“I’ll call you in a few days. And for the love of God, keep the Beretta in your pocket, not in the safe! I have a lot of enemies, my love.”
We never know if we’ll see each other again, but I’ve always been careful not to mention it, because it would be calling into question his absolute conviction that even when it comes to survival, he is above all other mortals. When he opens the door, he turns around for a second to blow me one last kiss, and I manage to say, “Pablo, the M-19 has always brought us bad luck, you and me both. I think what you’re doing is crazy….”
And once again I watch him go, carrying through the shadows the cross that only I know exists. I hear his whistle, and minutes later I see him move away from my window with a small group of men. I wonder if there is anyone else who knows the extent of the terror of extradition that weighs on this man’s soul—this man, so rich and powerful, but so impotent in the face of legitimate power. I know that no one else could feel compassion for him, and I know, as well, that there’s no one in the world to whom I could confess the fears that overwhelm me. I stay there alone, thinking of the causes of those two friends, one who fights for the poorest and one who fights for the richest, and the embedded pain or unmentionable terror that men and the brave carry in their hearts of flesh, lead, stone, and gold. I’m left sad and worried, wondering if it’s Pablo who is manipulating Iván Marino with his money, or if it’s the rebel leader plying the multimillionaire with his unique capacity to provide him the service on which, possibly, the rest of his life depends. And mine along with it….
On August 29, 1985, some ten days after that night—the last I will ever spend at Hacienda Nápoles—I open the newspaper and read that Iván Marino Ospina has been killed in Cali in a confrontation with the army. On one hand, I feel sincere pain for the loss of that fighter; on the other, profound relief, because I imagine that without his fearless spirit, the absurd plan has been called off, or at least postponed. Like Pablo, I adore Simón Bolívar, who died in Colombia with his heart destroyed by the ingratitude of the people he liberated, and I offer up a prayer to El Libertador for the soul of the guerrilla commander whose path crossed mine during those brief hours. I wonder how long the army had been following Iván Marino, and with a shiver, I realize that it could have been Pablo who died. I think about what he must be feeling at the loss of his friend, and I know, starting at that moment, he will be reinforcing his security measures to the utmost and that we surely won’t be able to see each other for weeks.
In the middle of September he surprises me with a serenade of my favorite tangos, among them “Ninguna” and “Rondando tu esquina.” I think how that song, which I’ve always loved, now just reminds me of how surveilled I am. The next day Pablo calls to say that he misses me all the time, and to ask me to work seriously on the outline of the film, because if the Italians don’t produce it, he is in a position to do it himself. At the beginning of October he announces that, given the possibility the Supreme Court will approve his extradition, he has to leave for a while. He implies that the plan of the Palace of Justice has been aborted, and he explains that he can’t take me with him because it would mean putting me in danger. With the hope of seeing each other as soon as it’s safe, he says good-bye with a mariachi serenade and the romantic promises of “Si Nos Dejan” and “Luna de Octubre.”
In the following weeks I try to forget the events of that warm August night, but memories of Iván Marino’s fearlessness and Pablo’s triumphant tone throb from time to time in my memory like a black-winged butterfly. Again and again, we journalists hear rumors about threats from Los Extraditables and the M-19 against the Supreme Court magistrates, but no one pays attention because almost all of us who work in the media are used to hearing about threats and are convinced that, in Colombia, “a dog’s bark is worse than its bite.”
*
—
IT IS NOVEMBER 6, 1985, and I am with a colleague in the lobby of the Cartagena Hilton Hotel. We are covering the Miss Colombia Beauty Pageant for the radio; it’s an event that, year after year, gathers most of Colombia’s journalists in the city, along with hundreds of personalities and everyone who is anyone in the cosmetics and fashion industries. The queens make their arrivals with committees from their departments, which always include the governor’s wife and the mayor of the capital. “Coronation Night” takes place at the Convention Center and is followed by a sumptuous black-tie ball at the Cartagena Club. The day before the event, the governor, his family members, and the dignitaries of each department make their entrance, along with media personalities from all over the country vying to interview many important politicians, and while they’re at it, to admire so many pretty women. By this time, drug trafficking’s penetration into the beauty pageants is common knowledge, and everyone is aware that without support from the department drug boss, the government couldn’t dream of covering the expenses of the queen’s committee (made up of one or two hundred relatives and close friends, two dozen high-society ladies, the ex-queens with their husbands, and the whole regional bureaucracy). Nor is it unusual for the Miss herself to be dating the boss—or the boss’s son—and the relationships of the police commanders and the army brigade with the local king of coke or marijuana are much more intimate, stable, long-lasting, and profitable than the ones between the successful businessman and the reigning queen of the moment.
