by Mark Bowden
Pablo fled Panama when Noriega's army double-crossed him. Panamanian forces raided one of the cartel's lab complexes on the Colombian border in May. Shipments of chemicals needed for processing cocaine were seized by customs officials, and some of the Ochoas' men, including the pilot Rubin, were arrested and falsely implicated in a plot to murder Noriega. Pablo flew to Managua, on a path that very nearly delivered him into the hands of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).
He surfaced in Nicaragua in dramatic fashion. A rotund American pilot and cocaine trafficker named Barry Seal had been busted by the DEA in Florida and, facing up to fifty-seven years in prison, had begged the DEA to take him on as an informant. He flew a C-123 transport plane to Managua on June 25, 1984, to pick up a 750-kilo shipment of cocaine. A camera hidden in the nose of the airplane captured images of the exiled Pablo and Rodríguez Gacha as they supervised the loading. The DEA intended to use Seal to set up a big sting, one that would hire Pablo, Rodríquez Gacha, and maybe even Lehder and the Ochoa brothers to Mexico, where they could all be arrested and brought to the United States to stand trial. It was clear that Pablo, at least, intended to continue working with Seal. He had given the informant a list of goodies to bring him back from the States. Life on the run had evidently cut into El Doctor's lifestyle. He wanted Seal to bring him video recorders, ten-speed bicycles, Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch, Marlboro cigarettes, and one more thing…$1.5 million in cash.
Pictures of Pablo and Gacha loading drugs at a Nicaraguan airport caused quite a sensation in Washington. It proved a connection between the Marxist Sandinista regime and top Colombian cocaine traffickers. Oliver North, the National Security Council adviser coordinating the Reagan administration's efforts (legal and illegal) against the Sandinistas, saw the photos as a tremendous public relations coup. He wanted to release them immediately but was asked not to by Ron Caffrey, chief of the DEA's cocaine desk in Washington. But it proved impossible to keep the pictures quiet. The administration was trying to convince Congress to continue funding for the Contras, the pro-democracy rebel forces battling the new Sandinista regime. The presence of Colombian narco kingpins shipping cocaine from Nicaraguan soil was very helpful to their case. The information leaked, first to the head of the U.S. Army Southern Command, General Paul Gorman, who told a chamber of commerce crowd in San Salvador that "the world will soon be given proof" that the Sandinista regime was abetting drug trafficking, and then to The Washington Times. The stories appeared only after Seal had delivered Pablo his goodies.
Seal would be murdered two years later, tracked down and killed by one of Pablo's sicarios, or paid gunmen, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, after unwisely refusing to enter the U.S. Witness Protection Program. When Pablo and Jorge Ochoa were indicted in Miami for their part in the 750-kilo shipment, a car bomb was exploded outside the Bogotá residence of tough-talking Ambassador Tambs. Five months later the ambassador fled Colombia for good. Bogotá had become a hardship post.
The near miss with the DEA and the troubles in Panama may have convinced Pablo that no matter how hot things were for him in Colombia, he was safer there than anywhere else. There were signs that his prolonged absence was undermining his control in Medellín. When kidnappers seized his seventy-three-year-old father, Abel, in October, Pablo responded immediately with a vicious and concerted campaign. Gunmen turned Medellín inside out, killing scores of people, anyone even suspected of associating with the kidnappers. Sixteen days later, Abel was released unharmed and told his friends that no ransom had been paid. His kidnappers had been scared into letting him go.
After that, Pablo simply returned home. He and Maria Victoria threw a huge christening party for their daughter, Manuela, who had been born that summer at their Nápoles estate. No matter how hot things got—he would soon be the most wanted fugitive in Colombia and eventually the most wanted man in the world—Pablo Escobar had decided to fight his battles on his home turf. He would never leave Colombia again.
5
For the rest of his life, with one brief respite, Pablo was at war with the state. At the center of the struggle remained extradition, the one fate he feared more than any other—even death. He had proclaimed, "Better a tomb in Colombia than a prison cell in the United States."
