Six
FOR MANY YEARS WE WERE CONTINUALLY ON THE MOVE, always watching the movements around us. It began with just the Colombian police and military searching for us, but eventually we were at war with the Cali cartel, with very specialized units of Colombian police created just to scour the earth for Pablo, with representatives of America’s Delta Force, and even with the Colombian paramilitaries. And yet Pablo was able to fight them all and survive.
For much of this time we stayed on farms Pablo owned, some of them on mountains with views of the city he loved, but other times we lived deep in the safety of the jungle. Only the closest friends knew where we were. When Pablo needed to see someone, a lawyer or a politician or a friend, that person was brought to him blindfolded, often by an unusual route. Even our mother did not know where we were; when Pablo wanted to see her she would be brought to a named point. I would meet her there and make her wear a pair of blackened glasses and then take her in another car to the meeting point. Once, I remember, I handed her these glasses and told her to put them on. When she did she began making faces. “What’s wrong with these glasses,” she asked. “They’re very expensive, but I can’t see anything.”
I explained, “Mommy, these aren’t for fashion. They’re for security.”
Security was always first. Pablo always bought farms on the roads miles away from our location and put his people living there. If necessary he would build houses for them. When an enemy force went by that place day or night we would be notified immediately to get ready to leave. Only once, I can remember, did the police come upon us completely unannounced—and these people never knew who they had found.
Pablo and I were staying at a farm on a road near Amagá, which is about forty miles outside Medellín. This was toward the end of our time on the run, after Pablo had decided we should be without bodyguards. The price on us was $10 million each. As Pablo said, we paid the bodyguards very well but not $10 million. For that kind of money we knew the only people we could trust were each other. Our agreement was that we would watch out for each other; we slept at different times so one of was always alert.
It was a beautiful house surrounded by orange and apple trees and flowers; it had a swimming pool, a place of great calm. We often had barbecues outside, where we would sit and play dominoes. I became a master of that game while we stayed there for about eight months. When Pablo was buying this farm a dog bit him, so Pablo insisted the dog stay with the farm. He named it Hussein, and eventually the animal calmed down.
We were living in the house with an older married couple we had known for many years, Albertino and Ilda. The farm had been bought in their name. They were both artists, painters. In addition to living in the house, they were given a salary and all their expenses were paid. For our protection Albertino would begin a painting but leave it unfinished. The picture that was there at the moment was a beautiful farm with a small cow. The only thing to be finished was the green grass, which I could paint to look real if necessary. Pablo would wear the painter’s cap and in the morning both of us would put paint on our hands and our clothes in case the police showed up. Pablo had grown a beard and when he was splattered with paint he would look authentic, like he did his work there.
The importance of this farm was that it was near enough to Medellín for Pablo to be in contact with the attorneys negotiating a compromise with the government to do away with the extradition laws. These meetings usually took place late at night, sometimes at one A.M. When Pablo had to go to places he would wear his artist disguise and Albertino would drive. The negotiations took a long time because Pablo knew exactly what we wanted, which was for the government to change the constitution. Meanwhile, we hid.
Very early one morning the police suddenly came to the farm. It was not a raid; there was only one patrol car with two men, so I figured they were not looking for Pablo Escobar. I opened the door for them. Albertino and Ilda were having breakfast and when Ilda saw the police she slipped away to wake Pablo. In this house we had built secret stashes to hide money as well as hideouts for ourselves. Pablo moved into one of them. When the police came to the door I welcomed them. I was pretending to be a painter with the cap and the artist’s glasses. I began reaching out to shake hands, but stopped politely because, as I indicated, I did not want to get paint on them. They explained their presence. “We’re doing a search in the neighborhood because we found a body at the side of the road.” In fact, he said, they had found a head on one side of the road and a body on the other. He continued, “It happened last night. We were wondering if you saw anything weird or heard something unusual.”
“No,” I said, and that was truthful. That corpse had nothing to do with us. “I was up very late working on my painting.” I invited the police inside and served them a cup of coffee. They admired the house and left. When they had driven away I used our knock code to tell Pablo it was safe to come out. Later we learned from the people in town that the body was that of a husband who had been killed by his wife and her young lover.
Wherever we stayed we made certain there were places for us to hide quickly if necessary. It was this way with all the hunted men from the drug organizations. One time the police got a call that a major leader was hiding in an apartment. The exact address and apartment number were given. When the police went into the apartment there was warm food still on the table. They searched this apartment for hours but found nothing. The man had disappeared. The police were used to being given false information—people were always calling them to say they had seen Pablo Escobar in a store or walking into a building, for example—and this seemed no different.
A month or more later this same person again called the police and insisted the leader was at that address. From the outside the police saw a candle burning. The army knocked down the door. The candle was still burning, the bed was warm—but the apartment was empty. This time they had the answer to the mystery. They stuck the point of a pen into a tiny hole that no one could find unless they had been told it was there. The wall opened up. This man was there. He had prepared for a stay of hours—with him was a canister of oxygen. He was captured and eventually extradited to the United States.
The hideouts we built were not fancy, but effective. They allowed us to fade into the walls in an instant. One that Pablo built, I remember, could be opened only by turning a hot water faucet to one side. The difficulty with being inside one of these hideouts was that the person could not know what was taking place outside. That made it necessary to have some type of secret code, a code that said it was safe to appear.
But the best hiding place was the jungle. And eventually even we got comfortable there. With the protection of our bodyguards we could disappear into the jungle and the police and military would not risk tracking us in dangerous territory. In the jungle they were the invaders.
