Killing Pablo

by Mark Bowden

  To pass time, the inmates lifted weights, rode exercise bikes, and played soccer. Pablo would play for hours at a time. He always played center forward, even though he wasn't the quickest or most skilled player and he had a bad knee. His men always let him win, sometimes arranging for him to kick the winning goal. If Pablo grew winded, which was often, he would wave in a replacement until he caught his breath, and then he'd plunge back in. Uribe once waited four hours for Pablo to finish playing before they could talk. Prison guards served drinks to the inmates on the sidelines and doubled as waiters in the bar afterward. Despite the long hours of play, Pablo and the other men were growing fatter by the week. They liked to dine on the typical Antioquian fare of beans, pork, eggs, and rice. Pablo and the others had entered the prison intending to use the time to lose weight and get in shape, but after the first few months this resolution crumbled and most of the exercise equipment stood idle. They still played soccer, but they drank a lot and smoked dope. Pablo grew talkative when he was stoned. He told Uribe once that he had been terrified of the stories of killings, bombing, kidnappings, and torture from La Violencia as a boy, but that as he grew older he realized that terrorism, as he put it, "was the atomic bomb for poor people. It is the only way for the poor to strike back."

  Pablo still identified himself with the poor. He said he had been forced to turn violent because of government persecution, but he was confident that he remained popular with most Colombians, especially his people, the poor of Antioquia. He received letters from supporters every day. Women wrote, offering to visit him at the prison; supplicants wrote, asking for money to pay their debts. Pablo read and saved the letters, and he often responded, sometimes sending money. At night, after the other inmates were asleep, Pablo would pace on the veranda outside the living quarters almost until dawn, and then he would sleep until midafternoon.

  Prison was a welcome hiatus for nearly all concerned, but it was not without risks. So long as he remained at La Catedral, his enemies knew where to find him. That was why he had selected this site on a steeply sloping mountainside, built the cabanas uphill, buried an arsenal, and scouted out avenues of retreat up and over the top of the hill. He had looked at several locations in Antioquia for the prison, and he'd liked the layout of this one best. On a visit there months earlier with his brother Roberto, Pablo had said, "This is the place, brother. Do you realize that after six in the evening it fogs over and is foggy at dawn, too?" That would discourage a surprise aerial assault and give them ample cover if they decided to flee. He had his men string wires high over the soccer field to prevent helicopters from landing on the prison's one flat piece of ground.

  There were also legal concerns. While Pablo was imprisoned, the government was working to build criminal cases against him Just days after his surrender, he had been charged with being the "intellectual author" of the assassination of Galán. In September one of his top sicarios, Dandeny Muñoz, was arrested in New York City and charged with arranging to have a bomb placed on the Avianca airliner and with more than a hundred other killings. Weeks later, police found evidence at one of Pablo's estates linking him with the murder of newspaper editor Guillermo Cano. There was plenty for him to talk about with Uribe on his regular visits.

  President Gaviria assigned the "Escobar problem" to a young lawyer on his staff who had been begging for something more important to do. Eduardo Mendoza had handled security for Gaviria during his presidential campaign, and as a reward had been appointed to a position in the Justice Ministry. He was inexperienced and naive, but he was honest, kind, and idealistic. His work in the campaign had earned him a place in the palace's inner circle, a group of advisers so young the press dubbed them Gaviria's Jardín de Infancia, or "kindergarten." Mendoza himself, a principled vegetarian, was particularly unimposing, a very slight man with thin brown hair that tended to flop across his forehead. Even in his well-fitting gray suit and with a bulky leather briefcase, he could be mistaken for a secondary school student. After naming him a vice minister of justice, the president had assigned him the task of doing something about the imprisoned Pablo Escobar.

