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

by Mark Bowden

  It was all the more remarkable considering that the unruffled drug boss was at the center of such a violently raging storm. He was now fighting escalating wars on two fronts, against the government and the Cali cartel. The southern-based cocaine-trafficking organization, headed by Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, had grown richer and more powerful and was challenging the Medellín operation's control of routes and markets. Pablo believed the Cali cartel was responsible for a massive explosion outside his eight-story Medellín apartment building in January of that year. Eleven-year-old Juan Pablo and four-year-old Manuela were asleep in the penthouse when the bomb carved a thirteen-foot hole in the street, killing two watchmen, shattering windows throughout the neighborhood, exploding water mains, and cracking the building's facade from end to end. In the blast, Manuela suffered ear damage that left her partially deaf. The Escobars fled, and police exploring his luxury penthouse found expensive original paintings, among them priceless ones by van Gogh and expensive original works by Salvador Dalí. They also found Maria Victoria's collection of hundreds of shoes. In the basement of the building were eight antique Rolls-Royces and a bullet-proof stretch Mercedes limousine. Pablo struck back against the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers in a bombing campaign against their national chain of legitimate drugstores.

  Police raids were also disruptive, and occasionally scary. Pablo was usually tipped off well in advance of any effort to arrest him, and he had homes scattered throughout the mountainous Medellín area, but now and then the police achieved enough surprise to catch him, literally, with his pants down. In March of that year, about one thousand national police officers raided one of his mansions in the mountains outside Medellín. They arrived in helicopters and in tanks and encircled the area. Pablo fled in his underwear, avoiding the police cordon on foot. Close calls like this led to retaliatory bombings and kidnappings. In May 1989, Pablo's men set off a car bomb in Bogotá alongside a vehicle carrying General Miguel Maza, the head of the DAS. Six people were killed and fifty more injured. The wheels of Maza's car melted on the asphalt in the heat of the blast, but the sturdy general, who was leading the hunt for Pablo, stepped out unhurt.

  As these battles raged, Pablo's army of lawyers (which after September included Uribe) held a series of meetings with President Barco's government, attempting to revive the deal Pablo had offered in Panama City four years earlier. By now he had upped his demands and backed away from his offer to return money in foreign banks to Colombia. He wanted full pardons for himself and everyone else associated with the Medellín cartel and an end to extradition. In return, he promised they would get out of the trafficking business.

  There were good reasons to want out. The Bush administration was shifting the focus of the drug war from intercepting boats and planes at the border to attacking cocaine's South American roots. The U.S. crackdown had already hurt them. Pablo's mansions and property in Florida had been seized. Ever since Lara's big raids back in 1984, U.S. airborne and satellite surveillance had been steering Colombian assault forces to scores of labs and coca fields, inflicting heavy losses on the industry. Angry when the talks with Barco went nowhere, Pablo kidnapped both the son and the sister of government negotiator German Montoya, Barco's chief of staff. His son was released, but his sister, Marina Montoya, was murdered. These acts of public vengeance and coercion turned all but Pablo's hard-core local supporters against him and the other narcos. He had gone from hero to pariah in the space of eight years, and the suits in Bogotá and Washington were more than fed up.

  In Colombia it has always been hard to tell for sure who exactly is trying to kill you, but by 1988 Pablo was sure that somebody was. His enemies had both the motive and the means. There had been the bomb outside his apartment building in January, and then in June of the following year a team of British mercenaries, former Special Air Service commandos, came after him at his Nápoles estate. They aborted the attempt when one of their helicopters crashed into a mountain. Both attempts were widely attributed to the Cali cartel, but there was no telling. By 1989 the scaffolding of Pablo's once fearful organization was shaky. Nothing he was doing worked. He had bombed or bribed just about every official in Colombia, but it was clear no one in Bogotá was going to cut a deal that would jeopardize all-important ties with the United States government. So Pablo began trying to work some influence in Washington. He had tried to retain a lobbying firm managed by Henry Kissinger in an effort to influence the Reagan administration, and he retained a lawyer who worked in the same firm as Jeb Bush, son of the president-elect, hoping to eventually persuade the younger Bush to approach his father. Both efforts failed.