Anyone who has any doubt that the woman-as-object exists only has to attend a Miss Colombia pageant in Cartagena: the gowns and headdresses are similar to those of the mulatas in the samba schools at Carnaval in Rio de Janeiro, except those women dance and sing half-naked and happy, while the poor beauty queens drag feathered capes and flashy trains that weigh a hundred pounds, in temperatures of one hundred degrees Fahrenheit and on five-inch stilettos. The endless parades of carriages and themed boats over the course of an entire week leave everyone exhausted, down to the toughest marine officers, who are the ones tasked with escorting the girls.
It’s eleven in the morning, there are five days left before the election and coronation of Miss Colombia, and the enormous lobby is buzzing with excitement at all the people who are here: radio journalists, photographers, singers, actors, fashion designers, the presidents of the firms that sponsor the pageant, former Miss Colombias who have only grown more beautiful and are now on the arms of their proud husbands. The judges are celebrities from other countries, and they’re the only ones who hide from everyone so that later no one can say the committee manipulated them or the Miss’s future father-in-law bought them off. The queens are in their rooms, getting ready for the first swimsuit parade. The hallways of the floors reserved for them are infested with ugly men in green uniforms and beautiful men in white uniforms, who all observe the whole gay population of makeup artists and hairstylists with utter contempt. These last, in turn, look at the navy officers with ferocious hatred and at the sailors with utter adoration.
At 11:40 a commotion breaks out and all the interviews and radio transmissions are interrupted. The M-19 has seized the Palace of Justice, and it seems they’ve taken the Supreme Court magistrates prisoners! My colleague and I dash to my suite and sit together in front of the TV. At first I dismiss the idea that what we are watching has something to do with Pablo, because I’m convinced that he is out of the country. The last thing that would occur to my friend is that I am Pablo Escobar’s lover, or that one of the most visible leaders of MAS could have financed a guerrilla takeover. And the last thing that would occur to me is that my colleague is the girlfriend of one of the M-19 leaders.
Bolívar Square is an enormous expanse with a statue of Simón Bolívar in its center, looking toward the Primada Cathedral, on the eastern side of the plaza. Across from it is the mayor’s office, flanked by the Senate, which looks north, and the Palace of Justice looking south. And behind the Senate is the presidential palace—the Casa de Nariño—guarded by the Presidential Guard Battalion.
Two days earlier, the security of the Palace
of Justice, seat of the Supreme Court and the Council of State, had been turned over to a private company. That was precisely the day the Constitutional Court was to begin studying the extradition cases for Pablo Escobar Gaviria and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, among others. The siege has been carried out by the “Iván Marino Ospina Commando Unit,” in charge of the “Antonio Nariño Operation for the Rights of Man.” Led by the commanders Luis Otero and Andrés Almarales, thirty-five insurgents have invaded the palace. Seven of them entered through the main door like ordinary citizens, and the rest forced their way in using two small trucks to barge through the basement door on a side of the building, coming in from one of the narrow and congested streets of downtown Bogotá. The guerrilla commando has already killed two guards and the palace administrator, and they’ve taken more than three hundred people hostage, including magistrates, employees, and visitors. Now they are demanding the radio transmission of a proclamation denouncing the abuses committed against those who accepted the amnesty agreement and condemning the ineffective Colombian justice that accepts Colombians being extradited and tried in other countries. They demand, as well, that the newspapers publish their program, that the government grant daily radio time to the opposition, and that the Supreme Court respect their right, enshrined in the Constitution, to force the president of the republic or his representative to appear in court. They want to subject him to judgment for betraying the peace agreements with the disarmed insurgent groups M-19, EPL, and Quintín Lame.
