Seven
ONE OF THE TIMES I CAME CLOSEST TO BEING KILLED—until I was bombed six years later—was on a Sunday morning in 1987. My son José Roberto and I were in a modest car that would not attract any attention. We drove out of my farm at the head of a line of five cars, each of the others having a driver and a woman lookout. But each car had complete surveillance equipment and my car was equipped with gadgets that I had copied from James Bond. For example, I could press a button and release a cloud of fog so no one could follow me, or spray oil on the road, throw nails on the road or even release six tear gas bombs.
We were traveling on the road to Medellín when two big Nissan Patrols with eight officers in each one signaled for me to get over. When I stopped, these cars pulled in front of me and behind me. At the time this happened I had no problems with the justice system so I had not believed it necessary to use my gadgets. The police could not know that one of my bodyguards in the car behind me was recording the event. They asked me for identification and I handed them an ID that identified me as Hernán García Toro with the number 8.282.751. I wondered if they already had knowledge that I was Pablo Escobar’s brother. The impossible thing to know about the police was whether they were working honestly or in the kidnap business. Or worse, if they were people just pretending to be police. There was no way of knowing.
The police were confused. They told me politely that they were looking for someone else and handed me back the ID. But then another policeman suggested that they take me somewhere so I could be “identified by our friend.”
I was not showing any nervous signs. I have always been a tranquil person. When I got the García Toro ID back I handed it to my son to hide in his pants. Then I signaled him to go into one of the bodyguard’s cars. It was a crime to use false documents and that was enough to send me to prison. We were in the middle of the road, causing a large traffic jam. These police were distracted. Finally one of them came back to me and asked, “Sir, can you give me back the ID please?”
I said, “I don’t have it. I gave it to you and you didn’t give it back. May I have it back, please?”
“What do you mean?” he said. “I gave it back to you.”
I shook my head seriously. “No, you didn’t. You took it away. I haven’t moved. Please, I’m going to see my mother and I would like my ID back.”
It seemed likely that they knew who I was, but they weren’t certain. Finally they put me inside one of the Patrols and ordered everyone else to leave. I nodded, and they got in their cars and drove off.
The police could not know that my bodyguards had recorded all of the police so we could identify them. A bodyguard called Lorena got into the car I had been driving. Under the seat there was a walkie-talkie tuned in to Pablo’s frequency. Lorena called Pablo and informed him of what was happening. She gave him the police officers’ license plate numbers. “Don’t worry,” Pablo told her. “Try to follow him, but stay away.”
They drove me around for a few hours. When we stopped, two men with their faces covered like bank robbers came over to the car. One of them looked at me and said, “He is Roberto.” I was pulled out of the car and told to walk with them. I thought, This is the end.
They led me to a trail. It was about eleven o’clock at night. I remember looking into the sky and thinking, There is no moon tonight. I was resigned to my fate. It was freezing and they weren’t talking. Finally I asked, “What are you going to do with me?”
“We’re going to kill you,” one of them said.
“That would be the end for you too,” I said. I lied, “My brother already has your pictures and recordings. When we stopped, remember that red BMW? It took your pictures. By now my brother has all of your information.”
They couldn’t know if I was telling them the truth. They began speaking with others on their own walkie-talkies, trying to figure out what to do. They decided, “We aren’t going to kill you. We just want $3 million.”
We negotiated. In the forest, on a cold moonless night, we negotiated the value of my life. I told them I could only give them $1 million, but later we settled for $2 million. “I need to make my call to my accountant,” I said. We returned to the police car and they drove me to a pay phone. I dialed a number that reached only Pablo wherever he was. “This is Roberto,” I said to him.
“Can you talk?” Pablo asked.
“Yes.”
“Are you kidnapped?” I told him the situation. He said he already had a lot of information from Lorena and they were learning more from the video. Phone calls were being made to the police working for us and within a short time we would know the identity of the kidnappers. He told me not to try anything, the money was nothing for my life. Then he told me to put the kidnappers on the phone.
The kidnappers thought they were going to speak to my accountant. I watched as the color drained completely from the face of the one on the phone. I knew that Pablo had told him, “This is Pablo Escobar. I have all your information. You are responsible for my brother.”
We drove on country roads while we waited for the ransom to be delivered. As the night passed some of the police left us supposedly to go to places where the money might be delivered. I wondered if some of them had decided that kidnapping Pablo Escobar’s brother wasn’t such a great idea. I finally spoke with Pablo and he told me Carlos Aguilar, El Mugre, would organize the delivery. Two more policemen waited at that place.
We drove off another time. I was in the back seat with three policemen. I had established trust with these police, because we had stopped to eat and they had allowed me to use the bathroom. I kept looking for a way to escape, but I couldn’t find one. I was still fearful that once the police had the money in their pockets they would kill me.
At four in the morning we were parked, waiting for the money to arrive. I knew exactly where we were, as it was a place I had suggested for the money delivery. It was a road I had traveled often from my farm to the city. After a half hour the cop sitting right next to me behind the driver had fallen asleep. I waited until the driver looked to be yawning, then jumped on the sleeping cop and grabbed his machine gun. I pointed the gun at the cops and told them to get out of the car. Now I was in control. I made them all crawl under the car, then I shot two bursts into the air and took off running toward a nearby river I knew very well. I threw the cartridge into the river and tossed the gun away, then crossed the river and escaped into the safety of the jungle.
