“Tell me how I can help you. I only ask that you give me a passport or travel document so that DAS doesn’t know when I leave Colombia and when I return. I’m doing this on principle, and I don’t have the slightest intention of asking your government for asylum, or work, or for a single cent. My only problem is that I swore to myself I would never again see anyone from that business, and my only source of new information is a former drug dealer. But he seems to be the best informed in the world.”
And like that, because of what the leaders of the two biggest cartels did to me, and the denouncements from the Colombian security agency, my cooperation with the international antidrug agencies begins. I think that if the FBI hadn’t been so concerned with searching my suitcases to see if I was carrying $10,000 or more for a non-liquid Pablo, and had instead been as efficient with their endless tracking of El Mugre and the Sandinista aviators, they would have been able to ruin, thwart, or smash the Medellín Cartel’s impressive Cuban connection and its financial structure in a matter of weeks. And if instead of following me and my chic European friends, Interpol had tracked the big narcos and launderers who arrived on my plane, they would also have been able to cut off at its root the Cali Cartel’s European connection that blew up the next year.
Police all over the world will always consider their colleagues to be more valuable than their informants. That’s why I give those European friends of DAS all the names of the narco-traffickers and their accomplices, but I decide not to talk to them about Caribbean politics and to wait instead for a chance to contact the Americans directly. But as it turns out they don’t need my cooperation: Pablo’s connection with Cuba falls apart on June 13, 1989, and by July 13, Fidel Castro has already executed General Arnaldo Ochoa—hero of the Revolution and the war in Angola—and Colonel Tony de la Guardia. I receive the news of the general’s death with deep sorrow, because Ochoa was always a man of extraordinary bravery who didn’t deserve to die by firing squad, accused of high treason.
A war is the most costly thing in existence. Weapons and dynamite must be bought by the ton. Not only must soldiers have to be paid generously, so do all kinds of spies and informers, and in Pablo’s particular case, also the authorities in Medellín and Bogotá, plus politicians and friendly journalists. These hundreds—maybe thousands—of people are equal to the payroll of a corporation, and there are not enough tons of coke to withstand that daily bloodletting of resources. I know that right now Escobar has two problems in life. One of them, everyone knows, is extradition; but for the well-informed, like Deep Throat and me, his problem is money. After the Cuban connection’s collapse, Escobar faces an urgent need for massive liquid resources for a war that is polarizing all his enemies: the Cali Cartel, DAS, and the police. It’s already cost him hundreds of men, and since he never abandons the family of a person who gave his life for his boss, every dead sicario is multiplied into several mouths to feed. But most serious of all is that the war has provoked a stampede of his former associates toward the Valle del Cauca, because Pablo has started to charge taxes on his guild for the fight against extradition. Anyone who doesn’t pay in cash, merchandise, vehicles, planes, or property pays with his life. Tired of his extortion and the cruelty of his methods, many bosses, like the one who was on the same plane as me, have switched to Cali’s ranks.
I know that Escobar will turn more and more to kidnapping in order to obtain capital, and also that he will tear Bogotá apart and manipulate the press ever more coldly in his quest to cripple the state. He feels such contempt toward a media that criticized him pitilessly when he was with me—and because he was with me—that he has named one of his houses “Marionetas” (Puppets) in their honor. From my solitude, I watch silently as those same colleagues who had once pelted me with the ugliest epithets for loving the paisa Robin Hood now kneel before the King of Terror. They all woo him eagerly, but he’s the one who needs them, and desperately. And the megalomaniac obsessed with fame, the extortionist who knows the presidents’ prices better than anyone, learns to manipulate them to sell an image that grows more terrifying and all-powerful every day, precisely because every hour he becomes more vulnerable and less rich. The foreign press has created the impression that Pablo is the leader of a nationalist organization, like the PLO, the ETA, or the IRA. “El Chopo,” “el Arete”, “el Tomate,” and “la Garra” are his military wing, and the Dirt heads the financial wing of the Medellín Cartel. But while those groups fight, respectively, for the right to a Palestinian homeland or for Basque separatism or for a part of Ireland, the cartel and its wings fight only for one man’s cause: to keep El Patrón from being extradited.