There also was the time that we were staying at the farm called the Parrot. We had been there for several months along with Gacha, Pablo’s brother-in-law Mario Henao, Jorge Ochoa and his wife, and some of our people. There had been no worries. Usually I would go to bed early in the evening and rise in the morning by 3:30. But one afternoon about six as everyone was watching the news on television I felt very tired and took a nap. As I slept the small priest visited me again, warning me: “You guys gotta go. The police are going to show up.”
It was a powerful dream but I was too embarrassed to tell it to anyone. I thought they would laugh at me. So instead I shared with them, “I feel very strange. I’ve just got a feeling the police are going to show up tomorrow.”
“How come?” Pablo asked. “Did you get any phone calls?”
“No, I just got the feeling.”
They didn’t pay any attention and of course I didn’t blame them. But I went to our employees and told them to get some food ready, pack some clothes, and put the seats on the mules: “Just in case we have to leave this place quickly.” The farm was right next to the beautiful Cocorná River, which is so clean you can see the fish below, so I also had them make certain there was fuel and supplies on our boat. I went to sleep that night at the usual time, but this bad feeling I had didn’t go away.
One of the radios Pablo had given to all our neighbors made a noise about 6 A.M. It was from one of the people who lived on a nearby farm by the name of José Posada. He was one of the people who would call frequently to say everything is good, everything is quiet. But this time he said, “Leave. The police are here. We’ve seen trucks and heard helicopters. Go now!”
Within a few seconds we heard the helicopters coming at us. The “damn mosquitoes,” Pablo used to call them. And then he would make a movement to slap them away like they were nothing at all to him. Not this time, though, they came too fast. There was no time to go for the mules or the boats. As they approached they started shooting from the air. We ran, firing back as much as possible. Some of us ran to the river, others into the jungle with just the clothes we had on our backs. Pablo was in his sleeping clothes without even a shirt or shoes. He left all his papers behind. Fortunately, Pablo had planted some pointed trees and bushes, which made it impossible for the helicopters to land. But they continued shooting at us from the air. Bullets hit the ground and the trees and whizzed by my ear. I ran, faster than I had ever run in training. This time there was no stopping until we got free of there.
Long ago we had made a blood pact that we would shoot ourselves behind the ear rather than be extradited. Jorge Ochoa thought it looked like this might be that time. They were all around us. Jorge took his .38 revolver and was ready to commit suicide, but Pablo stopped him. “It’s not the time,” he said. If it were, he vowed, he would do the same. Somehow we managed to get loose of the raiders. But it was close.
It was later I found out that those damn mosquitoes had killed Pablo’s brother-in-law Mario Henao, our brother in our souls, as he tried to get to the river. Pablo saw him get shot. I didn’t. Pablo was shooting back as he ran. Maybe he hit one of the choppers with a machine gun; it was said he did but I didn’t see that either. But the loss of Mario was a terrible pain to all of us. When we were safe in the woods we received the confirmation that he died and that was the only time I ever saw Pablo cry. In addition to several dead, they had captured fourteen of our people, but none of the leaders were among them.
We had many close escapes while we were negotiating. Once we were staying on a farm we call the Cake, near the top of a hill in the wealthy area of el Poblado. While there was a very old, very large house, with fourteen bedrooms, on the land, Pablo built for himself and his close friends Otto and Pinina a Swiss chalet–type.
The house was typically well defended. We lived there with 120 bodyguards. The perimeter was established by two rows of barbed-wire fences, and the gaps between those rows was patrolled by vicious dogs. There were also twenty raised watchtowers that were manned twenty-four hours each day, and a motion-detector lighting system that warned of any intruder. There was also a battery-operated bell system that would alert us if the police had shut down the power, as well as radio scanners to hear the approach of an enemy, and surveillance cameras all around to cover the perimeter. I had supervised the installation and kept checking it to be sure each piece operated successfully.
One day Pablo called me urgently on a secure line to tell me our radio communications frequency was blocked. “It’s got to be the police,” I said. “Get prepared.” A minute later I was told that truckloads of soldiers were coming up the hill. Twenty minutes later bells were off from four places, meaning the soldiers had practically surrounded the perimeter. Pablo remained calm, as always. He noted that the bells had not run from the southwestern portion of the property, so we went in that direction. Pablo picked up a submachine gun, Pinina and Otto took their weapons, and we started walking among the pine and eucalyptus trees.
When we reached the towers 13 through 16, where the bells had not rung, Pablo took armbands with the insignia of the DAS from his pocket and we all put them on our arms and kept walking. Pablo was wearing a military cap and dark glasses, and he was dressed in the civilian way, as the DAS agents always wore. The helicopters were now flying over the house. One of the guards from the watchtowers had a rope, and as planned Pablo tied the watchmen’s hands with it. Then they began walking down the hill, as if these men were Pablo’s prisoners.
Soon we spotted several soldiers. “Hey!” Pablo yelled to them. “Come help us with these guys we caught from Pablo’s command post.” Pablo handed the four men to these soldiers and told them not to mistreat them, and that he and his men were going to go after two others from the house they had seen running. Pablo took with him one of the soldiers who carried a water canteen. As they walked, Pablo asked him where the other soldiers were posted, and this young soldiers provided that information. Once Pablo learned where the other soldiers were, Pablo told him to wait right where they were standing, that his people were going to look around and would return. He was left standing there.
Eventually we arrived at a modest farm. The farmer and his wife understood who we were and took us inside. They fed us and let us stay there safely. Eventually they loaned Pablo their car—their son even rode ahead on his motorcycle to make certain the road was open. The escape was complete.