Death was his strategy against extradition, that and money. His policy of plata o plomo became so notoriously effective that it would ultimately threaten to undermine Colombia's democracy. Already, by the end of 1984, he was untouchable in Medellín. He moved openly around the city, attending bullfights and nightclubs, throwing parties at his estates, all while officially a fugitive. Popular and powerful, he had clearly bought off the police and courts there. Anyone who considered standing up against him was marked for assassination. In July, the judge appointed to investigate the murder of Justice Minister Lara was murdered in Bogotá.
In the fall of 1985 Pablo offered once more to turn himself in if the government would promise not to extradite him to the United States. When it again refused, he settled in for a long fight.
Pablo formed an "organization"—in fact a flimsy pretense, in whose name he acted on behalf of himself and the other primary targets of extradition—called "the Extraditables," which vowed a fight to the death against the procedure. It gave him an outlet for his urge to take part in national affairs, and it gave him a chance to write. Pablo penned long communiqués by hand in a script that was half printing, half cursive, often enlarging and capitalizing certain words for emphasis. Pen in hand, he worked himself into heights of rhetorical indignation. With his American indictments and the pending Colombian arrest warrants, Pablo knew that he was just one misstep away from a life behind bars in the United States. His hatred of extradition was a matter of both personal survival and national pride.
Extradition was a kind of insult to Colombians and Pablo knew that his communiqués struck a popular chord. It implied not only that the nation was too weak to administer justice itself (which was true) but that the United States represented some higher moral authority. Pablo made an odd spokesman for this position; he was arguing, in essence, that Colombia alone had the right to arrest and punish him. He warned the nation's leaders that if they persisted in this agreement with the United States it would lead to a bloodbath. After one of their number Jorge Luis Ochoa, was arrested in Spain, the Extraditables faxed a statement to newspapers, radio, and TV in Bogotá: "We have found out that the government is trying by whatever means possible to extradite citizen Jorge Luis Ochoa to the United States. For us, this is the vilest of outrages…. In case Jorge Luis Ochoa is extradited to the United States, we will declare absolute and total war against this country's political leaders. We will execute out of hand the principal chieftains."
Whether prompted by Pablo's threats or concern for Colombian sovereignty—or perhaps both—government authorities successfully contested U.S. efforts to extradite the drug trafficker. He was flown back to Cartagena, where he posted bail and promptly disappeared.
Pablo's primary target during these middle years of the 1980s was the country's judicial system, to which he offered plata o plomo. When a lawsuit was filed against the extradition treaty in 1985, Pablo bribed the office of Colombia's attorney general for a favorable recommendation and then went to work on the judges, one of whom received a letter, probably written by Pablo, that read:
We, The Extraditables, are writing to you because…we know that you have said publicly and cynically that the extradition treaty is constitutional…. We are not going to ask or beg or seek compassion, because we do not need it. VILE WRETCH. We are going to DEMAND a favorable decision…. We will not accept stupid excuses of any kind: we will not accept that you go sick; we will not accept that you go on holiday; and we will not accept that you resign. The decision will be made by you within fifteen days of the arrival of the recommendation of the Attorney General's office.
The letter went on to make it clear that a decision against extradition would be handsomely rewarded, while defiance would r
esult in the judge's family being killed and cut into pieces. "We swear before God and the life of our children that if you fail us or betray us, you will be a dead man!!!"