  Apart from finding a charge that could be made to stick, Mendoza was also instructed to build a real prison for the drug boss. The question of where such a prison could be built was already answered. The agreement with Pablo dictated that it must be at La Catedral, where Pablo and his men were already living. The new real prison would have to be constructed around the existing flimsy one, with Pablo inside. That was the plan. But who would build it? Mendoza knew that the Bureau of Prisons was thoroughly untrustworthy. It had a small engineering unit specifically charged with such tasks, but that group was the most corrupt of all. They stole everything. Mendoza was in the process of building a case against them when he hit on the idea of the Americans. They were the ones so eager to get Pablo seriously locked down. The Americans would be perfect. Mendoza began imagining an ideal prison that relied extensively on TV surveillance and electronic systems, which would minimize human contact with the prisoners, hence opportunities for intimidation and bribery. He had read about such high-security jails in the United States and seen stories about them on TV. So he flew to Washington, D.C., and presented his case at the State Department and at the National Bureau of Prisons, only to learn that the Americans were prohibited by law from helping to build prisons overseas. When he approached construction companies in Colombia directly, no one wanted the job. Everyone was terrified of Pablo. One major Colombian contractor told him, "We are not going to build a cage with the lion already inside."

  He finally found a firm called General Security, owned by an Israeli "security expert" named Eitan Koren, who was willing to take the job. Blueprints were made, but before any money could be dispersed the project had to be approved by the controller's office. Mendoza's request languished there for months. The controller and his staff would not take calls from him or the minister of justice, failed to return calls, and refused to meet with them. Gaviria had to intervene personally to secure the necessary authorizations. When the work started, with laborers recruited from distant parts of Colombia so they were not linked to Pablo's Medellín empire, some of the new men refused to proceed after seeing Pablo's men sitting at the fence taking notes, writing down the license-plate numbers of vehicles entering and leaving the area. Then some of Escobar's men came out and challenged the work crews, knocking a few of the laborers down, and workmen resigned in droves. This caused another long delay. A squabble erupted in El Congreso when Mendoza revealed his plan to hire an elite workforce for his new high-tech prison. Recognizing the special difficulties of incarcerating the drug lord, Mendoza envisioned attracting a team of professional guards to run La Catedral, men with special training and technical skills. This would call for a higher pay scales, pensions, and medical benefits, which immediately ran afoul of the guardians of Colombian bureaucracy, civil service administrators. The whole matter bogged down like a tractor in a sinkhole. Watching from their embassy, the Americans interpreted all the confusion and delay as further evidence that Pablo was calling all the shots. When Mendoza thought about it from their perspective, how could they not think so?

  Pablo was like a phantom. Even though he was ostensibly locked up, his power and menace were everywhere. Every once in a while, when he was displeased, like after construction work began around him, one of his army of lawyers would call the ministry to report that their client wished to turn over a large quantity of dynamite. They would direct the authorities to a truck, which would be found outside the home of a minister or beneath the windows of a government office, loaded with enough explosives to obliterate a city block. The press always found out, of course, and the story would come across as a munificent gesture by the imprisoned, reformed Don Pablo. But this was not disarmament. Mendoza and everyone else in the building knew very well that their "prisoner" had just delivered an unsubtle reminder that he, Pablo Escobar, held their lives in his hands. It was his way of saying, Let's not hurt each other.

/>   Although Mendoza was frustrated by all these obstacles, he remained undaunted. Colombia was an old country but in some ways was still very young, one of the oldest democracies in the western hemisphere but one whose great institutions still rested on shaky ground. It remained a place that was largely unformed, where the idealism and industry of a young man could—or so Mendoza thought—still make a difference.

  He had finally gotten construction started by the summer of 1992. The first new fences were slowly going up, much to Pablo's consternation, and new evidence against him mounted. The PNC, barred from the vicinity of La Catedral, set up electronic listening stations just beyond the proscribed twenty-kilometer perimeter. Pablo was careful about his communications, using the pigeons for his most important messages, but others in the prison talked freely. The police quickly established that La Catedral was, in the words of the police major who ran the unit, "a grand business center." The police monitored the steady flow of contraband into the prison, the liquor and drugs and whores, but did nothing to stop it. They merely observed, taped, filmed, and filed reports. Month after month, nothing happened. The police units responsible for this surveillance were disgusted by the weakness of their government As they saw it, the Gaviria administration was afraid to confront Escobar directly, so they hid behind excessive concern for personal freedoms. This gave Pablo and his associates plenty of room to maneuver.