I had saved my own life. By noon I had arrived at the farm of a friend and called Pablo. “Where do we need to send the money?” he asked. I told him the story. He scolded me for risking my life for a few million, but he was grateful that I was alive.
I never learned the fate of those policemen.
Most of the time, though, I personally wasn’t involved in the violence. Although to be safe for a few years after that I traveled with as many as thirty bodyguards.
My brother had become a general leading his private army against the government of Colombia and the Cali cartel. He did what needed to be done for victory and sometimes it was very brutal. Too many innocent people were killed in this war. Drivers, bodyguards, cooks and maids, people walking on the street, lawyers, women shopping—thousands died in the bombings. But it’s important to remember this: Pablo didn’t start the bombing. Cali and the police continued placing bombs against us. Pablo, for example, owned the most beautiful farm I have ever seen; it was called Manuela and it was located in the Pe?ol. It had every luxury imaginable, soccer fields, tennis courts, horse stables and cow barns, even a wave pool with water slides. The police arrived there and looted everything, from beds to family pictures, putting it all in trucks. The caretakers were tied down and then they blew everything up. Pablo denounced the police to the government, but nothing was done.
Our mother had bought a small farm known as Cristalina with her own pension money from being a teacher, and they came there and tied up the caretaker with his wife and small children and blew up the house in a thousand pieces in front of them. Pablo had a mansion in El Poblado near a country club. Our enemies killed the two caretakers and they blew it up, including huge sums of cash hidden there. As always Pablo protested to the government but he was ignored. In addition to some cars kept at Napoles, Pablo had a famous collection of classic cars and motorcycles that he kept in a warehouse in Medellín; he had about sixty cars there, Fords and Chevrolets from the 1920s and the car that supposedly had belonged to Al Capone. Our enemies killed the guard and set fire to the building, destroying this irreplaceable collection.
Pablo began his war to defend himself from our enemies by transforming his sicarios plus dozens of other men into a trained force. The pilot Jimmy Ellard testified in court that he told Pablo that the security was not good: “And the best thing you can do is employ American Green Berets.” He had contacts in America to accomplish that, he said. Pablo said thank you very much, but informed him that he had hired his own military people to do the training. Later it was learned that these were Israeli and British mercenary soldiers hired to train people in the methods of warfare that would be necessary.
The first targets were a chain of drugstores called La Rebaja that were owned by the Cali cartel. There were thousands of these drugstores around the country and in the months after we were attacked eighty-five drugstores were bombed. Because of Cali’s bombing attack the war had spread onto the streets. People could not travel safely from Medellín to Cali as every visitor became suspect. Sometimes people found in the wrong place would just disappear.
The police and army focused their war on drug traffickers only against the Medellín organization. Secret police squads terrorized the city. They were responsible for many deaths, including innocents. These were the people who would drive through the barrios machine-gunning the young men standing there. Some of the survivors would be taken into custody to the Police School Carlos Holgüin, where they would be tortured to find out if they knew where Pablo Escobar was hiding. Most of these young men didn’t even know Pablo, and a few days later their bodies would be found thrown in the streets. Their crime was being poor. Outside Colombia I’m certain people wondered why there was such support for the drug lords who were killing the police. This was a reason why.
Just being in the streets was often the reason people died. The brother of the girl with the pretty legs borrowed the car of a friend of his, for example. He didn’t know that person was wanted by the police, so when they saw this car they shot it up and killed this innocent person. It was at this time that the bombings of the CAIs and the shootings really got going.
I also believe that the state also took advantage of the public fight between Medellín and Cali by blaming Pablo for crimes he didn’t commit. There were many bombs during that period that the police said Pablo had placed that he had absolutely nothing to do with. We know Medellín was blamed for deaths that we had nothing to do with. So Pablo used to say, “If the government is putting the blame on me and I know we didn’t do anything, it could work both ways.” Meaning they could be blaming Cali for crimes they did not commit.
It was in the interest of the government to encourage conflict between the two organizations. The more we attacked each other the better for them. In 1989 at the airport in Bogotá, for example, presidential candidate Ernesto Samper was attacked and was shot seven times—although he survived and years later became president. Samper supposedly was friendly with the leaders from Cali. Because of that he was the kind of politician who might have been attacked by Pablo—but the real fact is that Pablo was not involved in this assassination attempt. Regardless of who did the shooting, the government blamed Pablo for it.
The first big attack on the government to cause major change in their policy took place in August 1989, during the political campaign for president. Six men were running for that office, but the most popular was Luis Carlos Galán, one of the founders of the New Liberals. It was believed he would win. This was the same man who had denounced Pablo as a drug trafficker years before when he served in Congress.
At a campaign rally in the town of Soacha, about twenty miles from Bogotá, Galán was starting his speech to about ten thousand people when several shooters hiding machine guns behind posters began firing at him. He was hit in the chest and died right there. Many other people were hurt. In Colombia this killing was compared to the terrible assassinations of the Kennedys.
