Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw

by Mark Bowden

  Lara was murdered three months later. Riding in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes in northern Bogotá, he was hit by seven bullets from a machine pistol wielded by an ex-convict on a motorcycle. Lara had become increasingly fearful for his family's safety, and had arranged with the U.S. embassy for them to live temporarily under assumed names in Texas. But at the same time he had become increasingly heedless of his own. He had committed himself to this struggle and seemed to accept death as a possible outcome. The bullet-proof vest given him by U.S. ambassador Lewis Tambs was found on the seat beside him. It probably would not have helped.

  4

  Pablo was right about one thing. One of the strongest forces behind the move against him and Colombia's other cocaine billionaires was the United States. In response to a growing epidemic of cocaine use in America, President Ronald Reagan had created a cabinet-level task force in January 1982 to coordinate the nation's efforts against drug smuggling. He had appointed Vice President George Bush to lead it. It was not until Bush was elected president in 1988 that the U.S. war on drugs would formally shift its emphasis from trying to stop drugs from crossing the borders to going after narco kingpins, but Bush began moving in this direction early on. After Lara's murder, the Colombian government recognized the cocaine cartels as a threat and were increasingly willing to accept American assistance. The drug lords would eventually become not just law enforcement targets but military ones—an important distinction that the hunt for Pablo Escobar would make clear. Even though few who thought seriously about the drug problem believed it could be stopped or even curbed by arresting a few cartel bosses, it proved a lot easier to get the U.S. Congress worked up about a cabal of billionaires infecting America's youth than about the amorphous smuggling problem. Marshaling public support for war, or even just war spending, requires enemies, and Colombian cocaine barons colorfully fit the description.

  During this same period, mainstream attitudes toward cocaine use in the United States underwent a dramatic shift. In June 1986, University of Maryland basketball star Len Bias, the number-one pick in the National Basketball Association draft, collapsed and died at a campus party after snorting cocaine. The decade-long flirtation with the white powder by affluent young Americans had begun to sour anyway, but Bias's death sealed it. Seemingly overnight, cocaine the harmless party drug became cocaine the killer. Suddenly the stories of wild parties and excesses in Hollywood showed a darker side, in stories of overdose and addiction. Cocaine lost all its stylishness when it started showing up on city streets in its cheap, smokable form, crack. It was now a ravenous social epidemic, spurring petty crime waves and destroying lives. Traffickers like Pablo became not guides to the zeitgeist but criminals. They were no longer purveyors of the world's most desired substance; they were authors of a modern plague. People didn't stop using cocaine. But it was no longer fashionable or even okay to be open about it. Bewildered yuppie cocaine kingpins, who just a few years earlier had been the life of the party all over America and who saw themselves more as dashing facilitators than hardened criminals, were being hauled into court in chains, charged under stiff organized-crime statutes, and facing potential life terms in prison. The men behind the giant cocaine cartels in Colombia were no longer just gangsters; they had become enemies of the state.

  At least some of the sudden open hostility Pablo encountered when he took his seat in the Colombian House of Representatives was a consequence of American pressure. While the narcos were not yet American targets, the U.S. government was growing concerned about links between them and Colombia's guerrillas. A secret CIA intelligence estimate issued in June 1983 reported, "These guerrilla groups initially avoided all connections with narcotics growers and traffickers, except to condemn the corrupting influence of drugs on Colombian society. Now, however, several have developed active links with the drug trade, others extort protection money from the traffickers, and some apparently use profits from drugs to buy arms." At the same time Pablo and the other narcos were collaborating with the Colombian army against the FARC, ELN, and M-19, arrangements of convenience were being struck in various regions. The guerrillas were finding it more profitable to join the narcos than to fight them. Instead of taxing the Medellín cartel, the insurgents had begun negotiating deals to protect coca fields and processing labs. "In fact, the FARC in some areas established quotas, taxes, wages and rules for workers, producers and owners of the coca fields," the CIA report said.