  The future did not look bright. The Liberal Party candidate for president, Luis Galán, was wildly popular and certain to be elected in 1990. Galán was a charismatic forty-six-year-old reformer who had become a fearlessly outspoken enemy of the cartel. He had vowed to rid Colombia of drug traffickers, and he made no secret of his desire to ship them off to the United States for trial and imprisonment. His election threatened to undo all the progress Pablo had made by cowing and corrupting the Colombian judiciary. Galán was the nation's darling at that moment. Many Colombians compared him to the national hero Gaitán. Killing Galán would stir up an unholy wrath.

  Pablo's grudge with Galán ran deep. The popular politician had backed Lara's public attacks on Pablo in 1984 and had thrown him out of the New Liberal political movement. Galán was where all these troubles had begun. Pablo met with Gacha and some of their sicarios in the summer of 1989 at a farm owned by Gacha, and there the two men debated the pros and cons of killing the candidate. Both realized the storm that would follow might destroy them, but Pablo pointed out that Galán's election might do the same. They decided to order the hit.

  On August 18, a sicario with a Uzi submachine gun shot down Galán as he made a campaign speech before supporters in Soacha, a town southwest of Bogotá. Three months later, in an effort to kill Galán's successor candidate, César Gaviria, his men planted a bomb on an Avianca airliner, blowing it out of the sky. One hundred and ten people were killed, including two Americans. It was an act of audacious cruelty with implications beyond any that Pablo had imagined.

  These two atrocities would prove to be fatal mistakes. They made Pablo enemies who were far more powerful than any he had faced before. Downing a commercial airliner was an attack on global civilization. It meant Pablo now posed a direct threat to American citizens, which meant, as we shall see, that some in the Bush administration believed he could be legally targeted for assassination. Killing Galán had made Pablo public enemy number one in Colombia. The Avianca bombing made him public enemy number one in the world.

  By the end of the summer of 1989, Pablo Escobar was forty years old. He was one of the richest men in the world, and perhaps its most infamous criminal. No longer just a law enforcement target, he was now a military target. To the men of America's secret counterterrorism community, the ruthless doper from Medellín had become a clear and present danger.

  THE FIRST WAR

  1989–1991

  1

  In time, no one in Colombia knew Pablo Escobar better than Colonel Hugo Martinez of La Policía Nacional de Colombia (PNC), even though the two men had never met. The tall, taciturn man who was nicknamed "Flaco" (Skinny) knew Pablo better than even the drug boss's closest family members and henchmen, because there were things he would say and do before his associates that he would not before his family, and there was a side of him that his family saw that he showed to no one else. The colonel saw it all. He knew Pablo intimately. He recognized his voice, knew his habits, when he slept, when and how he moved, what he liked to eat, what his favorite music was, how it was that criticism written or broadcast against him infuriated him but how he delighted in any political cartoon that portrayed him, no matter how crudely. The colonel knew what kind of shoes Pablo wore (white Nikes), what kind of sheets he liked on his bed, the preferred age of his sexual partners (girls of fourteen or fifteen, usually), his taste
in art, his handwriting, the pet name he had for his wife ("Tata"), even what kind of toilet he preferred to use—since he had new facilities installed in all of his hideouts, and they were always the same. The colonel felt he understood Pablo, could see the world through his eyes, how he felt unjustly hounded and persecuted (mostly, nowadays, by the colonel). Martinez understood this last part so well he could sympathize with it, at times. There was truth even in the worldview of a monster, and the colonel believed he was chasing a monster. He never grew to hate Pablo, although he did fear him.

