Another attack by the corrupt cops against innocent people was the following: One night they went to a nightclub called Oporto in Medellín; there they took about twenty young men from eighteen to thirty years old outside the parking lot to look for Pablo’s son. All these young men were sons of Medellín´s wealthy including some politicians. Right there on the spot they were told to lie face down, and they were massacred. The government kept quiet, and this way the police had more confidence to do their slayings. And another night at a Medellín street corner in the humble Castilla neighborhood another massacre occurred where twelve young men ranging from twelve years old to twenty-four were killed when they stood outside. All this was done by the secret police unit. The deaths kept piling up.
In a neighborhood called Aranjuez in Medellín the killing secret police unit went to a house where there were eight young men. The police took these young men in unmarked SUVs with tinted windows to the police’s Carlos Holgüin School. There these police tortured these teenagers to find out where Pablo was hiding—without success, of course, because how would they know? The next day most of these kids were found murdered, but a couple did manage to escape to tell the story.
Pablo actually wrote letters to President Cesár Gavíria and the attorney general to make public the truth that the police were killing innocent people. But the government didn’t do anything with the names of the corrupt police. I don’t know how much really they could have done to stop it, but Pablo wanted the people to know the truth. The bodies kept piling up in the streets of Medellín’s poor neighborhoods, especially over the weekends.
What was amazing was that Pablo’s mood never changed. He accepted what was happening and never panicked. He understood his fate. I remember hearing him say several times, “No drug dealer ever died of old age.” The fact is that no matter how much pressure he was feeling, no matter what had happened during the night, no matter where we were, he always acted the same and positively. He would usually get up sometime past noon, while Gustavo loved the early mornings. Pablo never saw him. So between Gustavo and Pablo they covered the entire day. Once Pablo got up he would spend his usual half hour or more brushing his teeth. That was his obsession, brushing his teeth, which were perfect. Then he would put on a new shirt; he wore a new shirt every day 365 days a year. After he wore a shirt he would donate it to someone, there was always a person who wanted a shirt of Pablo Escobar’s. When possible he would enjoy his favorite breakfast, arepas, it’s like a corn patty with scrambled eggs, chopped onions and tomatoes, and nice Colombian coffee. Pablo loved to sing and sometime in the day he would be singing songs he loved. If he wasn’t able to speak to María Victoria or his two children, his son Juan Pablo, and his daughter, Manuela, because it was too difficult or too dangerous for them, he would write poems for his little daughter and send them to her or record tapes for her to hear. I think of all the things that he lost while we were running, the only thing that truly affected him was not being with his family. He missed his family every single day.
It was while this was happening that the legend of Pablo Escobar was being built. All of the other drug traffickers had used violence in the business, all of them, but all of the publicity was focused on Pablo. In the United States and the rest of the world his name was put on the entire drug business coming from Colombia. This was good news for all the others. The concentrating on Pablo took much of the attention off the other cartels.
The media of the world made it seem like catching Pablo would end the drug trade from Colombia. Maybe what made Pablo so interesting and exciting to everyone was the fact that he couldn’t be caught. He was one of the richest men in the world, he was running a major drug organization, he was fighting wars with the government—and he was like a ghost. He was everywhere, but he was nowhere. When he was in the city the few people who knew about his presence never gave him away. The main reason for this was that the poor people of Medellín loved him and protected him. Some people were afraid of him, that’s true, but for the people with nothing he was their hero. The government had done nothing for them, the gifts of money and houses he had given them before were repaid with their loyalty.
Six
F
OR MANY YEARS WE WERE CONTINUALLY ON THE MOVE
, always watching the movements around us. It began with just the Colombian police and military searching for us, but eventually we were at war with the Cali cartel, with very specialized units of Colombian police created just to scour the earth for Pablo, with representatives of America’s Delta Force, and even with the Colombian paramilitaries. And yet Pablo was able to fight them all and survive.