  2

  Throughout the first year of Pablo's imprisonment, the United States embassy, the press, and many government officials—including Mendoza—had urged Gaviria to end the charade. Everyone knew La Catedral was no prison. Effectively, it was a state within the state. The surrender agreement had been a capitulation to violence, pure and simple, a deal with the devil. Still, most of official Colombia were happy to live with it Pablo was like a dangerous snake that had been driven into a hole. The prevailing attitude was: Before, Pablo Escobar ruled Colombia; now he rules Envigado, so leave him alone.

  The gringos were the only ones fixated on the drug trade. The new U.S. ambassador, Morris D.Busby, kept pushing for action against Pablo and the other cocaine exporters, but this was nothing new. The Americans wore blinders. They toiled behind the high walls of their fortress embassy in north Bogotá, a modernist gray four-story structure that looked like a bunker, shuttling back and forth to their secure apartments in armored cars, walled off from the general whirl of Colombian life. Between the two peoples was envy, disdain, and a century-old grudge. The gringos made things worse by suspecting all Colombians of corruption. Every month that went by with Pablo camped on his mountaintop reinforced this suspicion. Even the cheerful idealist Mendoza, when he visited the embassy to ask for help building new criminal charges against Pablo, was treated with undisguised suspicion, as though he were a defense lawyer for the drug boss instead of his determined prosecutor.

  Few in the U.S. embassy understood how hard it was to get things done. Even if Gaviria had wanted to act against Pablo, it would not have been easy. In America, perhaps, the president could order a thing and it would simply happen. In Colombia, everything was a fight. On paper, the president had power over all his ministries, but in reality, as Gaviria and all Colombian presidents before him discovered to their frustration, his authority was hopelessly diffuse. The army and the police and the secret police and the Justice Ministry were all fiefs, each made up of a multitude of smaller fiefs, all of them feuding and conspiring and plotting against one another.

  In the case of Pablo, all were united in their unwillingness to get involved. The police, locked out by Pablo's deal, were eager to see the whole thing discredited. The judiciary wanted no part of prosecuting a man who had ordered the murder of every cop, judge, and jailer who had ever crossed him. The army was even worse. Mendoza had been cursed and thrown out of offices by generals who refused, in their own words, to become jailers.

  Another fief eager to embarrass the president was the office of the attorney general, an independently elected position headed by a pipe-smoking former law professor named Gustavo de Greiff. The attorney general embarrassed the president in early 1992 by producing photographs of Pablo's scandalous luxuries in La Catedral—the waterbeds Jacuzzis, expensive sound systems, giant-screen TVs, and other goodies.

  When Mendoza investigated, however, he discovered that all of Pablo's furnishings were legal. They had been stamped and approved in efficient triplicate by his very own Bureau of Prisons. The bureaucrats had protected themselves well. The regulations allowed each prisoner a bed but gave no description of what kind. Likewise with bathtubs. Who could argue that a Jacuzzi was not a bathtub? Under the rules, a prisoner could be allowed a TV set for good behavior, and where did it say that the TV set couldn't have a wall-sized screen with a satellite hookup, VCR, and stereo speakers? The prison system had created a parallel world for Pablo. He lived in the equivalent of a resort, while on paper he was in a maximum-security prison.

  Gaviria was furious.

  "I want all of these things taken out immediately," he told Mendoza. "Tell the army to go in there and take everything out. Escobar has to know we're not kidding."

  That was one of the times Mendoza had driven over to the Defense Ministry to seek help from Rafael Pardo, the minister of defense. Mendoza showed him the pictures and explained the president's order.

  "No way," Pardo said. "I cannot do it because I don't have the people."