Many people had reasons for wanting Galán dead. He campaigned hard against all the drug traffickers and promised that if he became president he would follow serious extradition policies. In Congress he had blocked a bill that would have banned extradition. So everyone in the drug business could not afford for him to win the election. The DAS said the mastermind of the assassination had been Gacha, who was killed four months later. Pablo was not named.
Galán also promised to fight the left-wing paramilitaries if he became president, so those organizations had reason to want him dead. The wealthy families who controlled the life of the country by supporting friendly politicians were not happy that Galán had promised to open the government to the working people. He also had promised to reform the politics of the country so the politicians and police could not take money from the drug traffickers and emerald companies to look away while they did their business. So all of those people would have suffered if Galán had been elected president.
It took eighteen years after this assassination until Alberto Santofimio Botero, who was also running for president, was convicted of ordering the killing of Galán. The jury in Bogotá found him guilty after listening to the testimony of one of Pablo’s main sicarios, who said that Santofimio thought that by eliminating Galán he would become president. The election of Santofimio would have been good for the drug traffickers because there would have been no extradition. The reason for the assassination was that Santofimio “was removing a political enemy from his path.”
This was not the kind of question I would have asked my brother, and if there was not a reason for me knowing the answer he would not have offered it. But I know that it served the purpose of many other people and agencies for Pablo to be blamed for crime. To the world he was already becoming a vicious killer, so putting one more killing on him would make no difference.
But Pablo knew that the killing of Galán would cause a stern reaction, so on the night of the killing he called me and told me the police would be searching for us so my family should meet him at a hotel in Cartegena. By the time we got there Pablo and Gustavo were waiting. He wanted to send our families out of the country.
As he knew would happen, the government of President Virgilio Barco immediately declared a state of siege and smothered the country with police and military, raiding houses and buildings and making thousands of arrests. The government took almost one thousand buildings and ranches, seven hundred cars and trucks, more than 350 airplanes and seventy-three boats—and almost five tons of cocaine. Four farms owned by Gacha, the Mexican, were claimed by the government, in addition to some of Pablo’s buildings and businesses in Medellín. This reaction was a big chance for the police and the army to settle old feuds because no one would dare object when they arrested a person and said he was a suspect in Galán’s assassination. Many people were taken into custody, but none of them were the leaders of the drug operations.
President Barco also put back into effect the extradition treaty with the United States, which the Supreme Court had suspended a few months before. The cartel answered that it would kill ten judges for every person extradited. Right away more than one hundred judges resigned their office. Medellín began fighting even harder than ever before. In the first few days seventeen bombs were exploded against banks, stores, and political party offices. Some of these terrorist attacks were placed there by our enemies to create more confusion, but it was all blamed on Pablo.
The United States offered to send soldiers to Colombia if they were invited to help in the fight against the drug traffickers. The U.S. president, George H. W. Bush, said he would send $150 million in equipment to Colombia, as well as soldiers to help our government solve their drug problems. So now America was in the fight against Pablo too. Pablo had never attacked the U.S.—he only defended himself from the Colombian government.
After ten days of this government crackdown, the leaders of Medellín offered a truce. Gacha called a newspaperman and said he would surrender all his farms and airplanes in return for amnesty. The father of the Ochoas, Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, wrote to President Barco, “No more drug trafficking, no more war, no more assassinations, no more bombs, no more arson . . . Let there be peace, let there be amnesty.”
The mayor of Medellín also wanted the government to negotiate, saying, “This is the position of many people who believe that you have to talk to obtain peace.”
President Barco answered by saying, “We cannot rest until we destroy the organizations dedicated to narcotics trafficking.”
Pablo remembered the same appeals had been made after the death of Lara. He wrote to the newspaper La Prensa, “How much blood could have been avoided after the Panama talks. We want peace. We have demanded it shouting, but we cannot beg for it.
“No more the path of legal action,” he finished. “Now it is with blood.”
In September a homemade rocket was fired at the embassy of the United States from ten blocks away. It hit the building but didn’t explode, and did little damage except that it made American diplomats in Colombia send their families home. President Bush answered by changing a presidential order that had prohibited the assassination of citizens of other countries who were terrorists—and drug traffickers were considered terrorists. This rocket was not fired by Pablo. It was all a setup to involve Pablo and have the U.S. retaliate against him.
In your mind part of you is always the person you used to be. For me, that was the bicycle champion. If I had paused to think about the journey I’d taken it would have been impossible; from representing the country I loved in the sport I loved to running through the jungle as police helicopters fired tracer bullets down on me. So I didn’t think about it. I know that it seems difficult to understand, but it is true. Maybe that was my means of dealing with my reality.