For much of this time we stayed on farms Pablo owned, some of them on mountains with views of the city he loved, but other times we lived deep in the safety of the jungle. Only the closest friends knew where we were. When Pablo needed to see someone, a lawyer or a politician or a friend, that person was brought to him blindfolded, often by an unusual route. Even our mother did not know where we were; when Pablo wanted to see her she would be brought to a named point. I would meet her there and make her wear a pair of blackened glasses and then take her in another car to the meeting point. Once, I remember, I handed her these glasses and told her to put them on. When she did she began making faces. “What’s wrong with these glasses,” she asked. “They’re very expensive, but I can’t see anything.”
I explained, “Mommy, these aren’t for fashion. They’re for security.”
Security was always first. Pablo always bought farms on the roads miles away from our location and put his people living there. If necessary he would build houses for them. When an enemy force went by that place day or night we would be notified immediately to get ready to leave. Only once, I can remember, did the police come upon us completely unannounced—and these people never knew who they had found.
Pablo and I were staying at a farm on a road near Amagá, which is about forty miles outside Medellín. This was toward the end of our time on the run, after Pablo had decided we should be without bodyguards. The price on us was $10 million each. As Pablo said, we paid the bodyguards very well but not $10 million. For that kind of money we knew the only people we could trust were each other. Our agreement was that we would watch out for each other; we slept at different times so one of was always alert.
It was a beautiful house surrounded by orange and apple trees and flowers; it had a swimming pool, a place of great calm. We often had barbecues outside, where we would sit and play dominoes. I became a master of that game while we stayed there for about eight months. When Pablo was buying this farm a dog bit him, so Pablo insisted the dog stay with the farm. He named it Hussein, and eventually the animal calmed down.
We were living in the house with an older married couple we had known for many years, Albertino and Ilda. The farm had been bought in their name. They were both artists, painters. In addition to living in the house, they were given a salary and all their expenses were paid. For our protection Albertino would begin a painting but leave it unfinished. The picture that was there at the moment was a beautiful farm with a small cow. The only thing to be finished was the green grass, which I could paint to look real if necessary. Pablo would wear the painter’s cap and in the morning both of us would put paint on our hands and our clothes in case the police showed up. Pablo had grown a beard and when he was splattered with paint he would look authentic, like he did his work there.
The importance of this farm was that it was near enough to Medellín for Pablo to be in contact with the attorneys negotiating a compromise with the government to do away with the extradition laws. These meetings usually took place late at night, sometimes at one
A.M.
When Pablo had to go to places he would wear his artist disguise and Albertino would drive. The negotiations took a long time because Pablo knew exactly what we wanted, which was for the government to change the constitution. Meanwhile, we hid.
Very early one morning the police suddenly came to the farm. It was not a raid; there was only one patrol car with two men, so I figured they were not looking for Pablo Escobar. I opened the door for them. Albertino and Ilda were having breakfast and when Ilda saw the police she slipped away to wake Pablo. In this house we had built secret stashes to hide money as well as hideouts for ourselves. Pablo moved into one of them. When the police came to the door I welcomed them. I was pretending to be a painter with the cap and the artist’s glasses. I began reaching out to shake hands, but stopped politely because, as I indicated, I did not want to get paint on them. They explained their presence. “We’re doing a search in the neighborhood because we found a body at the side of the road.” In fact, he said, they had found a head on one side of the road and a body on the other. He continued, “It happened last night. We were wondering if you saw anything weird or heard something unusual.”
“No,” I said, and that was truthful. That corpse had nothing to do with us. “I was up very late working on my painting.” I invited the police inside and served them a cup of coffee. They admired the house and left. When they had driven away I used our knock code to tell Pablo it was safe to come out. Later we learned from the people in town that the body was that of a husband who had been killed by his wife and her young lover.
Wherever we stayed we made certain there were places for us to hide quickly if necessary. It was this way with all the hunted men from the drug organizations. One time the police got a call that a major leader was hiding in an apartment. The exact address and apartment number were given. When the police went into the apartment there was warm food still on the table. They searched this apartment for hours but found nothing. The man had disappeared. The police were used to being given false information—people were always calling them to say they had seen Pablo Escobar in a store or walking into a building, for example—and this seemed no different.