At noon, the building is completely surrounded by the army, whom the “Poet President” has ordered to recover the Palace of Justice whatever the cost. At two in the afternoon, tanks have already entered through the basement, the helicopters of GOES (Grupo Operativo Antiextorsión y Secuestro, or Operative Group Against Extortion and Kidnapping) have unloaded troops on the building’s terrace, and a tank has knocked down the palace gates that open onto the plaza and gone inside, followed by another two loaded with men from the Presidential Guard Battalion and the artillery school. Belisario Betancur has convened with the former presidents, the presidential candidates, and the Senate and House presidents and is refusing to listen to the magistrates or the rebels. The offers from foreign nations to mediate between the government and the armed group don’t even reach the ears of the president. He will not forgive the M-19 for breaking the peace process that was the foundation of his presidential campaign. And he won’t forgive Iván Marino Ospina for supporting Los Extraditables in an earlier statement, even though the statement had been denounced by the other M-19 commanders:
“For every Colombian extradited, we must kill a U.S. citizen!”
The tanks open fire, and the radio stations start to transmit the voice of Magistrate Reyes Echandía, president of the Supreme Court of Justice—and also of the Criminal Court that had approved the extradition of Colombians to the United States some years before—begging the president to cease fire because they’re going to end up killing everyone, but his calls are only answered by the police chief. The words spoken by the young colonel Alfonso Plazas from the artillery school to a journalist define the moment:
“Just here defending democracy, sir!”
And in Latin America, when a head of state gives the military carte blanche to defend democracy, they know exactly what they have to do. And what they can do: purge themselves of all that visceral hatred built up over years or decades of counterinsurgent fighting, leaving aside—finally!—all those restrictions imposed on them by laws designed by civilized men for the protection of unarmed citizens. Especially since the Colombian Palace of Justice houses—alongside all those files like books that contained the criminal records of Escobar and his associates—a few other boxes with 1,800 cases against the army and the security agencies for human rights violations. The voracious fire that inexplicably breaks out in the palace at six in the afternoon does away once and for all with the problems of a dozen extraditables, but, above all, with those of several thousand military men.
Hellish temperatures now oblige the guerrillas and their hostages to withdraw to the bathrooms and the fourth floor, and Andrés Almarales orders the women and the wounded to be evacuated. Late in the afternoon, the telephones on which Magistrate Reyes and Commander Otero had been communicating with the presidential palace go mute. When Betancur finally decides to talk to the court’s president, it’s impossible: technically, the military has carried out a coup. The events of the Miss Colombia beauty pageant are not canceled or postponed, with the argument that the happy, strong spirit of the Colombian people will not be broken by tragedy. Nor are the cartageneros about to let their parade be rained on for something that’s happening “there in Bogotá.”
The fighting goes on all night, and when the president’s representative and the director of the Red Cross arrive in the early hours of the next day to negotiate with the guerrillas, the military won’t let them enter the palace. Instead, they put them in the historic Casa del Florero alongside two hundred hostages who have been freed by Almarales or rescued by the uniformed officials, including the state councilor Jaime Betancur Cuartas, the president’s brother. Each person is rigorously searched and interrogated by the director of the B-2 military intelligence unit, Colonel Edilberto Sánchez Rubiano, with help from the army’s artillery and the F2 unit of the police. Several of these confuse innocent people with guerrillas, and dozens of judicial officials, including magistrates and counselors, are saved from detention only thanks to the pleading of their colleagues. Anyone who awakens the slightest suspicion is put into a military truck destined for the Usaquén Cavalry School in northern Bogotá. Of those, only two law students are later released, abandoned on a distant highway after being tortured.