And while nearly a thousand police are killed, the Colombian justice that takes twenty years in coming—that eternal tool of victimizers—also falls victim to its own indifference: in 1989, the narco-traffickers assassinate more than two hundred functionaries of justice, and now no judge will dare rule against them.
In 1989, I return to Europe with all the information I have been able to gather for Interpol. It seems to me that in matters of narco-trafficking, the Germans prefer to deal with the FBI and DAS and to leave the Colombian police to the DEA for whom they don’t seem to feel any great admiration. But the truth is that in August of that year I’m not thinking much about public events or the news in Colombia, because my father is dying and I’m worried about my mother’s suffering. Only sometime later do I learn that on the sixteenth of that month, my ex-lover ordered the murder of the judge who had opened the case against him for the newspaper editor’s death. Also that on the morning of the eighteenth, he did the same to the Antioquia police commander Colonel Valdemar Franklin Quintero, for having purged officials on Pablo Escobar’s payroll and detained “The Nanny” and Manuela for several hours to interrogate them about his whereabouts. On the nineteenth, my father dies, and that night I tell my mother I won’t be traveling to Colombia to attend the funeral, because he never loved me and hadn’t talked to me since 1980.
But there is another reason for not being with her, a terror I can’t share with anyone. The night before my father died, Pablo committed a crime that was only one among thousands but it was the most significant of all: on August 18, 1989, eighteen sicarios with IDs of the army’s B-2 unit assassinated the man who would have been president of Colombia from 1990 to 1994, having secured 60 percent of the vote. He was the only Colombian statesman of the second part of the twentieth century who was truly irreproachable. A month earlier, General Maza Márquez had replaced the candidate’s trusted bodyguards with a group of men led by a certain Jacobo Torregrosa. I knew that if I traveled for my father’s funeral, DAS would surely have men waiting for me in the airport to question me about Escobar and the reasons for my frequent trips to Germany, and I would end up in the hands of a dozen animals in one of their dungeons or in the army cavalry school. I also knew that the media, thirsty for revenge, would believe anything that General Maza chose to tell them, and they would furiously applaud any brutality that the DAS or the B-2 wanted to use against me, as they had applauded the mythical beatings and mutilations for years. Because that presidential candidate was named Luis Carlos Galán, and for Pablo Escobar he was the first and the last, the worst and the greatest of an ever-growing list of enemies built up over a life marked by hatred and destined only for the most ruthless forms of revenge.
Three months after Luis Carlos Galán’s assassination, Pablo Escobar blows up an Avianca airplane with 107 people aboard, one of whom was supposed to be the galanista César Gaviria—now the Liberal Party’s official presidential candidate—who at the last minute had decided not to board. For this crime, a New York court would later give the sicario La Quica ten life sentences. Investigators would conclude that the explosive used was Semtex, the same one used by Middle Eastern terrorists, and that the detonator was very similar to the one used in December 1988 by a terrorist sent by Muammar Gaddafi to blow up a Pan Am jet carrying 270 passengers over the Scottish village of Lockerbie. Liby
a had recently paid compensation in the millions to the victims’ families. Manolo from the ETA had taught Pablo and his men how to build the most powerful bombs, and that’s how I confirmed once more that international terrorism was interconnected, the same way narco-trafficking was interdependent with the establishment powers that be in my country and nearly all of the surrounding ones.
In November 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. It’s the official beginning of the end of the Iron Curtain and the communist governments in Eastern Europe. That December, George H. W. Bush invades Panama, and General Noriega is overthrown and brought to the United States to be tried for drug trafficking, organized crime, and money laundering. Carlos Lehder becomes the most valuable narco witness against the ex-dictator, and his sentence is reduced from almost three life sentences to fifty-five years.