Ten days later Pablo returned to this small farm. He admitted he loved the property, because it was secluded in the mountains and looked on to a waterfall. He offered the farmer a great amount of money for it. His offer was accepted, and Pablo had another safe house set up for himself.
Each time we were attacked we would move to another place that had been prepared. While this was happening the business continued. Pablo remained convinced that in return for an end to all the violence eventually the government would agree to his terms: There would be no extradition to the United States and if we went to jail in Colombia it would be for a reasonable time and in a situation safe for us. The search for Pablo divided much of our country; while the poor people supported Pablo, others did not. For me, like Pablo, the most difficult part of it was being separated from my life. We all had to believe our families were being watched and people were listening to their phones, so it took careful plans to be able to be in contact with them. It was painful for me, for example, to watch my second marriage fall apart and be helpless to do anything to stop it. Even in the middle of this worldwide hunt our personal lives continued.
My second wife went with our ten-year-old son, José Roberto, to the beautiful vacation city of Cartagena. We owned a home there and a boat. Many members of our family were there, so my wife gave the house to some of them and stayed at a nearby hotel. One morning she said she wasn’t feeling well because she had a fever and sent José Roberto with his aunts to cruise on the boat. José Roberto was a fine boy and didn’t want to leave his mother alone, so when they reached the boat he started crying and complaining he wanted to go home. His aunts were insistent but finally he ran back to the hotel. He knocked hard on the door to her room but nobody opened it. He called down to the reception and made everybody worry: “I’m the son of Roberto Escobar and my mother is in this room and she isn’t answering. This morning she had a fever and I’m worried she is dying.” Deep inside, though, he wanted to find out the truth of a feeling he had.
When the security received no response to knocking they opened the door with the master key. Nobody was there. José Roberto told them that his aunt was staying in another room and thought, “Maybe my mother is there.”
And again, they knocked, and again no answer. They opened the door and my wife was in the Jacuzzi with another man. José Roberto was stunned. She said to him, “Please don’t say anything to your father. You don’t understand.”
José Roberto was a pretty smart kid, and kept quiet. But instead he sent me a letter telling me this whole story. I was hurt terribly when I received this letter but there was nothing I could do about it. Nothing. I thought women were just like money; neither can truly belong to you. If I said anything against her she might call the police and tell them where we were staying. She had access to much of the money. She knew the bank accounts, she knew the safe combinations. She had our son with her. So I had to lie there at night wondering what was going on and being able to do nothing about it. She was a beautiful woman, but the love and compassion I had for her quickly disappeared. Still, though, to this day, it remains unclear to me why she did that. I was a formidable husband to her, she had love, money, and everything necessary for happiness.
This was part of our lives as fugitives. There were so many feelings about being out of touch with the rest of the world and helpless to change our situation. We got our news from the television or during phone calls with our families. Our relatives would read the newspapers to us, which sometimes told us where the government thought we were staying, or where they were searching for us. Every day, every minute, our lives were up for grabs. Every time we heard an airplane approach we stopped and waited. We lived our lives ready to leave instantly.
About three months after this escape we were staying in an old house at the top of a mountain. And it happened once again. I lay down to sleep and the small priest visited me. This time I told Pablo, “I got that strange feeling again. I think they are going to be here tomorrow.”
After our last experience Pablo believed my warning. He ordered our people to pack the mules with food and water, the guns were made ready, and we all slept lightly. In the morning we got a call from a contact in the police. “The police know where you are,” he said. “They are going to come up there.” We got up on the mules and climbed into the mountains. Several of our employees stayed behind and were there when the police arrived shooting. The police killed the groundskeepers and the farmers.
I am not usually a person who believes in the mystical world, but I have experienced the warnings of this priest. I don’t know why he comes to me. He doesn’t come each time my life is in danger. There have been very bad situations that have happened with no warning. But when he does come danger follows him. So I’ve learned to listen to his warnings.
Our most difficult escape took place in 1990. This time I got the greatest warning of all from the priest that danger was coming. We were at a farm called Aquitania with about forty people. It was about a hundred miles from Medellín, in the jungle. About four in the morning we got notice from the outer security that the police were about six miles away and coming fast. Because there were so many of us, instead of a hideout, we had built a house underground about two miles away, deeper in the jungle.
An employee of Pablo’s named Godoy lived in the jungle and people believed he sold wood to earn his living, but for his real job he would build hiding places for us and guide us through the jungle. The underground house he had built was amazing. People could hide there for days if needed. The moment we got the word we ran for this shelter. Godoy took us there. We could hear the helicopters behind us shooting at the place we had abandoned. At those times you never stop to wonder how they could find you, but it was clear we had a traitor in the organization. With the rewards for Pablo and myself it’s not surprising. We reached the underground house and secreted ourselves there for the rest of the night. The next afternoon Pablo sent Godoy to his own house, which was not too far from our hiding spot, to find out as much as possible. Godoy looked like a simple workingman so he could move about without being suspect. The police had passed the whole day searching the area without finding much. About 6 P.M. the police showed up at Godoy’s farm and asked him questions. “I live here with my family,” he told them. “I work with wood. I produce a little coffee to sell to the city.” The police looked around for an hour but left when he told them he wanted to have dinner with his wife and his kids. He was not suspected.