  The new U.S. ambassador to Colombia, Lewis Tambs, was a conservative Republican who had coauthored the Sante Fe Report, the U.S. government blueprint for containing communism in Latin America. At his final briefing before leaving for the Bogotá post in April 1983, he had been instructed to concentrate on the drug problem as his first priority. On his arrival, the gregarious ambassador said he had only "two songs on my harp, Marxism and drugs," and given the new evidence linking the narcos and the guerrillas, the tunes were intertwined. The connection had strong implications in Washington, where the idea of using the U.S. military and spy agencies to combat drugs was still a novel and controversial idea. Fighting communism was neither. It had been the primary thrust of U.S. foreign policy since the end of World War II. If Marxism and drugs were becoming one tune in Colombia, then Pablo and his associates were courting a powerful and implacable enemy. In Lara, Tambs had found his first important ally. When the justice minister had launched his campaign against hot money, he was armed with information and support from the U.S. embassy.

  With Lara's permission, the U.S. State Department had begun testing herbicides on coca fields, and in March 1984, government forces had struck two heavy blows against the Medellín cartel. Under Lara's leadership, La Policía Nacional de Colombia (PNC) raided a huge cocaine-processing facility on the Yarí River in the southern jungles. Called Tranquilandia, it was a complex of fourteen labs and camps housing forty workers. The PNC seized fourteen metric tons of cocaine, the largest such find in history. In the weeks before this raid, Betancur's aroused forces (with American assistance) had found and destroyed seven airstrips, seven aircraft, and twelve thousand chemical drums, and had seized cocaine estimated to be worth more than $1 billion. It had been the worst month ever for the Medellín cartel. Less than a month later, Lara was dead.

  His killing created a powerful backlash against the Medellín cartel, one that would now erupt into open warfare. Cocaine would never again be seen as just another new industry in Colombia. The esteemed editor of El Espectador, Guillermo Cano, would write, "For some time now these sinister men have managed to create an empire of immorality, tricking and making fools of the complacent, doling out crumbs and bribes upon them while a cowardly and often entranced populace stood idly by, content with their illusions and entertained by stories of their jet-set lives."

  Respectable Colombian society had picked a fight with the most powerful man in their country, and there would be hell to pay.

  Killing the justice minister was an act of war against the state. Outrage in Colombia forced President Betancur to embrace both Lara's crusade and the American aid it required. He placed the entire country under a state of siege and authorized the national police to begin confiscating the narco kingpins' estates and other assets. He vowed at Lara's grave to enforce the extradition treaty with the United States.

  American involvement in the Tranquilandia raid was widely publicized, and it prompted Pablo to write an angry letter to Ambassador Tambs, who had publicly accused him of owning the Tranquilandia labs.

  Calling the charge "tendentious, irresponsible and malicious," Pablo wrote that the ambassador was trying to set the stage for extradition "of some sons of Colombia…. Señor Ambassador, as a Colombian citizen and a member of Congress of the Republic [Pablo would not be formally stripped of his seat until December 1984], I want to express my most energetic and patriotic protest over the improper interference of North American boats and authorities in Colombian territory, in a way that entails the most flagrant violation of the sovereignty of our motherland
."

  Soon after Tambs received this letter, Pablo fled the country. For the rising star from Medellín, it had been a swift fall. Just a year earlier he had been a newly elected alternate to El Congreso, with private ambitions for the Presidential Palace. He and the cocaine industry seemed on the road toward respectability and power. With his parliamentary immunity, Pablo felt untouchable. His lavish parties at out landish Nápoles attracted the most beautiful and powerful people in Colombia. He was a kingmaker who, it seemed, would sooner or later be king. And, just like that, he was cast out. Days after Lara's murder, Pablo boarded a helicopter in Medellín and made the short flight north to Panama City, where the other kingpins of the cartel—Carlos Lehder, José Rodríguez Gacha, the Ochoa brothers—had already gathered in exile.