In December of that same year, a bus with 8,000 kilos of dynamite rocks the DAS building and tears it to its foundation. Only General Maza survives, and only because his office was surrounded by concrete reinforced with steel. There are almost one hundred dead and eight hundred wounded, and in front of that Dantesque scene, I no longer weep for the dead but for the living. Two weeks later, in an army ambush on the Caribbean coast, Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha falls. While the country explodes in jubilation at the Medellín Cartel’s vulnerability, in Pacho, the heart of the Mexican’s territory, thousands of people cry over their benefactor’s death. I know that from now on, General Maza and the Cali Cartel will be a solid block of concrete and steel against Pablo, who has been left without his only friend and unconditional ally of his own stature. And now with Gonzalo’s enemies on the extreme left added to Pablo’s on the extreme right, paramilitary squads would over time become the most ferocious catalyst of all the hatred Escobar inspired.
The series of wars resulting from the first becomes more polarized as the days pass. Including Bernardo Jaramillo—the next presidential candidate of the Patriotic Union—and Carlos Pizarro Leongómez, from the now-demobilized M-19, four candidates for the presidency have been assassinated. No one dares ask for explanations from the person whose job it is to ensure their safety: the immovable director of DAS.
In addition to my scholarship and my cooperation with Interpol, there was another reason I was in Germany for a good portion of the four years that passed between my good-bye to Pablo in 1987 and my next contact with him.
In July 1981, I had been the only Colombian journalist sent to London to cover the wedding of Charles and Diana, the Prince and Princess of Wales. After carrying out a marathon broadcast of six hours by myself, I was returning happy and proud because both the BBC and the Crown’s information service had offered me jobs. I had declined, because the prospect of starting my own company with Margot overshadowed any Hollywood movie opportunities or prestigious international positions. On the flight from London to Paris, where I had a long layover before taking the flight back to Bogotá, a charming girl had sat next to me, and we spent the trip happily chatting about the royal wedding. When we reached Paris, she had introduced me to her brother, who was waiting for her at Charles de Gaulle to continue together to the South of France. While she took her little nephew to buy an ice cream, he and I had stayed talking. He was the son of a German nobleman and a Lombard beauty, and it seemed that, like me, he was not happily married. When we said good-bye, we both knew that one not-too-distant day we would see each other again. When I returned to Bogotá and David Stivel had told me he was leaving me to go off with his actress, I had said calmly, “Do it today, because yesterday in Paris I met the only man who could convince me to marry again. He’s beautiful, ten years younger than you, and one hundred times more brilliant. You only have to sign the document my lawyer will send you in a couple of days, and I hope you’ll be as happy as I plan to be.”
One of the three reasons I had fallen in love with Pablo was the gift of my freedom: one Monday in January 1983, he had told me that on Friday, as soon as I was free of my ex-husband, I had to have dinner with him before some other ogre got to me first. Starting that night, I had loved that man from my own country so much I hardly ever thought about the one from a distant land. The superior man Pablo predicted I would marry someday—and the one whom, according to Dennis, I would love—would return to my existence and, for a short time, bring me all the forms of happiness I had believed were reserved for the just in paradise; and he would also return to play the strangest role in Pablo’s death, and an even stranger one in my life.
He has now been divorced for a couple of years, and when his sister tells him I’m in Germany, he comes to see me the very next day. Bavaria is one of my earthly paradises, and Munich one of my urban paradises—the perfect neoclassical city of the Mad King and his composer of The Ring of the Nibelungs. For several weeks we walk around the Old Pinakothek, with its timeless treasures and Rubens’s titanic The Rape of the Sabine Women, and the New Pinakothek, with so many other jewels of his and my time. We stroll through the Bavarian countryside, one of the most bucolic God has created, and we are incredibly happy. Sometime later he asks me to marry him, and after thinking about it for a few days, I accept. He puts on my finger an engagement ring with an eight-carat diamond—the number of infinity—and we set the date for May of the following year. His mother tells me that soon we’ll travel to Paris to order, six months in advance, the haute couture Balmain wedding dress that she wants to give me. For the first time in my life, everything is approaching the divine perfection dreamed of by the most sybaritic of the epicureans, or by my adored Sufi poet of the thirteenth century.