As soon as the police cleared the area Godoy called me on the radio. “They left my place ten minutes ago. Be careful. They are very close.” Even though the hiding place was not visible from the ground, because we did not know who had betrayed us we didn’t know how much information the police had gotten. Only a very few people knew about this underground house, but if one of them had talked to the police we would be trapped with no way to run. We knew that it was better to have a chance to get away than to be trapped underground. We moved outside and gathered our supplies. While Pablo was deciding when to go we heard a helicopter flying nearby and looked up at it through the trees. There we saw a terrible sight.
One of our security people, El Negro, was hanging by his feet out the door of the helicopter. When we saw El Negro flying from his feet we knew we had to run, because he had helped Godoy build the hideout. Later we found out what had happened. El Negro had been captured by the police at a farm about a mile below us. They tied his legs and took him up in the helicopter and hung him outside, telling him, “If you don’t tell us where Pablo is we will drop you right now, motherf*cker.”
El Negro screamed that he would talk and they saved him. He wasn’t a traitor but they were going to kill him. When they landed on the ground he started walking with them toward the underground place. But there was a miscommunication between the police walking with El Negro and the army searching for us. The army in the helicopters started shooting at the police on the ground, because they thought it was Pablo and his crew. The police on the ground started firing back. Everybody was shooting at everybody, and we took advantage of the gunfight and fled to the deepness of the jungle. El Negro also escaped, and made it to a nearby town where no one knew who he was, and the town’s priest hid him in his residence so he wouldn’t get murdered. It was twenty days later that El Negro made it back to Medellín.
Godoy led our escape. Among the forty people who ran with us were our loyal and trusted friend Otto, our cook named Gordo, and a very good soccer player we gave the name of a great Argentine soccer player. We didn’t follow an established path because, as Godoy told us, “The police won’t come this way.” It was tougher, though, climbing up a mountain covered with trees and bushes. We walked for about five hours in the night until we got into guerrilla territory. That first night about twenty of our people got separated and lost, so we arrived at a small house with the remaining twenty fighting people. We believed some of the others would find us there. A few did as the hours went by. This house was lived in by an older woman whose son was a guerrilla. At first they got scared because they thought we were the police, but when they were introduced to Pablo they relaxed. The message was simple: Many Colombians had great reason to fear the police more than drug traffickers.
Our clothes had been ripped badly by the underbrush we’d run through. This woman gave me a uniform from her son, who must have been at least six and a half feet tall. It was so big over me that I had to tie it at the ankles and use rope around the waist to hold it up.
I was carrying with me as much as $500,000 cash. I always carried money, knowing that in many situations it is much more valuable than weapons. As we sat eating the soup made for us a campesino showed up. We paid him $100,000 to lead us out of the jungle. But when we finally got ready to go Pablo realized that Otto, our loyal trusted friend, was still lost. In our escape Otto had been next to Pablo much of the time, ready to protect him, but had disappeared in the night jungle. “I know there are a lot of guys missing,” Pablo said. “But I won’t leave this jungle without Otto.” Pablo didn’t care if the police were coming; he wasn’t going to leave Otto behind. So Pablo and I, one other person, and the campesino agreed to go back and search for him. We took gas lamps with us and walked in a straight line, one behind the other. In the distance we could hear the helicopters shooting blindly into the jungle. The bullets zipping through the leaves made a snapping sound. Every few minutes we would yell for Otto. Finally we heard him answer back, saying he was hurt. I was learning the jungle; I found out that sound travels so well it’s hard to know where it is coming from. The peasant told us to be silent and led the search. It took almost an hour to climb through the vines to find Otto. He’d tripped and fallen into a deep hole. His face was cut up and we thought his arm was broken. It took us all working together another hour to cut him free from the grip of the jungle.
We left the farmhouse the next night. I left the people $50,000. They had never seen American dollars before and I had to explain to them what they were. I warned them to wait a couple of months, then go to town and exchange it a little at a time. I explained that if they exchanged too much they would attract attention, and if the police found out where they got the money they could be killed. Before leaving, we had radioed ahead to one of our people to meet us at a place with the supplies we would need. He told us that the army and the police were everywhere, it was a major search, and it would be better to stay hiding in the jungle for a while. We were led through the jungle for several days to a dirt road, then handed a map that would take us to a bridge that crossed over the River Samaná to a safe place.
At that road our people met us with those supplies we needed to stay safely in the jungle—food, clothing, sleeping bags, and medicine, all those tools of survival. Then we started walking again. My life on the bicycle had given me strong legs and good energy, but it was a hard walk. Some of our people struggled keeping up with us. In two days we found another small house and approached it. A man and a woman lived there with their two grown sons. Pablo told those people we were part of the guerrillas. No, the man said, “I know who you guys are because they’re talking about you everywhere.” These people didn’t have electricity; they had only a battery-run radio, and no TV. On their radio they heard the news that Pablo Escobar and his brother were in the jungle and that the government was offering a $10 million reward for each of us. “Don’t worry,” they told us. “We’re not interested in anything to do with the government.” They invited us to stay at their house and the woman cooked a meal for all of us on wood. We agreed to spend the night there.
I woke about four in the morning and watched silently as one of the sons left and walked into the jungle. I woke Pablo and told him. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Wait until a more normal hour and we’ll ask where he went.”
Before everybody woke up I felt restless. I couldn’t wait. An hour later I got up and started making noise, waking everyone. I said casually to the couple, “Oh, where’s your other son?”
The father said that he’d gone to the nearest neighbor to get an ax to chop the wood needed for cooking. “We want to make you a nice lunch so we need more wood to cook for all of you.”