Also I did not have conversations with Pablo about what was going on. I didn’t try to talk to him about the violence that the police were committing against our family, friends, and employees. I know that wouldn’t have done any good. The decisions Pablo had made in the past had allowed him to become one of the richest men in the world, so there was no reason for him to begin doubting his decisions. I know he felt the government had given him no choice but to fight. He believed that many in the government had made the choice to associate with Cali to try to destroy Medellín so they could take over the business. The proof of that came later, in 1996, when the 8000 Process scandal made it public that Cali was paying bribes to many politicians, even men running for the presidency. And what Cali wanted the government to do was use the legal system to rid the business of their competition. Even our prosecutor general once admitted, “The corruption of the Cali cartel is worse than the terrorism of the Medellín cartel.”
So Pablo felt he was fighting everybody—but this was just the beginning. Soon there would be more enemies.
At 7:15 in the morning of November 27, 1989, Avianca Airlines flight HK 1803 from Bogotá to Cali exploded over the mountains outside the capital city, instantly killing 107 people. It was a terrible blow to the country. Even I was a little surprised when Pablo was accused of this crime. Why? The investigation discovered that a small bomb had been put aboard the airplane under a seat in the middle. When it went off it caused the fuel to detonate and destroy the airplane.
Like so many crimes committed in this period there were many possible motives. The first was that the man who had replaced Galán in the election for the presidency, his campaign manager, Cesár Gavíria, was scheduled to be on that plane. That was true, but Gavíria saved his life by changing his flight and taking a private flight instead. So he was supposed to be the first target. But it also was said that the plane was destroyed because there were one or two informants from the Cali cartel who were going to testify against Medellín aboard. Also in September and October more than thirty thousand kilos of Medellín cocaine had been seized in the U.S. and the word was that Cali had given them the information where to find it, so some people believed the plane was destroyed because Marta Lucía Echavarria, the girlfriend of Cali leader Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, was on board in seat 10B and this was to punish him.
I will say this: If I had any knowledge of this plan before it was carried out I would have done everything in my power to stop it.
Many people have told their stories about this disaster and the DAS and American FBI and the police have made their investigations and published their reports. The United States used the excuse that two Americans were killed in the crash to become involved, and two years after it happened Pablo and La Kika were indicted by the United States for this crime. La Kika became the very first person ever to be tried, convicted, and sentenced under the 1986 law against killing Americans anywhere in the world.
All those reports put together say that this is the way the bombing happened: No one will ever know for sure the reasons that this was done, but supposedly it was talked about at a meeting of Pablo, Gacha, Kiko Moncada, Fernando Galeano, and Albeiro Areiza. They had a copy of Gavíria’s schedule so they knew he was going to be on that flight. The bomb was carried to the airport in parts in three different cars. The plan was to put five kilos of dynamite on the plane and have it detonated by a “suizo,” meaning a person who is tricked into doing a job in which they will die. The ticket for the suizo was bought for the fictitious name Mario Santodomingo, who sat in seat 15F and put the package under seat 14F. It seems the suizo was told his job was to record the conversations of Cali people sitting in front of him.
As the plane rose into the air as instructed the suizo turned the knob on the “recorder.” The bomb exploded a hole in the floor and side of the plane, and then blew up the fumes in the empty fuel hold. Everyone on the plane died and three people on the ground also were killed.
Right after the airplane was blown up a man claiming to be of Los Extraditables called a Bogotá radio station and reported that they had planted the bomb. Four years later the man who claimed that he made the bomb told the DAS that Medellín leader Kiko Moncada gave him a million pesos to recover the cost of the operation. So certainly others were involved, but the only name the world heard was Pablo Escobar.
The U.S. sent to Colombia its most secret intelligence unit, Centra Spike. Centra Spike flew small airplanes above the cities and applied the most advanced technology to listen to communications of interest. Their method was to spy on the ten people who Pablo spoke with most often and then the ten people that each of those ten people usually contacted. That’s the way they built a map of the Medellín organization. They flew in total secrecy. When our contacts told us about this I had warned Pablo that the U.S. was eavesdropping. As an electrical engineer who specialized in communication I knew what was possible. But Pablo wasn’t too concerned about that. He thought that if he had been listened to they couldn’t have located him anyway; he used to say that he could have been anywhere in the world.
To use the information provided by Centra Spike, in 1990 Colombia organized an elite military unit named the Search Bloc. This consisted of seven hundred of the most trusted policemen, trained by the United States Army Delta Force, who had only one objective: catching Pablo and the other leaders of Medellín. To fight back, a bombing campaign was begun against the Search Bloc. The whole situation was completely out of control. The government thought about stopping the Search Bloc, but instead they added more soldiers.
There were more than a hundred bombings. This was all-out war. Judges were bombed. Newspapers who wrote in favor of extradition were bombed. Every policeman had become a target. The police of Medellín had stopped living in their own homes to protect their families and stayed together in secure places. Everyone in the city, probably in the country, were touched somehow by the bombing campaign. For example our cousin, “the girl with the pretty hair,” was a student at college. She was registered there under a new name and only her best friend knew of her family. During the war against the police a bomb was placed in a police car near a stadium and when it exploded hundreds of people were killed and wounded. It was horrible. Even now I can’t really understand or accept how it came to this. But there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. In that bombing the grandparents of another student were killed. When it was reported a few days later that Pablo’s men had planted the bomb this student approached our cousin in the cafeteria filled with people. “Your cousin killed my grandparents,” she screamed and started hitting her. She grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down.