  On August 18, 1989, the same day that Pablo's sicarios killed front-running presidential candidate Luis Galán, another group of his hit men killed PNC colonel Waldemar Franklin, chief of the Antioquian police. Franklin and Colonel Martinez had been friends. They had come up together through the ranks. When Franklin was assigned to Antioquia, Martinez and the other top officers in the PNC knew there would be trouble for the Medellín cartel. Franklin couldn't be bought or bullied. He had steered the raid that rousted Pablo in his underpants from the mansion outside Medellín that spring, one of his closest calls yet, and Franklin's men had recently raided a cartel laboratory and seized four metric tons of cocaine. This was bad enough, but Franklin sealed his fate when his men stopped Pablo's wife, Maria Victoria, and his children, Juan Pablo and Manuela, at a road block. The drug boss's family was taken to police headquarters in Medellín, where they were held for hours before Pablo's lawyers negotiated their release. Pablo would later complain to Roberto Uribe that Maria Victoria had been refused permission to give Manuela a bottle of milk. Pablo had always denied ordering the murder of Galán, but to Uribe he admitted that he had ordered Franklin killed over that bottle of milk.

  Galán's killing had the anticipated effect. President Barco launched an all-out war against the cartel. He suspended habeas corpus, which meant people could be arrested and detained without being charged with a crime, and once again he authorized army and police to seize the cartel leaders' luxurious fincas. Shadow ownership of property was declared a crime, which made it harder for Pablo and the other narcos to disguise their holdings. But the biggest step Barco took was to invite further American help in this growing fight.

  The narcos could see the United States government closing in on them. The kingpins had all been indicted by the U.S. Justice Department, most of them, like Pablo, more than once. They knew the DEA had been active in the country for years. Having long since compromised the Colombian police and military, they were holding their own at home, but President Bush had campaigned in 1988 saying he favored taking direct military action against traffickers in other countries. It was clear which "other country" he had in mind. Colombia was the source of nearly 80 percent of the cocaine making its way to the United States. In April 1986 President Reagan had signed a classified National Security Decision Directive that declared the flow of drugs across U.S. borders to be a "national security threat," which opened the door to U.S. military involvement. Bush had headed a cabinet-level task force against drugs as vice president. As president, he declared war on drugs. Just weeks after Galán's murder, Bush signed National Security Directive 18, calling for more than $250 million worth of military, law enforcement, and intelligence assistance to fight the Andean drug cartels over five years. A week later he authorized another $65 million in emergency military aid to Colombia alone, and he authorized sending a small number of U.S. Special Forces troops to Colombia to train its police and military in rapid-strike tactics. He followed that a month later with his Andean Initiative, which called for "a major reduction in the supply of cocaine." Bush told reporters, "The rules have changed. When requested, we will for the first time make available the appropriate resources of America's armed forces." Bush had always pledged that military action would depend on the approval of the host country, but even that caveat had begun to erode. In June 1989, the newly appointed U.S. drug czar, William J.Bennett, had all but advocated sending U.S. military hit squads to kill the infamous narcos. "We should do to the drug barons what our forces in the Persian Gulf did to Iran's navy," he had said. Stories from Washington, all of them read carefully at the breakfast tables of narcos in Colombia, revealed that senior U.S. officials were weighing such steps, and that the U.S. Justice Department was working on an opinion that would approve unilateral U.S. military action against narcos and terrorists in other countries, with or without the approval of host governments.

  Indeed, in August of that year the army's counterterrorism unit, Delta Force, had prepared to raid a house in Panama where Pablo was reported to be staying. The plan called for Delta to seize him and then turn him over to DEA agents, who would arrive after the drug boss was in custody. The raid was called off when agents discovered that the reports were false; Pablo had not left Colombia. Nevertheless, the aborted mission showed how much the rules had changed under Bush. Over the next five years, the United States would basically underwrite a secret war in Colombia. U.S. spending for international antidrug efforts would grow from less than $300 million in 1989 to more than $700 million by 1991—and those dollars didn't even reflect the sums spent on the secret military and spy units deployed. The U.S. might have been considering acting unilaterally, if necessary, but Bush clearly preferred cooperation from Colombia. Barco had resisted opening that door until Galán's murder. That had changed everything.