It was hardly an idle threat Four other judges connected to the case, each of whom had received similar threats but who refused to comply, were murdered. More than thirty judges had already been killed since Lara's assassination. Plata o plomo had every official in Bogotá living in fear or under suspicion; they were either targets of the Medellín cartel or presumed to be its lackeys. In November 1985, days after the assassinations of the four judges weighing the extradition issue, the guerrilla group M-19 stormed the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, demanding, among other things, that the government renounce the 1979 extradition treaty. The terrorists held hostage the entire Colombian Supreme Court and its staff, prompting a government siege that left forty rebels and fifty Palace of Justice employees dead, including eleven of the twenty-four justices. The raid crippled the Colombian legal system and effectively killed President Betancur's efforts to negotiate a peace settlement with the FARC and M-19. Destroyed in process were some six thousand criminal case files, including records of the criminal proceedings against one Pablo Escobar. It was later reported that the guerrilla group had been paid about $1 million by Pablo and other traffickers to carry out the raid.
There were still a few brave souls in public life who defied plata o plomo, but by the end of 1986 not many of them were still alive. That same month the utterly cowed Colombian Supreme Court declared the extradition treaty invalid because of a technicality—it had been signed by a delegate of the president, not the president himself. Semana magazine applauded the decision, declaring that the treaty had "offended the dignity" of Colombia. Pablo set off fireworks in Medellín to celebrate the victory. His newspaper, Medellín Cívica, called it "The Triumph of the People."
It was a short-lived triumph. The United States had too much influence in Colombia to lose extradition that easily. Just days later the newly elected president, Virgilio Barco, promptly re-signed the treaty.
But victories like this were increasingly rare. Colombia had been corrupted and terrorized to its core. El Espectador editor Guillermo Cano wrote sadly, "It seems we have decided to live with crime and declare ourselves defeated…. The drug cartel has taken over Colombia." Weeks later the white-haired, sixty-one-year-old Cano would himself be killed while driving in Bogotá, his backseat piled with wrapped Christmas presents, shot down by one of Pablo's sicarios on a motorbike.
Pablo's ugly struggle continued. His lawyers (and sicarios) chipped away at the cases against him. Murders and bribes resulted in his name being left off the indictment of those responsible for Lara's murder, and the old charges against him for killing the DAS agents who'd arrested him in 1976 were dropped when the records mysteriously vanished. Recognizing that its judicial system was stymied, Colombia did away with jury trials (people were too frightened to serve in any trial remotely related to drug trafficking) and began attempting to protect judges by hiding their identities. But often even these "faceless" judges were gunned down. Pablo also tried in various ways to escape American justice. Betting that the United States had more interest in fighting Communists than narcos, his lawyers approached the U.S. attorney general in 1986 with an offer to trade information against Communist guerrillas, the FARC, ELN, and M-19, in return for amnesty from his drug crimes.
With the offer, Pablo made a gesture. He betrayed his long-time cartel associate Carlos Lehder. Colombian police were tipped off to a party Lehder had planned for February 4, 1987. The colorful, eccentric cartel leader was arrested and immediately extradited, flown from Bogotá to Tampa on a DEA plane. Photographers were allowed to snap pictures of him in the back of the plane, wearing combat boots, sweatpants, and a striped shirt, looking resigned and oddly bemused as he waited to depart. He would be sentenced to 135 years in prison in the United States and would not forget Pablo's betrayal.
Still, the United States was not interested in making a deal with Pablo Escobar. It was a sign of how seriously the Reagan administration was taking the drug problem. In April of 1986, the president had signed National Security Decision Directive 221, which for the first time declared drug trafficking a threat to national security. The directive opened the door to direct military involvement in the war on drugs, which was placing a growing emphasis on attacking the crops, labs, and traffickers in Central and South America. This was an unprecedented mixing of law enforcement and military missions, and Reagan directed that any American laws or regulations prohibiting such an alliance were to be reinterpreted or amended. The departments of Defense and Justice were directed to "develop and implement any necessary modifications to applicable statutes, regulations, procedures and guidelines to enable U.S. military forces to support counternarcotics efforts." Beginning that summer, U.S. Army troops joined DEA agents and Bolivian police in raiding fifteen cocaine-processing labs in that country.