A few weeks later, my future mother-in-law sends her chauffeur for me because she wants me to sign some documents before the marriage. When I get to her house, she puts a prenuptial agreement in front of me: in the case of divorce or the death of her son—one of the heirs of her second (and multimillionaire) husband—I would receive a portion of my spouse’s fortune that is so ridiculous I can only interpret it as the insult it clearly is. In an icy voice she tells me that if we don’t sign, she will disinherit her son. When I ask her for an explanation for her sudden change in attitude toward me, she takes from her desk an envelope full of photos of me with Pablo Escobar, accompanied by an anonymous letter. I ask her if my fiancé knows about what is happening, and with great irony she replies that she could never stand in the way of her son’s happiness, but that in the next hour he will be informed of all the reasons for her and her husband’s decision. I tell her that my fiancé already knows about that relationship, and that she is destroying all our dreams, because I could never marry someone who is not going to be my partner and companion on completely equal terms in all circumstances of life, good or bad, and because without me at his side, her son will never be happy again.
My fiancé begs me to give him a few days to try to change his mother’s mind, but his pleas fall on deaf ears: I return his ring, and that same night I go back to Colombia with my heart destroyed.
*
—
WHEN I ARRIVE, I learn of the violent deaths of two people I know, total opposites of each other: Gustavo Gaviria Rivero and Diana Turbay Quintero.
The first leaves me sad for many days, not just for him, but because without the solid rock that his cousin was for him, Pablo will go even crazier, and the country will end up paying for it. He no longer has the strength and support of the industry’s founding bosses, and he only has his brother Roberto left. Although he’s a man of utter confidence in accounting matters, Osito doesn’t have Gustavo’s impressive command of the business or his obsession with absolute control. He is missing that ruthless character so essential to managing an empire of organized crime, especially with a partner who is almost always absent and demands more and more resources for a war against an entire state with armed forces and organized agencies. I know that in spite of his brother’s unconditional loyalty and talent, without his cousin Gustavo, Pablo’s business will collapse and his enemies’ will rise. And I know something else that by now he must also know:
the next death will be his, and the greater his cruelty before he dies, the greater the myth he leaves behind will be.
Pablo has always known that women suffer more and that female victims inspire more compassion than male ones. That’s why this time he has chosen Nidia Quintero, the ex-wife of President Julio César Turbay, as the forced spokeswoman for his cause. While Turbay Ayala’s brutal government was responsible for thousands of disappearances, the size of the social foundation Nidia directs has made her into one of Colombia’s most beloved people. When her daughter Diana Turbay is on her way to interview the priest Manuel Pérez, leader of the ELN (National Liberation Army), for the newscast she directs, Escobar’s men intercept her. Now the most admired woman in Colombia in recent times is clamoring for the new president, César Gaviria, to stop the war, listen to Los Extraditables, and save her daughter. But Gaviria does not sacrifice the rule of law to the man who assassinated his galanista predecessors and who blew up a plane he should have been on; the government lashes out against all. In an attempt to free Diana, a police officer blind with hatred toward Escobar’s men and desperate to take revenge for the deaths of hundreds of colleagues confuses the victim—who is wearing a hat—with one of her kidnappers. Diana dies in the shootout, and the entire country accuses the police of shooting first and asking questions later. They cry that the president lacks compassion before the pleas of the victim’s mother, the press, the Church, and an entire country sick of watching funerals on TV, day and night: burials of the hundreds of humble dead and multitudinous processions for the illustrious dead. Escobar has already announced:
“The only thing that has been democratized in this country is death. Before, only the poor died violently. Starting now, the powerful will, too!”
But if there is a pain that I will never forget, it’s that felt by my journalist friend—girlfriend of an M-19 commander and whose name I will keep quiet forever—sobbing in my arms as she tells me how she was raped by DAS agents who entered her house at night. They warned her that if she reported them, they would torture her to death. Before they left, while she was crying in the bathroom, they put unlicensed guns in another part of her apartment. Minutes later, the police came with a search warrant, and she was thrown in jail, accused of illegal arms possession and of collaborating with the rebels.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 37