In the position we were in we couldn’t trust people we didn’t know. There was a lake close by and we went there to wash up. As we went back toward the house I saw a big pile of cut wood stacked up high. So I knew then that this man was lying.
Pablo said to me, “Don’t show worry.” To everyone else he said nonchalantly, “Let’s have something to eat. Then we can move.” That was typical Pablo calm. But while we were eating a plane flew high up above us, way off the usual route. I believed it was from the army but Pablo questioned that. “It’s so high, how can you think that?”
But I did. “You know me, man. Sometimes I feel things.” This was different. But still I had that bad feeling. A little bit later there was a helicopter flying nearby. We heard it, but didn’t see it. When I asked the father about the son, he said he would return that night. That was curious, I thought. Before he said that the son would be back with an ax to make lunch and now he’s saying he’ll come back at night? I told Pablo, “We gotta go. I don’t want to make a big deal, but I think the son left and went to the next town to talk to the people who are looking for us.”
I was ready to go but still Pablo preferred to wait. I decided to start walking with the few people who wanted to walk with me. Pablo stayed and we agreed to keep close contact on the radios. We had been walking about an hour when we saw another helicopter coming near us. We hid. This was an army helicopter and it was flying so low I could see the people inside—and one of them was the son. I called Pablo and told him to get out right away. “I saw the son riding in the helicopter. They’re coming.”
Pablo and our men ran into the jungle. The helicopter approached but didn’t see them. The police helicopters would randomly shoot all the time at anything, but the army only fired at targets they could see. We met up with Pablo and the rest of the group at the River Samaná bridge. There were twelve of us. As we were about to go over it we saw army guys coming from the other side. They didn’t see us so we moved away quietly. We couldn’t use the bridge so we had to swim across the river about a mile away. It was very difficult to get across carrying all our supplies. The river was wild. It carried us along for about three miles. One of our men with the nickname Ears, because he had big ears, almost drowned. Pablo was a very good swimmer and went to save him. Ears grabbed Pablo around his neck and almost dragged him under, but Pablo was able to save himself and Ears, but just.
We were soaked and very exhausted but we knew we had to keep moving. This was on the run like never before. Helicopters were in the sky looking for us. We kept going into the safety of the night. Finally we put up the tents and covered them with brush to make them invisible in the light. Just so things could be worse, it started to rain hard. It was so cold, so cold. We had to sleep next to each other to keep our bodies warm. I was still carrying the suitcase full of money and that night I used it as a hard pillow. The smell of the damp money under my head was terrible. It was then I thought that money made such little difference in life. I had hundreds of thousands of dollars in my hands but there was nowhere I could get the small things we needed most, dry blankets and warm food. I was ready to burn the money to keep us warm.
The days of Napoles and the great parties seemed very far behind us. Now it was just surviving.
Late in the night suddenly we heard a huge explosion. We all got up and were ready to move quickly. I said to Pablo, “Oh man, I think they’re bombing us!” Pablo and one of our people went to look for the damage. It wasn’t a bomb. A giant rock had been loosened in the rain and tumbled down the mountain. It bounded on a ledge and flew right over us, crashing into the trees and knocking them down all the way to the river. I said we should move our base, but Pablo decided that one rock had gone over us; chances of another rock following that path were small. But if we moved we might move right into the path of another rock. No one slept soundly that night.
In the morning we began walking. We were moving through thick jungle. A couple of times we saw poisonous snakes, frogs, and other wild animals that added to the danger. But they kept their distance. We walked for two days, taking water from the lakes but all we had to eat was some chocolate and peanuts, because we were running out of supplies, and some of the others guys were way behind. Our blankets and tents had been made useless. We were very uncomfortable. Eventually we walked right into territory controlled by the guerrilla group FARC 47. We didn’t encounter any of the guerrillas, but we did discover a small supply area with hammocks, food and water, and some guns. I believe that discovery saved our lives. We ate like crazy and took turns sleeping in the hammocks. While Otto was sleeping a tarantula walked on him and settled on his chest. Otto still slept. Pablo saw it and put a piece of wood in front of Otto’s face, and when the giant spider walked on it Pablo tossed it away.
We were new again, and we walked some more, reaching the very small town of Santa Isabelle. It was full of guerrillas and they welcomed us. We slept there, shaved, and ate bread, eggs, and pasta, especially lots of pasta. The guerrillas hid us in their houses. Because they didn’t want to risk anybody calling the police they took us to another small town, St. Carlos, where our employees José Fernando and Guayabita were waiting in a truck to take us to El Pe?ol, where Pablo owned a farm. Finally we settled there.
The thirty-day walk had made some of us badly sick with coughing and fevers. My own fever was very high and I didn’t know where I was. They took me to a hospital under a made-up name. For three days I was unconscious with the fever. They would give me cold showers to cool me down. Sometimes I would wake up screaming, demanding to see Pablo. Fortunately, no one knew the Pablo I was calling for was the most wanted man in the world.
Pablo also was sick but he stayed at the farm. For security there Pablo hired a gang from Medellín to protect the people while they recovered.
We had lost some of our men during our journey but again we had escaped the wave of police and soldiers searching for us. After we got better Pablo and I and a few of the top men like Otto moved back into the comforts of Medellín.