At two in the morning the whole world outside Colombia watches on TV with incredulous eyes as a tank fires straight at the palace, blowing an enormous hole in the fourth-floor wall where the last groups of insurgents and hostages have taken refuge. Through the opening, police shooters stationed on the roofs of the surrounding buildings fire indiscriminately inside the palace, under orders from their commander, General Víctor Delgado Mallarino. Meanwhile, the army throws grenades while helicopters fly overhead. Though their ammunition is running out, the rebels refuse to surrender to a humanitarian commission for a later trial protected by guarantees, and as the rain of bullets is wiping out their resistance, the fire consumes what remains of the palace. The soldiers have been ordered not to leave anyone from the last group of sixty people alive, and they are all killed, including the magistrates who have witnessed the abuse and butchery. Among these last people standing are the president of the Supreme Court and the four justices who were to rule on the extraditions, including Manuel Gaona Cruz, a human rights defender. The defense minister orders all the bodies, without exception, to be stripped and washed, eliminating valuable evidence, and he forbids Forensic Medicine from going in to remove the cadavers.
While all of this is going on, and by order of the communications minister Noemí Sanín Posada—cousin of María Lía Posada, Jorge Ochoa’s wife—the Colombian TV stations only show soccer games and news about the beauty pageant. Nearly twenty-seven hours after the siege began, a final explosion is heard, and inside the building everything is silent. At 2:30 p.m., General Arias Cabrales proclaims victory to the defense minister, and General Vega Uribe informs the president that the coup has been defeated and the Palace of Justice recovered.
“What palace? A pile of twisted iron with a hundred incinerated bodies inside?” we all ask, horrified.
At eight at night, Belisario Betancur addresses the country: “For better or for worse, the president of the republic takes responsibility.”
Responsibility for what? The massacre of judicial power through army and police bombardment? I ask myself as I listen to that supreme commander of the Armed Forces, whom the Colombian people, eternally tempted by the illusion of a nonexistent peace, had believed in 1982 to be a leader.
From that whole massacre, t
hree big winners have emerged: the military, Los Extraditables, and the two traditional parties—because, as a future political project, the M-19 and all the other insurgent groups have been left buried among the ashes of judicial power. Eleven magistrates are dead, along with forty-three civilians and thirty-three rebels, and eleven members of the Armed Forces and DAS. The news cameras had recorded the moment when a dozen cafeteria employees, their manager, and two rebel women were taken out of the Palace of Justice by the army. The next day, when their families ask for information about the whereabouts of the detainees, the response will be that they are being provisionally held in military barracks. No one will give a reason for this, or a location, and those people are never heard from again.
On November 12, I return home after that exhausting pageant, the last one I will cover in my professional life. The next day, November 13 of that annus horribilis, the greatest Colombian tragedy of all time occurs, and the world media forgets the hundred victims at the Palace of Justice and turns to the news of twenty-five thousand dead in Armero, in the rich rice and coffee region of Tolima. Thinking about the incredible luck of all those state-paid butchers, I tell myself that a curse has fallen on my poor nation and everyone in it. And I wonder if the man I had thought was the bravest of all has become merely the most cowardly of the monsters. I change my phone number, and with my soul shrunken by terror, I make the decision to never see Pablo Escobar again in my life. Overnight, I have stopped loving him.
Tarzan Versus Pancho Villa
THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD OMAYRA SÁNCHEZ is in the throes of death in front of TV cameras from all over the world. Only her head and arms emerge from the hardened mud in which her legs are trapped under a concrete column. The panorama of desolation that surrounds the teenager—miles and miles of mud seem to stretch out infinitely—is broken only by the occasional treetop or bloated dead cow. Getting Omayra out and to a hospital where they could amputate her legs would take days. While the gas gangrene is invading her body, the girl transmits a message of hope to millions of fellow countrymen, and people from many countries watching her, feeling helpless, moved by her suffering and her bravery in the face of death. We Colombians know it is impossible to save her, and we can do nothing but watch over her final moments and pray that her pain ends soon. Seventy hours later that angel leaves us forever and flies to heaven, where the souls of the other twenty-five thousand victims are waiting for her, along with the hundred, innocent or guilty, who died ten days earlier at the Palace of Justice.
Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Page 25