Inside Colombia, Pablo kept upping the ante. In December his sicarios killed the former chief of the nation's counternarcotics police and two legislators who had spoken out in favor of extradition. In January 1987 the former minister of justice, now the Colombian ambassador to Hungary, was stopped in a snowstorm in Budapest and shot five times in the face. He survived. Andrés Pastrana, the journalist son of a former president and Conservative candidate for mayor of Bogotá, was kidnapped, and a week later Attorney General Carlos Hoyos was killed in a hail of machine-gun fire in Medellín. A caller to a local radio station announced Hoyos's "execution" and called him "a traitor and a sellout." When a judge prepared to indict Pablo for Guillermo Cano's murder, he received a note from the Extraditables:
We are friends of Pablo Escobar and we are ready to do anything for him…. We know perfectly well that not even the slightest evidence exists against Mr. Escobar. We have also heard rumors that after the trial you will be given a foreign diplomatic position. But we want to remind you that, in addition to perpetrating a judicial infamy, you are making a big mistake…. We are capable of executing you at any place on this planet…in the meantime, you will see the fall, one by one, of all the members of your family. We advise you to rethink, for later you will have no time for regrets…. For calling Mr. Escobar to trial you will remain without forebears or descendants in your genealogical tree.
By the end of 1987 there were killings in the news almost every day in Bogotá. The new U.S. ambassador, Charles Gillespie, began warning Washington that the escalating violence in Colombia was threatening to topple the state, and the National Security Council began preparing a "comprehensive national strategy" to shore up the government. Noting the state of siege, President Barco declared martial law.
Through it all, Pablo orchestrated the war in relative peace, living with defiant openness in homes in and around Envigado and at his giant finca, Nápoles, which his lawyers had managed to wrest back from the state. It was during this period, in September 1988, that Roberto Uribe met Pablo for the first time. A Medellín criminal lawyer, Uribe had been retained by one of Pablo's bodyguards who had been charged with the kidnapping of Pastrana (who was released unharmed and later would be elected president of Colombia). Uribe was a bookish, frail man with a broad, round forehead, a man with more reverence for the letter of the law than for its larger intent He had found a mistake in the draft of the indictment against his client and had used it to have the charges dismissed. Pablo invited Uribe out to Nápoles for a meeting.
When he arrived at Nápoles at noon, Pablo was asleep. The lawyer had been there before as a tourist; on a bus tour from Medellín. Now he was a guest of the great man himself, and he was nervous. He was offered a chair by one of the swimming pools, where he sat, and sat, and sat. Pablo awakened two hours later, then spent three hours meeting with his lieutenants. Uribe sipped coffee and accepted some of the food that servants offered him. Finally, early in the evening, the drug boss wandered out to the pool, dressed in a T-shirt, shorts, and white Nike athletic shoes—exactly as in the
pictures Uribe had seen. Pablo apologized for the delay and said that he hadn't known Uribe was waiting for him.
"I thought you were here to see my brother," he said sheepishly.
Uribe found him charming. Pablo's manner was relaxed—Uribe later realized he had probably been stoned—and he spoke to the lawyer like an old friend, someone he was taking into his confidence. He laughed with delight as Uribe explained the legal technicality that had freed his client, and said he wanted the lawyer to file similar motions for all of the men charged.
From that day forward, Uribe was one of Pablo's lawyers and confidants. He began seeing him regularly, and liked him. Working for Pablo Escobar vastly increased his status and income, so he was prepared simply to dismiss all the stories about the man's ruthlessness. How could someone so calm, someone who never raised his voice, who never swore, who was so unfailingly polite, be as violent a man as people said? When Uribe sat with him and talked, the terrible stories about Pablo became impossible for him to believe. What the lawyer saw was a generous man, someone who was a sucker for any hard-luck story. He was rarely in a bad mood. In time, Uribe noticed that just about everyone introduced to Pablo for the first time was afraid, as he had been, but that within minutes the fear had evaporated. Pablo had the gift of putting people at ease.