. At the end of the corridor under a yellow light, I can make out two or three men; they immediately withdraw with the men who’ve arrived with me. Since they hide when they see Pablo come out, I can’t tell who they are. But I deduce that his guests are not only close confidants, they must also demand discretion in the subjects to be addressed, a prudent distance from subordinates, and exceptional security measures.
Pablo, an expert in communications, is always informed in seconds, by radio or walkie-talkie, of everything that happens around him. He comes right out to receive me, opens the car door, and leans in to embrace me. Then, he pulls me out with both arms and looks at me proudly as if I were some Renoir in his collection. His enthusiasm about something that he’s clearly been planning for a while suggests that he can’t wait to introduce me to his guest—who, I now know, is only one. He asks me to guess who it is, and I ask if it’s that Saudi prince who transports huge amounts of money in his diplomatic plane, or some Central American revolutionary, or a Mexican three-star general, or one of the big Aztec or Carioca bosses, or maybe an emissary of Stroessner, the eternal Paraguayan dictator. When he tells me who it is, I almost can’t believe my ears.
“I wanted you to meet two of the founders and top leaders of M-19. They’ve been great friends of mine for a while now, but I couldn’t tell you until I was absolutely sure about you. After Martha Nieves Ochoa’s abduction, we came to a nonaggression pact with them. Álvaro Farad has just left. He seemed worried about meeting you. But Iván Marino Ospina, the toughest of all the comandantes, is here. He didn’t react when he heard your name, because he’s spent years in the jungle and doesn’t watch TV. Depending on how things go, we’ll see if we explain who you are or if we leave you incognito.” He puts his arm around my shoulders and takes on the bullfighter’s accent he uses with me when he’s happy.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 23