  "But you have a hundred and twenty thousand men under arms!" said Mendoza.

  Pardo and his generals were stubbornly indifferent.

  The national police were out because of the deal, so Mendoza went next to the DAS, the secret police. They told him—Perdon, Señor Vice Minister—that unfortunately they were not allowed to intervene in a prison unless there was a riot. As comfortable as Pablo and his men were, that seemed an unlikely event.

  Eventually, in desperation, Mendoza hired a truck and assigned a lawyer on his staff to drive up to the prison with a crew of men, load up all the TVs, recorders, and stereos, and drive them out.

  "Eduardo, you are my friend," the lawyer pleaded with him. "What have I ever done to you? Why do you give me this assignment?"

  Mendoza figured the truck would simply be turned away at the gate by Pablo's men, and he would have new ammunition to urge the army or secret police to act.

  Instead, the gate to La Catedral swung open, and Pablo himself waved the crew in.

  "Certainly, Doctor," said the drug boss, with his characteristic good manners. "I didn't know these things bothered you. Please, take everything out."

  Pablo's men even helped to load the truck. Pictures were taken of the denuded quarters, which Mendoza proudly showed the president.

  All of the goods, of course, were quietly replaced at La Catedral that evening.

  But as time passed, the electronic communications started to reveal problems within Pablo's happy new kingdom. The walls that protected him also stood between him and normal hands-on management of the cartel. For that, Pablo had to rely increasingly on a few powerful lieutenants, about whom he began to form suspicions.

  Entrusted with a large portion of his cocaine empire were two families, the Galeanos and Moncadas, who were longtime players in Medellín. Both families had grown fabulously rich, even more so after Pablo's surrender, despite paying Pablo's "war tax" of $200,000 per month. Suspicious of the families' growing prosperity and of their loyalty, Pablo reportedly hiked their tax to $1 million a month, and then authorized some of his men to steal $20 million from the families' secret stash houses. When the heads of the two families, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada, visited La Catedral in the summer of 1992 to complain, they were lectured by the boss about his importance to the industry, about how he had established the early trade routes "so that others could benefit," and about how he, Pablo Escobar, had once and for all defeated the U.S.-Colombian extradition treaty. Then he had Galeano and Moncada killed. Days later, Pablo's sicarios tracked down the brothers of both men, Mario Galeano and William Moncad
a, and they, too, were killed.

  The extended families of these four men geared up for war. Some of the less hard-core members went to the police, complaining that because the first two men had vanished after visiting La Catedral, the government of Colombia was complicit in their disappearance and evident murder. So it was that an exasperated President Gaviria was finally forced to act.

  3

  Mendoza was in his office at the Justice Ministry in Bogotá late Wednesday afternoon, July 21, 1992, when President Gaviria's chief of staff phoned to ask that he stop by the Presidential Palace. The vice minister of justice was helping to redraft the nation's criminal-procedure code, and he already had a meeting scheduled at the palace after lunch. He was working on a section of the proposed new constitution that would restore jury trials to Colombia; they had been stopped some years ago when narco assassinations had made it too dangerous to serve on a jury.

  "That's perfect," Mendoza said with typical enthusiasm. "I'll get two things done at once."

  When he arrived at the palace that afternoon he checked in on the drafting session and told the others he had to look in on the president.

  "I'll be right back," he promised.

  But he didn't return. Something big was happening upstairs. In the waiting area outside Gaviria's office there were generals in their crisp green uniforms and ministers in their well-tailored suits, staff people bustling, servants in white jackets offering hot coffee and tea on silver trays, phones ringing. Mendoza was ushered into a room with his own newly appointed boss, Justice Minister Andrés Gonzalez. With him was the dapper defense minister, Rafael Pardo, and one of Pardo's generals.

  "Eduardo, we are at this moment attacking La Catedral," said Pardo. "You just missed it. We are attacking it with everything, and we are going to bring Escobar back to Bogotá."