by David Fisher
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 Peñol. 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 fo
r 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.