by David Fisher
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.”
Eight
OUR SURRENDER I
N 1991 WAS THE BEGINNING of the final end of the story of Pablo Escobar. We had spent the three months before the surrender at a farm called Skinny Dog. Pablo had given it that name on the day it was bought, when he saw the owner’s skin-and-bones dog. He insisted that this ordinary dog be part of the deal, and the farm was named for him. It was high enough on a mountain in Envigado to provide a long-distance view. We had a quiet time there—long enough for the skinny dog to grow fat.
On the morning of Pablo’s surrender he woke up much earlier than usual, at 7 A.M. We ate breakfast with our mother, then Pablo began making plans to meet the helicopter that would take him to the Cathedral. The surrender would begin as soon as the Assembly voted to outlaw extradition. That vote was taken right after noon. The war was won. We all got ready for the move.
I think the whole country was waiting.
We drove in a convoy to a soccer field in Envigado. A big crowd of our people was waiting there to offer protection. Pablo was dressed as always in blue jeans, blue socks, sneakers, and a simple white shirt. He was wearing a Cartier watch and carrying his Sig Sauer and a Motorola radio with two bands of twenty-five frequencies. By the time we got to the field the helicopter was landing. He hugged me and climbed on board for the flight. Father García and the journalist Luis Alirio Calle were waiting inside to fly with him. There was still great danger; there were many groups that did not want Pablo free to talk to the government. So the defense minister closed all the airspace in the region, writing in his own diary, “Not even birds will fly over Medellín today.”
When the helicopter reached the top of the mountain Pablo got off and walked directly to the entrance. He handed a soldier his pearl-handled gun as a symbol of the end of the fighting—but people who were there told me that as soon as he got inside he took another gun. It took a few more days before all of us had surrendered and were safely inside. Officially there were fourteen of us.
The first few days there were very busy. Among our first visitors was our mother, who arrived with a rosary and a pot of cooked meat, Father García, who took our confession—we asked God to allow us to get out of this situation and protect our family—and friends like Colombia’s famous soccer star René Higuita. Pablo had helped discover him as a young player and brought him to the notice of the professional teams. They had stayed loyal friends. The media tried to make a scandal from Higuita’s friendship with us, but no one paid attention; he didn’t even lose his TV endorsements of products.
There were many other things that had to be done quickly. While Pablo’s people living outside would continue the business and pay whatever bribes had to be paid, we needed to have our own access to money. As much as $10 million in cash was packed tightly into ten milk canisters, which were covered with salt, sugar, rice, and beans, even fresh fish. We told the guards that these canisters contained our weekly food ration, so they let them inside. Eventually they were buried near our soccer field. Other money was stored in tunnels hidden under our bedrooms that could be reached only by trapdoors under the beds. Weapons that we might need to protect ourselves were also brought in that way.
To communicate with our associates outside we also installed eleven telephone lines, a cell telephone system—which was now available—a radio-telephone system, and nine beepers. It was written that we had carrier pigeons to carry messages, but that wasn’t true. We had the lighting system prepared for our needs, so that if planes flew overhead we could quickly turn out all the internal lights with a remote control that I built—or when we needed to slip outside we could do the same thing.
Security was always the primary concern. In addition to our bodega watching post, there were four guard stations along the twisting mountain road to the Cathedral. These were manned by the army, who were never permitted inside the gates, but in truth we were allowed to hire half of the jail guards, and the good mayor of Envigado hired the other half, so these guards mostly were friends of ours. The government paid them very little, so they were often persuaded to work with our needs in exchange for additional cash payments, good food, and colored pieces of paper. An arrangement had been made so that these pieces of paper could be exchanged in Envigado for home appliances, electronics, clothes, and even Colombian cash, and the owners would be paid by our people.
When our protection was done, we prepared the Cathedral for our pleasure. When we arrived it was a simple place. It wasn’t like a regular prison with bars and cells, but it wasn’t especially comfortable either. With the help of my son Nico, we changed that situation. Nico had acquired a soda truck and received permission to bring cases of soda to the prison. But the crates of soda formed walls and inside those walls was whatever we wanted. He brought in Jacuzzis and hot tubs, television sets, the materials needed to build comfortable bedrooms, whatever we wanted—including the first of the many women to stay there. It was a hectic period and much was done to transform the prison into a much more tolerable place.