Not too long after the walk through the jungle Pablo decided to change his whole security situation from a big number to only a few. Rather than moving with as many as thirty people, he used only two, which made it much easier to travel around and kept us more discreet. Sometimes we stayed at the homes of regular people that we trusted, couples with no children in the house. When we moved around in the city we often wore different costumes. Some people said that Pablo dressed as a woman, but that was false. We wore fake mustaches, sometimes wigs, always different types of clothing. We would pretend to be a doctor or a laborer fixing roads; sometimes we drove our own cabs. Very few people knew where we were staying. When we had meetings with government representatives or our lawyers to try to work out a good arrangement, usually they were at farms and houses outside the city. The people who went there were always taken with their eyes covered.
One night I will never forget for my whole life was December 1, 1990, Pablo’s birthday. We were staying in a nice home and the bodyguards with us were Otto and El Gordo, the fat one. It was nice to be calm after everything we’d been through. There were few days when we were free to be happy. At breakfast everybody was saying “Happy Birthday” to Pablo. He was happy that day, feeling confident that the government would soon be ready to make a deal. He said to me, “I’m going to have a party tonight and I’m going to bring in an orchestra. I want live music.”
Naturally I believed he was kidding. It would be impossible to bring musicians to the house. Once they left the first thing would be to call the police, to collect the reward. The police were not interested in putting us in jail, they wanted us dead. I was concerned. “With all respect, Pablo,” I asked, “how are you going to bring this group?”
Pablo was smiling. “Don’t worry. Just trust me. It’ll be okay.”
Pablo and I never argued. But this made no sense to me. Sometimes Pablo thought he couldn’t be captured, but this was like giving the canary to the cat. We were watching television in the afternoon when Pablo called El Gordo and told him to get the group. “Cut it out, Pablo,” I told him. “It’s not funny anymore.” But he insisted, sending El Gordo.
The people of the house were really worried. I went upstairs to prepare my clothes to leave. I tried once again to talk Pablo out of this crazy idea. I told him, “You’re my baby brother and I love you, but I don’t understand this. I’m staying with you until the group shows up. I’m going to listen to a couple of songs and then I’m going to be out of here. I’m already packed. I have a suitcase with money and I have another place to go. But I’m not going to stay with you.”
We spoke for about an hour. It was a very sentimental talk, and Pablo told me, “I love you too, brother. You have been with me in all my problems, it’s not fair that you leave on my birthday.” And then he smiled mischievously. In my mind this was the time we were going to go apart. Pablo went downstairs and I could hear everyone laughing and having a good time. I took a shower and came downstairs with my suitcase and it was then I saw the six blind men playing their guitars.
All of them, blind. They could not know who they were playing for. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be sad or be angry. But that was so Pablo. Everybody was having a blast, and no one thought that Pablo could pull something like this. It was so astute. For the meal he had ordered all kinds of seafood, lobster and octopus and four bottles of the Portuguese wine, port. He invited the musicians to join us, and he was very happy to share his birthday with this group.
At the end of this party the musicians were ready to sing “Happy Birthday” but they asked to know the name of the man celebrating his birthday. Suddenly everyone was silent. But Pablo stood up and said, “All right, I don’t want you to be afraid, but you are singing to Pablo Escobar.” The musicians didn’t believe this, but nonetheless they sang to Pablo.
When they were finished singing, Pablo told me to give them each $20,000. I handed them the cash. Now they believed it was Pablo. I remember watching them feeling the bills, but they couldn’t figure out what they were because they were so used to the size of Colombian money. “That’s U.S. money,” Pablo explained, and then he gave them the same warning given to anyone he paid: Be careful, don’t bring the whole amount to one place. Go with somebody you trust, cash the money in small amounts, and don’t mention my name. Otherwise you’re going to get in real trouble.
There was no danger with these people. El Gordo and Otto returned them home. Even if they told that they had played for Pablo Escobar, they didn’t know where they were taken. Of course not, they were blind.
Amazingly, through all this time the business continued. Nothing stopped the business from growing. The biggest problem remained smuggling even more and more product into the United States. In 1989 Pablo and pilot Jimmy Ellard purchased an old DC-3, which could make the flight from Colombia all the way to Nova Scotia in Canada. The plan was that from Nova Scotia the product would be driven over the U.S. border to New York City. But on the airplane’s test flight an employee did not pay some dollars to a local radar guy and the plane became visible to Colombian air force radar. As the DC-3 landed, military jets raced out of the sky and shot it into pieces with tracer bullets. For a stupid $20,000. Through the years the organization had used every type of airplane, from the Piper plane on top of the gate at Napoles to multi-engine jets, to planes specially built by Domínguez out of parts of other airplanes for the drug flights. Pablo’s “air force” had more planes flying than most countries. But then Ellard began searching for a stealth airplane that could not be seen on any radar. The dream was a plane with only a little metal; they made a deal to buy a Rutan Defiant, a special plane constructed almost completely of plastic. They also were going to replace the metal propellers with plastic propellers and cover it with radar-absorbent paint. But during the first flight the top of the canopy popped open and material flew out hitting the back propeller and making such tremendous damage the plane was no longer usable.
But the profits remained so large even losses like these were easily accepted.
No matter what we did or where we went during these years, we lived constantly with the possibility of death coming around the next corner. That was true for all the leaders from Medellín. Pablo was forced to feel that in December of 1989. Pablo and the Mexican, Gacha, had remained in good contact with each other, maybe because there was nobody else with the equal of their power. The government had made the two men, Escobar and Gacha, the biggest targets of its war on the drug traffickers. Everyone agreed that they couldn’t stop the river of cocaine flooding into America, but they could make people think they were having success by getting these two leaders. The United States had given the Colombian government more than $60 million and helped build up the army to catch them, mostly leaving the Cali cartel and other groups from Bogotá and the northern regions of the country alone. Our president, Virgilio Barco, was also criticized a lot by the U.S. for not doing more to stop the drug smuggling. Colombia was taking houses and bank accounts and cars, but the leaders were not being caught. So the U.S. applied more pressure on Colombia to give them big names to put in their headlines.