The girl with the pretty hair started crying too, not for herself, but for the grandparents, for everything that was happening in our country. She grabbed the girl by the arm and put her into a corner. “Stop screaming,” she said. “I want you to understand this has nothing to with me. I have the same last name, but I had nothing to do with this incident. I’m not like that. I can’t go to Pablo and tell him ‘Stop doing this.’ I can’t.”
But later she did go to Pablo and ask him why he did such terrible things. And he told her, “You don’t even know how many people that I care about are gone because of this war. This is what I have to do.”
She said to him that he had two personalities. Sometimes he could be so nice and kind, but on the other hand, “You can be so ruthless.”
“They made me like this,” he said. “I have to be strong. I have to fight back because people turned their backs on me. I know I’m not going to die like a regular drug dealer.”
If there was one personal enemy Pablo had it was General Miguel Maza Márquez, the head of the DAS, a man who had made a vow to defeat the cartels. In an American trial a drug pilot testified that Maza had been involved in the cocaine business, that he had been told by a major connection that Maza was shipping between twenty and twenty-five kilos a flight. I have no personal knowledge of this; it could be another situation of someone trying to make a good deal for himself at the sake of an innocent man. But is it possible? In Colombia in those days anything was possible. Until the government focused on Medellín the money was so easy to make and the big people were not touched at all. The only people taking the risks were those on the lower levels who were actually doing the moving. It was well known that many famous people in politics in Colombia had been involved in small ways in the business. If Pablo or his high associates agreed to include your drugs in their shipments you were almost guaranteed to make a profit.
There was also the possibility that some agents were on the payroll of the drug organizations. A lot of poor people feared the DAS in that period just like the police for all the atrocities done in the city much more than they respected it. To them DAS wasn’t the Colombian FBI, it was the police who came in the night.
Maza has said that Pablo offered him money through a lawyer to work with the cartel and that he turned him down. That I had not heard. But it makes good sense. So many politicians and policemen were happy to take money from the traffickers that there would be no reason not to make such an offer.
Pablo despised Maza, due to the crimes committed by him and his agency. Numerous times Pablo had denounced these illegal acts to the Colombian government but everything was overlooked. Maza has claimed that Pablo made seven attempts to kill him. Maybe. There were many bombings at this time. In one car bombing Maza lived but seven of his bodyguards were killed. Maza proved to be a very lucky man. In December of 1989 the plan was to blow up the entire DAS building to kill him. This would be just like bombing the FBI Building in Washington, D.C.
At least a thousand and perhaps as much as eight thousand pounds of explosives were loaded onto a bus. One man was waiting in the lobby of the building. After Maza and his bodyguards arrived this inside man was supposed to contact the outside men with the bus and give them the okay. Then they were to direct the bus into the lobby of the building and explode it. But the plan went wrong in many respects. The man inside was waiting and waiting but he didn’t see Maza arrive because he came into the building a different way than usual. Finally the inside guy decided to step outside—and when the bombers saw him walk out of the building they detonated the bomb—almost killing him too.
It was probably the biggest bomb of the whole war. The bus crashed into a car outside the building, and the whole front of the building came off as if it had been pulled away. The bomb was so strong that the engine of the bus landed on the roof of a knocked-down building blocks away. There was serious damage to buildings as far as twenty blocks away. At least fifty people in the DAS headquarters and nearby were killed and as many as a thousand were wounded. It was written in newspapers that the walls of the building were covered in blood and, unfortunately, parts of bodies were found many blocks from the explosion. If the bus had managed to reach the building there would have been even bigger destruction.
But Maza survived. His office had been protected with steel and that saved his life. He said that he was almost the only person on his floor to survive the attack.
I always loved my brother, but my soul was not blind. I could see that there were parts of him that I couldn’t recognize. Now more than ever we lived day to day. Each movement had to be planned in secret. There was no going back to Napoles or the places we knew. Even seeing our families was difficult as we guessed they were being watched. Gustavo, for example, would show up in disguise—like all of us he would wear a mustache, glasses, a hat, and even a wig—at the home of a friend without any announcement. He would wait in their small living room and during the next few hours his wife and some of his children would arrive. The family would show up at different times in different cars. They would share cups of hot chocolate, knowing the time was precious. When they left, Gustavo would hug them and even sometimes cry. When we saw the people we loved no one knew if it was going to be the last time ever.
No one can ever know with confidence how many people died on all sides in the drug war. There were so many deaths that the figure is lost. Certainly many judges and policemen and politicians died, and three of the five candidates for the presidency in 1990 were killed, as well as members of the drug organizations and our families and friends. When I turned myself in for a second time and was sent to the maximum security prison in Itagüi, we built a board as a shrine to honor the perished friends and family. There were so many good names on that board. So many innocent people died for no reason. All of it could have been avoided. That’s the real tragedy; it all could have been avoided.