  In the four months after Galán's death, Barco's government shipped more than twenty suspected drug traffickers to the United States for trial. And with the new bonanza of American assistance, Barco created special police units, one of which was based in Medellín and was dedicated to hunting down José Rodríguez Gacha, the Ochoa brothers, and Pablo Escobar. It was called the Bloque de Búsqueda, or Search Bloc. This was the command given to Colonel Martinez. It was a position he'd neither sought nor desired. Nobody wanted it. It was considered so dangerous that the PNC decided the command would be rotated monthly, like a hot potato.

  There was, of course, a great flourish of official encouragement and praise when it was announced that Martinez was to be awarded the post first. With his wry sense of humor and practical bent, the colonel saw this for what it was and accepted the task grimly. He wasn't an obvious choice. There were better commanders, men with more field experience who had already distinguished themselves in combat against narcos or guerrillas. There were better investigators, men with impressive records tracking down fugitives. But these were all men who, because of their successful careers, had sufficient clout to duck an unwanted assignment. The colonel was quiet and bookish, with an aloof manner that seemed ill suited to leading men in the field. Tall and fair-skinned, he looked more European than Colombian. He was forty-eight, at a point in life where a man feels it is now or never for his life's goals. He was from Mosquera, a pretty little mountain village a few hours east of Bogotá, a place out of some timeless story of Colombian legend. Flowers cascaded down steep cultivated slopes to a central market and park, where on evenings, weekends, and holidays townspeople congregated and strolled. The colonel was the son of a local businessman who ran a cafeteria and worked in a store. He had joined the police force right out of high school. One of his older school buddies, José Serrano, had gone to the academy a year before, and seeing him return home in his cadet's uniform excited Martinez, prompting him to enlist. When he completed his courses at the academy in Bogotá, he was given a variety of postings, including station commander in the small town of Perreda, where he was promoted to chief of investigations. He went to law school at night during those years, and when he finished, the department sent him to Spain for a course in criminology. He married, and his wife bore him three sons and a daughter. In the years that followed, through most of the eighties, Martinez, then a major, held a variety of command positions at police headquarters in Bogotá. With the ongoing struggles against the FARC and other leftist guerrillas, there were plenty of combat postings, but Martinez was always more of an administrator and academic than a field officer. He had a long, lined face with a ju
tting straight nose and a thin-lipped mouth that could either make him look cruel or, when he smiled crookedly, reveal a crisp, quiet sense of humor. This new job would demand both cruelty and wit. It would also demand more courage than the colonel believed he possessed. In addition to Franklin's murder, the magistrate who issued the warrants for the most recent raids had been killed, as had a reporter from El Espectador who had written approvingly of the effort. There was a sense that Pablo could reach anyone, anywhere, any time. To make the threat explicit, Pablo responded to the creation of the colonel's Search Bloc by issuing a public pronouncement that it would not last fifteen days. In the world's most dangerous country, the job of going after Pablo was the most dangerous position of all.

  Not to mention the near impossibility of the task. Pablo practically owned Medellín, his home city, including enough of its police force that one of the rules for this newly constituted Search Bloc was that it could not contain even one native Antioquian, or paisa, for fear he would secretly be on Pablo's payroll. Instead, the national police had assembled a collection of men from different units, including Colombia's FBI, the DAS, and its special branch of judicial police, the DIFIN (Dirección Central de Policía Judicial e Investigación). All were considered elite and incorruptible. Some were used to working in uniforms under straightforward military command, and others were essentially undercover cops who worked in plainclothes as civilians. None of them were familiar with one another or with the city, and they had no local sources or informants. They didn't dare ask the Medellín police force for help, because it was known to be largely on the cartel's payroll. The whole Search Bloc, even its plainclothesmen, stood out sharply because none spoke with the thick paisa accent. On their first foray out into the city, eighty men in ten vehicles, they got lost.