The Mexican and Pablo had each built their security armies for protection and fighting back against their enemies. So everyone who came near them was watched closely, everywhere they moved was searched. But the one weak spot that Pablo had, that Gacha had also, was for their families. They would do anything for their families. This was the place that the government knew they could be touched. In the end this was the lesson that Pablo never learned.
The story told by the police was that Gacha’s seventeen-year-old son, Fredy, had been captured in a raid in September. The biggest charge against him was being the son of a man they wanted desperately. But the legal charge they made against him was for possessing illegal weapons. After two months they secretly released him, but from then on they followed him until he went to his father at a small ranch in Tolu, about an hour south of Cartagena. And then they sent an army against Gacha. The way the Mexican died is still a question. Was he killed by gunfire from the army or by his own hand? Did he die fighting or escaping? Also killed was his son and fifteen soldiers of his security force.
After Gacha was killed by the police, 15,000 ordinary people crowded the streets of Gacha’s town of Pacho to pay tribute to him as he was buried. They surrounded the cemetery to keep out the curious, and allowed the family to have its privacy from the media. Pablo was hurt by Gacha’s death. He had warned him that there was a snitch in the organization, but Gacha did not believe him. Pablo felt sure the informant was a friend and partner. There are stories that this was the real way the Mexican was found.
By this time Pablo had seen a lot of killing and so he accepted it without much emotion. Did he see in it his own fate? Pablo had always understood the penalties for his actions, and nothing he ever said or did made me believe he was afraid of his own death. I think if this battle did anything it made him positive that he had to continue inflicting such terrible damage on the government that they would agree to find a means to stop the violence. The government would have to change the constitution to prevent extradition, and Pablo would serve time in prison, pay a huge fine—and then be free. We had several lawyers and priests negotiating with the government for us. In this way the negotiations went on and on for several months.
The war was expanded on January 13, 1987. Pablo had built for himself and his family the most beautiful home in the richest and most secure area of Medellín. It was the five-story building that he had named Monaco. One floor was a dining room, one floor was the master bedroom, one floor was the penthouse. Inside were sculptures and paintings from Picasso, Botero, the Ecuadoran painter Guayasamín and other well-known artists worth many millions of dollars. The floors were of imported marble. Everything was made from the best materials.
Monaco was very secure. It was built from reinforced steel. It had the first security camera system in Colombia and there were monitors all over the building. We had told the architects and engineers to include some safe rooms for members of the family to hide in case killers got into the building. Pablo used to call Monaco his castle.
On this particular night Pablo had eaten dinner with his family. After putting his children to sleep he went secretly to a farm about ten miles away. At 5:30 in the morning a bomb was exploded, destroying Monaco. It was a huge bomb and woke up half the city. This was the first bomb of the war that was to shake Colombia. I was staying about two miles away. After the explosion awakened me I went immediately to the building in which my mother lived. The police there told me, “Nobody knows exactly what’s going on. Everything here is fine, but people are saying it’s a bomb.” We had all seen bombs on TV, but the experience for us was new. From there I went right to Monaco. A policeman stopped me a few blocks away and told me a bomb had exploded at Pablo Escobar’s building. I was stunned. A bomb? That was not the way the government worked.
When I got to the building it was destroyed. I started helping the police move broken doors and windows and debris. We found María and the two children, all of them safe, but crying and afraid. The ceiling had collapsed around the baby crib in which Manuela was sleeping, and it took rescuers some time to reach her. I called the bodyguards and they took the family to safety.
I went to see Pablo. “I’m going to tell you something,” I said. “But don’t worry, everything is fine.”
“I already know everything,” he said. How so quickly, I wondered. And then he told me, “And I already know who did it.”
He explained. Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela of the Cali cartel had called on a special phone number about a half hour after the explosion. “Pablo,” he said, “I just heard somebody put a bomb in your building.” This was the first news about the bombing that Pablo had received, but he didn’t give that away. I know, he said. Rodríguez said, “I already sent somebody to see if you’re okay and your family’s okay. Are you at the building?”
On the streets people were already saying this bomb was the work of the DAS, but Pablo knew the truth. Cali had planted this bomb. This bombing attack on his family was something that shook him. But all he said was that he was going to confirm what he believed.
It didn’t make sense to me. At times we would be doing business with Cali. We had even kept money in a bank they owned. Some people had worked without problems for the organizations in both Medellín and Cali. But Pablo felt certain about this.
Later he was able to confirm this claim. Knowing the country as well as he did, Pablo felt very definitely that it was impossible for the bomb to have been built in Colombia without him knowing about it. It had to have come from elsewhere. He remembered that a good friend of his that I will call Reuben had been in jail in Spain at the same time as Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, one of the Cali leaders. So Pablo made contact with Reuben, who told him that a member of the Basque guerrillas, the ETA, this person I will call the Maker, was also in jail at the same time. “I remember Orejuela talking to him all the time,” Reuben said. “The Maker was well known for being part of the ETA and he was a specialist in bombs and weapons.”
Reuben said that “after I got out of jail I was in Cali to pray at the town of Buga. I was in Cali and I saw this guy in the dining room of the hotel and he didn’t even say hello.”