  For some time they had been eyeing Panama as a more hospitable place to do business. A representative of Manuel Noriega, then commander of the Panamanian army and soon to be the nation's dictator, had approached Pablo and the Ochoas in 1983 with an offer to provide a safe haven and protection for their industry for a $4 million fee. The cartel had made a $2 million down payment, but when all the ringleaders suddenly turned up in Panama City, there was no warm reception.

  "The officer who made the deal was a black man, and the day Pablo and the others showed up with the rest of the money, I swear he turned white," recalled Rubin, who was with the group in Panama City.

  It was more than Noriega had bargained for. Apparently he had envisioned a comfortable way station for the cartel, and a modest slice of illicit funds for himself. It was a busy time for the man the Panamanians called "Pineapple Face." He was plotting the moves that would soon make him Panama's dicator, playing games with Oliver North and the CIA, and delving deep into marijuana trafficking. Just dealing with his rivals in Panama was a full-time job. The last thing he needed was to turn Panama into the new world capital of the cocaine industry. That would invite more attention from his norteamericano friends than he wanted.

  Whatever the intentions of Gacha, the Ochoas, Lehder, and the others, Pablo immediately began trying to negotiate a deal to return home. His fondest hope had always been to be a rich, respected don in Medellín. Now he was not just an outlaw but an exile. Looking for a way to erase the humiliations of the last eight months and restore himself, he was prepared to make a grand gesture, one that Colombia could not ignore.

  In May, just weeks after fleeing, he and Jorge Ochoa met in the Hotel Marriott in Panama City with Alfonso López, the former Colombian president. It was a meeting of old friends. López was an elder statesman, bald and near-sighted, one of the founders of Colombia's Liberal Party and someone who had enjoyed campaign support from drug traffickers during his career. He was accompanied by Alberto Santofimio, the former justice minister who had founded the Medellín faction of the New Liberal party, which had welcomed Pablo as a candidate two years earlier. The two drug bosses told López that they represented "the dome," the top one hundred Colombian drug traffickers, and made an unprecedented offer. Pablo said he and the others would "dismantle everything" and return the billions deposited in Swiss bank accounts to Bogotá banks if the government would let them keep their fortunes and promise not to extradite them. The offer, which López conveyed to the Colombian president, was intriguing enough for Betancur to send his attorney general to Panama City.

  The attorney general was presented with a six-page written proposal addressed to President Betancur. Clearly pleased at the prospect of returning home, Pablo had been in an especially convoluted and flowery mood when he wrote the proposal. The letter offered this preamble:

  In the search for a re-engagement with the country, with its government and with ourselves, as of a few months ago, we are requesting wise and opportune counsel from those, without being permissive or indulgent, who have better understood that our presence in the national life is worthy of study, review and modification. Mr. Alfonso López Michelsen, former President of the Republic, accepted to receive us in the first few days of May in the City of Panama and in a gesture of eminently patriotic goodwill, agreed to take our message of peace to the government…. It came to a good end when the Attorney General of the Nation, Mr. Carlos Jimenez Gómez, personally received us. Today we consider that the advice, eagerly sought, has taken real form. In effect, the Attorney General, Mr. Carlos Jimenez Gómez, who finds himself in Panama, has accepted to receive us personally to listen to our concerns.

  Pablo went on to deny responsibility for Lara's death, which had been widely attributed to him, and to pledge the traffickers' support for Colombian democracy and law by helping to "eliminate once and forever any drug trafficking in our country." He and Ochoa claimed to represent traffickers who controlled 70 to 80 percent of the Colombian cocaine business, and who earned about $2 billion annually from it. Labs and airstrips would be turned over to the government, and fleets of boats and planes would be sold. They would cooperate with crop-substitution projects to wean Colombian farmers from the lucrative coca. In a "suggestions" section at the bottom of the document, the traffickers asked for a change in the extradition treaty and the right to appeal extradition orders to the Colombian Supreme Court. They also asked to be forgiven for past crimes. In a nutshell, Pablo was offering to go straight and rid Colombia of drug trafficking, provided he could live with his fortune in Medellín without fear of arrest or extradition.