I also brought two bicycles inside with me, a stationary bike and one of my own Ositto riding bikes, so I could keep in shape. Among the things that Pablo brought with him was a large record collection, including classical music, Elvis’s records he’d bought when we had visited Graceland, and his signed Frank Sinatra records that we’d received when visiting Las Vegas. For reading he brought in a collection of books, from five Bibles to the work of Nobel Prize winners. The books I brought included a text on having a super-memory, and books on horses, cancer, AIDS, and bicycles. We also had a large collection of videotapes, naturally including the complete set of The Godfather movies and Steve McQueen movies, including Bullitt.
Eventually we turned the prison into a comfortable home. We had all the necessary electronic devices, including computers, big-screen televisions with video systems, beautiful music systems, even a comfortable bar with the best champagne and whiskey. Outside we had a good soccer field with lights to play at night, paths to walk where we could be hidden from the air by thick trees, and good places to exercise. Within a couple of months we had made it a reasonable place.
Immediately there were stories written that we were living in luxury, that the faucets in the bathroom were gold. That it was just like Napoles. That wasn’t true at all. It was safer for us than moving between hiding places, and we made it comfortable—it wasn’t an ordinary prison, but still it was a prison. We no longer had the freedom to make our plans to go where we wanted or see whoever we wanted when we wanted to see them. Everything required planning. But soon we had settled in. We fixed the kitchen and brought in two chefs to prepare international foods for us—we knew them as the Stomach Brothers. We had sufficient entertainment, sports and exercise facilities, security, arms, and a lot of money.
But it was not luxury. Some of our mattresses were on cement. The furniture was simple; the walls were decorated mostly with paper posters, although Pablo did have a couple of nice paintings. And our clothes were basic. In Pablo’s closet, for example, were his jeans and shirts, and many pairs of sneakers—some of them ready with spikes on in case we had to move quickly.
The difference between this prison and the world we’d lived in for the past few years was that now our enemies knew exactly where we were, but they couldn’t get to us. Instead of tracking us and trying to kill us, the government was responsible for protecting us. It was a difficult political situation.
President Gavíria had his own needs. To restore Colombia as a safe place for foreign companies to do business the Gavíria government had to have peace in the streets. People had to feel safe to come here. Ending the war was the beginning of that.
I spent the first months there without being charged with a true crime. After several months a government prosecutor came to the prison to accuse me. “The charge against Roberto is that he has accounts outside Colombia with millions and millions of dollars in them.”
At that moment there was no law in Colombia against keeping money in foreign banks. I told the judge, “That isn’t illegal, and if you read the law you see t
hat I have the right to negotiate an agreement with you. I’ll give you half the money and then you make the other half legal for me.”
The judge refused this offer. Instead the Colombian government made an agreement with other countries to freeze the bank accounts. Some of these accounts are still frozen.
Meanwhile, outside the prison the drug business continued to prosper. The arrest of the legendary Pablo Escobar did nothing to change that. Members of our organization continued to do their deals, the Cali cartel stayed in serious business, the other cartels kept working. When someone fell, other people stepped forward to take his place. What was different was that the violence had abated.
While we were there we did try hard to change our situation. Pablo had as many as thirty lawyers working most of their time in our effort inside the judicial system. The soccer star Higuita volunteered to try to make peace between us and Cali. Eventually with the help of Father García he spoke with the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, but to no good. They were too stubborn. Pablo told me, “I don’t believe in the word of those two.” As we discovered later there was good reason for that. A DAS agent who was helping run the prison security discovered that Cali had bought four 250-pound bombs from people in El Salvador and was trying to buy a plane to drop them on us. They were not able to, but on occasion our guards suddenly would begin firing their weapons at airplanes hovering too long in the area or coming too close to the Cathedral.
Time passed very slowly. I exercised, rode my bicycle, continued to read everything possible about AIDS and making my research, and I worked with my brother. Pablo would spend his days on the telephone, reading, and visiting with his attorneys. He even began studying Mandarin. In the evenings we would sit in rocking chairs watching the lights come on in the buildings of Envigado. At those moments, when we watched the normal life of others, it was hard not to think about people being with their families in an ordinary but comforting way.