For Pablo, Reuben agreed to try to get in contact with him. It was discovered that the Maker was in Colombia trying to make contacts to buy cocaine to bring to Spain. Anybody who wanted to be in the cocaine business knew about Pablo Escobar. So when the Maker got invited to Napoles he was happy to come. Pablo started talking to him. Definitely the Maker was having a nice time in that wonderful place. Finally Pablo said to him, “I heard you were in jail with a friend of mine. I need you to do me a favor. I need you to train some of my crew.” In return, Pablo offered to give him good prices on cocaine, telling him, “I will put more merchandise in Spain very cheap, cheaper than anybody else, but please help me out training my people with the bombs.”
And then Pablo asked easily, “Do you have any experience working in Colombia? You ever work for anyone here?”
The Maker replied, “Yes, as a matter of fact I met somebody in jail a couple of years ago and he brought me to Colombia to train some guys. I told them all the materials that were needed, how to put it in cars, how to activate them.” Pablo asked the name of the man he had worked for. “I trained the Indian, some guy called the Indian, ordered from a guy in Cali. They said they were going to do it against somebody in the government.”
“All right, I’m going to tell you what,” Pablo answered. “I’m going to help you with the drugs. You’re going to train my people. Here is $200,000 in cash to pay your expenses in Colombia. I’ll give you more money, but that bomb was against me.” The Maker was shocked. His face went white seeing he was surrounded by so many armed men, and he thought it was his last day on earth. “Yeah, it was against me, but don’t worry. I’m not going to do anything to you because you didn’t know. What I need you to do is work for me.”
The Maker agreed to do this, because he saw that Pablo was a serious person, and he started training the bomb makers that Pablo was to use in this war. Later he went back to Spain with a different identity and did many deals with Pablo to put merchandise in Spain.
The Orejuela brothers, Gilberto and Miguel, found out that Pablo knew it was the Cali cartel that had moved against him. Gilberto called Pablo saying something like, “Please, patrón, I didn’t do anything.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Pablo told him. “Come on, it’s too obvious. You called me right away when you put down the bomb. Do you remember your friend”—he said the name—“when you were in jail? We spoke with each other in an honest way. You did it. You started the fight so now be ready to get hit!”
Cali continued the fight. A couple of months after Monaco they did another bombing, this one coming against our mother’s home. At 4 A.M. they detonated a car bomb. My mother was in bed on the third floor and from the impact a huge picture of the Baby Jesus came down from the wall behind her, protecting her face and stomach, but her feet were uncovered. Some glass came down and cut her. She was brought to the emergency room by her friend Guillermina, who was always with her.
My sister Marina lived on the fourth floor with her husband and kids. She was six months pregnant and was rushed to the hospital where she gave birth to a premature baby. The baby had to live in an incubator for many weeks, but survived. One of the people who worked for her was killed.
On the fifth floor my older sister, Gloria, was wounded with shrapnel and was taken to the hospital. It was fortunate that no one in our family was killed. They destroyed the building and everything our mother owned. All the windows from the surrounding buildings were blown out. Pablo denounced the attack to the media, but the government looked away. The government prohibited the newspapers from printing stories about anything done to Pablo or his family so the people of Colombia did not know what was really happening.
When the war with Cali was starting Gilberto Orejuela hired a gang of very ruthless people of Medellín called Los Briscos. These guys were more into killing for the drug traffickers than dealing with the drugs. The head of this group got in touch with Pablo and said to him, “We are from Medellín so we have nothing against you. But Mr. Orejuela told me he wants to pay me $5 million for your head.”
Pablo said okay, “But you’re going to work for me from now on.” He said he had to get together an army and wanted them to be part of it. Then he said, “Here is your $5 million. I’m going to prove to you how weak Orejuela is. Tell him you need $1 million for the guns to kill me and show him pictures of me getting in my car from a long distance. That way you can tell Orejuela you have tracked me and easily can kill me.” The man was nervous but Pablo told him to go ahead, don’t worry. So he met with Orejuela in Cali and showed him the pictures, and the Cali cartel offered him only $5,000. “See,” Pablo said, “if he promised you $5 million if you were to kill me he would pay you only $2 million or something.” That was when Los Briscos started working for Medellín. Los Briscos realized that Pablo didn’t care about saving money like Cali did. And that made them want to work for Pablo.
But for Pablo that was also the last evidence he needed that the Cali cartel wanted to kill him. The question that never was answered completely was why Cali started this war. There are many who believe it was simple business: Pablo was making so much money and Cali wanted more for themselves. The American DEA said Medellín controlled 80 percent of the cocaine going into America. But other people believe it was the opposite; Cali controlled New York and Chicago and Medellín had Miami and Los Angeles. Then Pablo decided to do business in New York. So he sent Champion, the Lion, and Jimmy Boy to open up New York for Medellín. Maybe that started it.
Or maybe the war was started because Jorge Ochoa was arrested going to Cali and in return Rafael Cardona from Cali was killed.
Or maybe it was because Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela had made strong relationships with powerful government officials. The government never went after the Cali people; instead they were considered los caballeros, the gentlemen of the drugs, while we of Medellín were los hampones, the thugs, because we used weapons to protect our property. It was said that Pablo liked to fight but Gilberto liked to pay bribes. Even the head of the DEA in New York said to the newspapers, “Cali gangs will kill you if they have to, but they prefer to use a lawyer.”
For whatever the reasons the war started with the bombs. We stayed running, but by 1987 we were fighting against the government and the army of the Cali cartel. And we were winning because Pablo fought back tougher than anyone could have believed.