  It was a generous offer, even if it didn't include (as was erroneously reported later) a pledge to pay off Colombia's $10 billion national debt. It was probably an offer Pablo and the others could never have made good. Even if they were willing to give up their exorbitant narco profits, the many thousands of Colombians employed at all levels of the industry were unlikely to simply close up shop because Pablo had decided to retire with his billions. It was summarily rejected by both Colombian Conservatives and the U.S. embassy, who criticized López and Betancur for even opening a dialogue with criminals. The deal was politically untenable. Given the anger still felt in Colombia over Lara's murder, any deal Betancur struck with the narcos would be seen as capitulation. It was the first of many attempts Pablo would make to negotiate a return to the life he wanted for himself and his family. But he had gone too far. His denials about involvement in Lara's death were not believed, and they were later disproved when some of those closest to Pablo began cooperating with the police. Murdering the justice minister was a crime his country could never forgive.

  Pablo didn't give up. He grew bitter. He always believed that he was somehow attuned to the masses of his countrymen, that they loved and supported him. He was, if anything, an ugly caricature of his country, unthinkably rich in natural resources but violent, stoned, defiant, and proud. Pablo saw his fate and the country's as the same, and as notorious as he became, he never stopped being a patriot. With so much money, he might easily have sought shelter in a dozen places around the world, but his vision of himself and his future was focused exclusively on Colombia. He did not want to live anywhere but in his home city of Medellín. Those who stood in his way were not just his enemies but tools of the oppressor, traitors to the state.

  In the coming years especially, Pablo would become something of a pamphleteer. He liked to write, and he occasionally wrote well. Unlike his formal pronouncements, which tended to be comically overblown, his brief messages to associates or to his enemies were usually concise and polite and often displayed a subtle wit, except when anger made him sarcastic. Years later, when he was running from the national police, moving from hideout to hideout, the police found thirty pages of notes that they believed he had written and left behind in a hurried escape. In them, Pablo appeared to be trying to sketch out some kind of broadside, a rationale for his predicament. He blamed his persecution on the "gringos" who had "forced, by means of economic pressure, a government of slaves to engage in a fratricidal war against the so-called drug cartels."

  He had grown up in an essentially lawless state, one he called "morally timid," and believed his philosophy of enforcing
his own justice to be the only realistic alternative.

  If you are robbed, what do you do? Who do you turn to? The police? If someone crashes your car, do you expect the traffic police to solve your problem and to compensate you for your damages by forcing your aggressor…to pay damages? If you are not paid what you are owed do you believe that Colombian tribunals will force your creditor…to pay the debt? If members of the police and armed forces assault and abuse you, whom do you go to? I don't think one single person has mentally considered the above questionnaire anything other than a useless exercise of hope, which we all lost many years ago, faced with the criminal ineptitude of our police and judicial systems. Here, the guerrilla groups, crooks and coercive state systems (police and army) have been applying the death sentence on their enemies…. Total ineptitude. And then they go and insult the ones who dare to call things by their name.

  These meandering thoughts ultimately failed to cohere into an argument. If Pablo was trying to craft some manifesto to relate his own struggle to that of Marxist heroes Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, he failed—not because he lacked intelligence but because he lacked convictions. His only cause, ultimately, was himself. At his most grandiose, he identified his own ambitions with those of his countrymen, but there was no rationale or ideology behind this parallel. Pablo asserted it simply because it sounded good. He wanted to be a man of the people, a hero to the masses, and what Pablo wanted, Pablo got. So even as more and more Colombians turned on him, he remained in his own mind the people's one true representative. He would keep trying to work out a deal with the government of Colombia, despite his growing contempt for it, because he wanted most of all to live out that fantasy. It could not be done in Panama City or Managua or Havana or any of the capitals of Europe or Africa where he might have found safe haven. The true man of Colombia could not be cut off from his roots. The rest of Pablo Escobar's life struggle was to set himself back up, on his own terms, as Don Pablo, El Doctor, in Medellín, in his hometown of Envigado.