While the bombings continued Los Extraditables began kidnapping the elite of Colombia. The very wealthy and their families in most ways had been protected from the street violence, and because they controlled the power it seemed obvious that nothing would change until they were affected. The news said that the kidnappings were just a way to raise money by ransom, but money was never short. More than the money it was the pressure that these people could apply on the government to end the extradition treaty that was the real goal, and of course to let everybody know what kinds of corrupted officials were running the show with their gruesome murders. Rich people were taken off the streets, and most of the time their chauffeurs were killed to send the message.
The kidnappings of the wealthy had more effect than all the violence. The government used three former presidents to negotiate with the Extraditables. I think it’s true that Pablo wanted the fighting to end. He knew that this was not a way to live—or to die. But the one thing that Pablo always insisted on absolutely was an end to extradition. Everything else could be negotiated. The business would end, he would give up some of his fortune, he would surrender and agree to serve time in prison, there could be some compromise on all points—but there could be no compromise about extradition. There were times we spoke about this and I saw his frustration.
The country was in chaos and confusion. Before in Colombia, the shadow world had been allowed to exist along with the public world and there was calm and stability in the country. The government had accepted and even worked with the emerald trade, the marijuana smugglers, and all the illegal businesses. It was safe for everyone to walk in the streets. Everyone was making money. The people outside the business almost never got hurt. But that was not true anymore. By attacking the Medellín cartel and especially Pablo, who had become a political figure when he announced his presidential aspirations, the government had forced them to fight back. This was the terrible result.
A few of the leaders that lived in the poor neighborhoods of Medellín were murdered for supporting Pablo’s political career. I believe the real reason this war against my brother began was because of his politics, instead of the drug business. When Pablo used to get up on stage to give his speech to thousands of followers throughout the country his ideals were compared to that of presidential candidate Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who had been assassinated in 1948. Gaitan had been Pablo’s idol. Pablo’s ideals in his speeches were to work to eradicate poverty in our country, provide a chance for an education, health care, and decent employment for everybody in the country. He was proud that he had always shared his winnings with the country’s poorest people.
The government attacks did have many successes. A lot of our people were killed by the national police, Cali, or by the elite troops of the Search Bloc. Hernando, who was the manager of Napoles, was with his family on a farm for a weekend. Our enemies showed up at the place and Hernando told his son to run and hide. These people took a tool and broke every bone in Hernando’s hands and fingers and burned him all over his body with cigars until he was dead. Many of our employees were killed, including Ricardo Prisco and his brother Armando, who was shot by the national police as he sat in his wheelchair. Two of María Victoria’s brothers, Pablo’s brothers-in-law, were killed. Our cousin Luis Alfanso was killed and his parents, Lucy and Arnand, were beaten black and blue and burned and killed. Another cousin Rodrigo Gavíria, had his skull blown off by a machine gun, and another cousin, John Jairo Urquijo Gavíria, was shot as he tried to flee, as was their eighty-seven-year-old father, Luis Enrique Urquijo, an innocent man who had gone to church every day. My cousin José Gavíria was tied up in front of his wife and children and stabbed in the neck and allowed to die there. Our cousin Lucila Restrepo Gavíria was gunned down with her husband in front of her children. Now they all rest in the family cemetery with Pablo.
On August 7, 1990, Cesár Gavíria, Galan’s campaign manager, became the president of our country. Gavíria immediately announced his new policy: The government would continue to fight against drug terrorism, the bombings and kidnappings and assassinations, but Colombia could not stop drug business without the cooperation of the rest of the world. He said, “Drug trafficking is an international phenomenon that can only be resolved through the joint action of all affected countries. . . . And no success will be possible in this area if there is not a substantial reduction of demand in consumer countries.” There were many people who did not understand the important difference. This was interpreted to mean that there could be some agreement if the violence was stopped. But the new president’s message was clear; he wanted to change the situation.
But any thought that real change might come quickly ended four days later when the Search Bloc found Gustavo in a guarded house in Medellín and killed him in a gunfight: Gustavo, who had been with Pable since the first day. The shame of that for Pablo was that Gustavo almost lived to see the war against the government won.
Three weeks after Gustavo died the daughter of a former president, Diana Turbay, was kidnapped. It’s not possible to really know how that affected the government, maybe it didn’t at all, but Pablo had proved to them again that their own families could not be protected. A week later the new president agreed that those drug traffickers who surrendered would receive reduced sentences. They would have to serve some time in prison for drug trafficking, but they would eventually walk out free to live the rest of their lives.
During the next few months the three Ochoa brothers surrendered and eventually got reasonable prison sentences, but Pablo refused until the government agreed to change the constitution and put in new justice laws. He never for one second forgot the sentence the Americans put on Carlos Lehder, life plus 135 years in a maximum security penitentiary. Better a grave in Colombia than a jail cell in the United States.
Today the situation in Colombia is the opposite. Drug dealers work differently. The sentences in Colombia are more rigid than in the U.S. because there by giving up the names of other people and some money it is possible to have a long sentence reduced. Many present-day drug dealers earn fortunes and after serving some time recover it. These sorts of benefits are reserved for the wealthy drug lords, not for the petty drug dealers.
The negotiations with the government went on for almost a year. Most of the meetings took place in the middle of the night at farms owned by Pablo outside Medellín. In 1990 the M-19 guerrillas that Pablo had long ago fought for the kidnapping of Martha Nieves, Pablo’s friend’s sister, had made a deal with the government that allowed them to end the violence, surrender their weapons, and become a political party, and in return they would receive pardons for their crimes. Pablo believed he should be granted the same offer. Why not? M-19 had been guilty of violence; it was their guns behind the raid on the Justice Ministry. And yet the government had allowed them an entrance back into society. So why not Pablo and his associates? Even before the negotiations began Pablo had decided exactly what he wanted and what he would give in return.
The attorneys and government representatives who came to these meetings were picked up at night by vans without windows and had to wear black glasses so they couldn’t see anything. They were driven around for a time so they wouldn’t know how far from the city they had traveled. Even our own representatives did not know where we were hiding or how to get directly in touch with Pablo.
Meanwhile, unknown to us, American airplanes were still flying over Medellín, listening to telephone conversations, trying desperately to find Pablo. Cali was also trying hard to find Pablo. There was no question they knew we were talking to the government and they wanted to find Pablo before an agreement could be made. At this time there were no criminal charges against me. There was no reason for them to arrest me. But people on the payroll had told us that Cali had put out an order to kill me. So, unbelievable as it seems, the safest place for me was in prison with Pablo.
The church played an important role in these negotiations. Even with his sins, Pablo remained a religious man. Like our mother, who was saved from death when a picture of the Baby Jesus of Atocha fell on her and protected her, he almost always slept beneath a drawing or painting of Jesus. During his telephone conversations with our mother they often prayed together. Father Rafael García Herreros appeared on television every night just before seven o’clock on the show Minute of God. The audience heard him say, “I would like to speak to Pablo Escobar, on the edge of the sea, right here, on this beach,” but what they did not know was that Father García provided information for us about the progress of the negotiations, like when the government wanted to meet with our representatives, with his secret signals. For example, on his TV show he would say that they got a donation of 1,370,000 pesos, but what he was telling Pablo was that they were going to have a meeting on the 13th at seven o’clock.
When Pablo and I spoke on the telephone we also used a code. In the most dangerous time Pablo would call himself Theresita, the name of the nanny we had as little children, to avoid danger in case the phones were tapped. Theresita was a woman who did not wear shoes. She used to change our diapers, feed us with the baby bottle, and was with us until she died of cancer. When Theresita died I was saddened and thought why the scientists hadn’t discovered a cure for this disease. This began the great search of my later life. I started to buy every book I could find about cancer. In 1987, when one of my favorite horses got sick with equine anemia, I started to research this disease, which is similar in many ways to the human AIDS virus. When all of our troubles began I had to put aside my desire to contribute to finding a cure for this terrible disease.
One of the most important people involved in these negotiations was Archbishop Dario Castrillón of Pereira, who had a special relationship with the president, having been the official at his marriage. Pablo also had a strong friendship with this priest; he had worked with the churches of Colombia for many years, giving money to provide food, clothing, and shelter for the parishes of Medellín and Antioquia. The archbishop was important throughout all the negotiations until the end, and at this moment he is serving in the Vatican. It was normal for Pablo to use a helicopter to visit small villages in Chocó or Urabá. Even during the worst times Pablo continued to help the underprivileged citizens in these government-forsaken towns. Pablo and I met with the archbishop in a house at the highest point in El Poblado to ask him to go directly to the new president with his offer. Pablo told him, “I’ve decided to surrender myself but I have to get some guarantees before that. I would like you personally to take this message to the president so there will be no mistake.”
Pablo then listed the conditions that needed to apply if the war was to end. First, no extradition. Then he would agree to receive a sentence of thirty years, which would be reduced one third for his surrender and admitting to crimes. This sentence was similar to the punishment given to others who had taken a similar path. He thought the thirty-year sentence would actually require serving about seven years in prison with the benefits granted by the government.
As I sat there listening to him, for the first time I began to believe that maybe there was a way to end this horror and eventually return to our regular lives.
The search for Pablo went on during the negotiations. There were more killings, more kidnappings. During one of the police raids on a house, hostage Diana Turbay was killed, probably by police bullets, which Pablo had denounced during a communication to the government. A few days later President Gavíria made the policy that Pablo would be eligible for a smaller sentence if he confessed to his crimes. Pablo understood that to mean that the president was open to making a reasonable deal. There was a lot of negotiating, a lot of compromises, but eventually a deal for surrender was reached. The time was good for this. America had been paying Colombia millions of dollars and providing military assistance to go after the drug traffickers, but mainly to catch Pablo. U.S. president George Bush had been strong with Colombia about this issue. Including Carlos Lehder, our government had extradited forty-one men to the United States. But fortunately for all of us, right at this time Colombia was seated on the United Nations Security Council. The U.S president was attempting to gather support from the world to attack Iraq’s Saddam Hussein to expel him from Kuwait. Colombia had voted against a U.S. military attack, and Bush wanted Gavíria to change that vote. Gavíria announced that no more Colombians would be sent to the United States for trial. Perhaps in return for our vote in the Security Council, the U.S. didn’t make much of a protest. It has been said by our politicians that the Gulf War brought peace to our country.
Pablo and the government had made a deal. I remember the day we found out for certain that the government had agreed to the compromise. As always Pablo showed little emotion. He was happy, he was satisfied, but he was never a man to celebrate loudly. But I could see he was pleased. It seemed like there was finally a way out of this life. In return Gavíria got what he wanted most—the killings would stop. The kidnappings would stop. The bombings would stop.
The drug smuggling business? Ending that would be much more difficult.
With the agreement to end extradition the rest of the terms of surrender were finalized over several months. The terms that Pablo arranged allowed him and other members of the organization to plead guilty to at least one crime, and the other crimes would not be prosecuted. Pablo would be permitted to keep most of his property. The people who hated him most would be kept away from him, and in particular Maza would step down from his post as chief of the DAS. The government wanted to put Pablo into its highest security prison in Medellín, but of course that was not possible. He would pay for his own prison. As part of the agreement he insisted on approval of the guards. After searching for several weeks Pablo informed the government that a suitable prison could be made from a vacant building sitting on top of a mountain just outside Medellín. The building looked like a small school surrounded by tall electrical wire fences, but it had originally been built as a rehabilitation center. It was known as La Catedral, the Cathedral.
Pablo owned the building and all the land, although his name did not appear on the ownership papers. To hide that fact from the people it was registered in the name of a friend of the family, an old ironmonger, who exchanged it to the government of the city of Envigado in a completely legal arrangement and in return was given a smaller but desirable tract of land. It was not traceable to Pablo. The area measured about thirty thousand square meters.
Pablo had been very careful in selecting this place. The government had suggested two others, including Itagüi where the Ochoas were doing their sentence, but the Cathedral offered many advantages. The location was on the top of a hill overlooking Medellín, seven thousand feet above sea level, which gave us a view of anyone approaching from below. It would take considerable time for anyone to get up the mountain. It also gave Pablo a complete view of his beloved Medellín. As I said to him while we stood on the top of the mountain, “With a telescope, from here we could see the whole city.” In addition, for security, Pablo purchased a small bodega at the base of the road going up the hill and gave it to an employee, Tato, on his wedding day. But inside was a phone wired directly to the prison, so people stationed there instantly could give us warning if anyone passed. I built an electronic system that was laid across the roads and gave us a warning signal. The buildings also were bordered by a forest, which provided good coverage from the air and also would allow us to hide among the trees if we had to escape. From the first, we knew that we might have to escape quickly, so Pablo planned for it. In the agreement Pablo signed with Gavíria the government was prohibited from cutting down any trees. Pablo also was concerned that Cali or another enemy might attempt to bomb us and a big advantage of the Cathedral was that early in the morning and late in the afternoon it was hidden in fog. The prison was surrounded by a ten-thousand-volt electric fence. As much as it was to keep the prisoners inside, the purpose of the security was to keep people out of the prison.
After the terms were negotiated the only problem remaining was the extradition treaty. So in June 1991, the constitution was changed to forbid extradition. From then on Colombians would always be tried for crimes committed in Colombia in Colombian courts. Or until the law was changed again long after Pablo’s death.
In addition to the government, Pablo also made arrangements with the other drug traffickers. He believed he was serving his sentence for all the traffickers who would be helped by the new laws. It was agreed that during his time in prison he was to be compensated by them from the business. This was just as had always been done when one person gave up his freedom for others. “I am the price of peace,” he told them. “I am making this sacrifice for you, so you should compensate me.”
To get safely into the jail all of us had to plead guilty to a minimum of one crime, which would serve as an example for all of the crimes committed. Pablo confessed that he had participated in one deal that had smuggled twenty kilos of cocaine into the United States. Twelve of our men went into prison with my brother and me. Pablo helped them invent the crimes for which they pleaded guilty. Three of them agreed that they had collaborated to transport four hundred kilos of drugs. Pablo told each of them, “You confess that you borrowed a blue Chevrolet. You say you put the package together. And you say you drove the car. Remember, a blue Chevrolet.”
During their confessions the three men described the color of the car differently. It didn’t matter; these crimes were just for the record. By informing on each other as drug dealers each man was entitled to a reduction in his sentence for turning in a drug dealer.
I was the last person to surrender. At first, I didn’t see a good reason for me to be with them in the prison. The police had listed no crimes against me, and I could be more helpful outside. I could watch our family and pursue whatever legal work had to be done. But Pablo called me and said that for me the safest place was with him inside the Cathedral. “They are looking to kill you,” he said. I assume he meant Cali. But it could have been any of our enemies. “You’ll be safe in here so give yourself up quickly.”
When I presented myself to the government I was asked to which crime was I confessing. “I will confess to my crime,” I told them. “It’s Rh.”
The people in the room were puzzled. The female district attorney said, thinking I was referring to some code used to identify a crime, “That’s not a code. What are you trying to tell me?”
I smiled. “No, doctor,” I said. “It’s not a code. My crime of Rh is that I have the same blood as my brother Pablo.”