A month or more later this same person again called the police and insisted the leader was at that address. From the outside the police saw a candle burning. The army knocked down the door. The candle was still burning, the bed was warm—but the apartment was empty. This time they had the answer to the mystery. They stuck the point of a pen into a tiny hole that no one could find unless they had been told it was there. The wall opened up. This man was there. He had prepared for a stay of hours—with him was a canister of oxygen. He was captured and eventually extradited to the United States.
The hideouts we built were not fancy, but effective. They allowed us to fade into the walls in an instant. One that Pablo built, I remember, could be opened only by turning a hot water faucet to one side. The difficulty with being inside one of these hideouts was that the person could not know what was taking place outside. That made it necessary to have some type of secret code, a code that said it was safe to appear.
But the best hiding place was the jungle. And eventually even we got comfortable there. With the protection of our bodyguards we could disappear into the jungle and the police and military would not risk tracking us in dangerous territory. In the jungle they were the invaders.
There also was the time that we were staying at the farm called the Parrot. We had been there for several months along with Gacha, Pablo’s brother-in-law Mario Henao, Jorge Ochoa and his wife, and some of our people. There had been no worries. Usually I would go to bed early in the evening and rise in the morning by 3:30
.
But one afternoon about six as everyone was watching the news on television I felt very tired and took a nap. As I slept the small priest visited me again, warning me: “You guys gotta go. The police are going to show up.”
It was a powerful dream but I was too embarrassed to tell it to anyone. I thought they would laugh at me. So instead I shared with them, “I feel very strange. I’ve just got a feeling the police are going to show up tomorrow.”
“How come?” Pablo asked. “Did you get any phone calls?”
“No, I just got the feeling.”
They didn’t pay any attention and of course I didn’t blame them. But I went to our employees and told them to get some food ready, pack some clothes, and put the seats on the mules: “Just in case we have to leave this place quickly.” The farm was right next to the beautiful Cocorná River, which is so clean you can see the fish below, so I also had them make certain there was fuel and supplies on our boat. I went to sleep that night at the usual time, but this bad feeling I had didn’t go away.
One of the radios Pablo had given to all our neighbors made a noise about 6
A.M.
It was from one of the people who lived on a nearby farm by the name of José Posada. He was one of the people who would call frequently to say everything is good, everything is quiet. But this time he said, “Leave. The police are here. We’ve seen trucks and heard helicopters. Go now!”
Within a few seconds we heard the helicopters coming at us. The “damn mosquitoes,” Pablo used to call them. And then he would make a movement to slap them away like they were nothing at all to him. Not this time, though, they came too fast. There was no time to go for the mules or the boats. As they approached they started shooting from the air. We ran, firing back as much as possible. Some of us ran to the river, others into the jungle with just the clothes we had on our backs. Pablo was in his sleeping clothes without even a shirt or shoes. He left all his papers behind. Fortunately, Pablo had planted some pointed trees and bushes, which made it impossible for the helicopters to land. But they continued shooting at us from the air. Bullets hit the ground and the trees and whizzed by my ear. I ran, faster than I had ever run in training. This time there was no stopping until we got free of there.
Long ago we had made a blood pact that we would shoot ourselves behind the ear rather than be extradited. Jorge Ochoa thought it looked like this might be that time. They were all around us. Jorge took his .38 revolver and was ready to commit suicide, but Pablo stopped him. “It’s not the time,” he said. If it were, he vowed, he would do the same. Somehow we managed to get loose of the raiders. But it was close.
It was later I found out that those damn mosquitoes had killed Pablo’s brother-in-law Mario Henao, our brother in our souls, as he tried to get to the river. Pablo saw him get shot. I didn’t. Pablo was shooting back as he ran. Maybe he hit one of the choppers with a machine gun; it was said he did but I didn’t see that either. But the loss of Mario was a terrible pain to all of us. When we were safe in the woods we received the confirmation that he died and that was the only time I ever saw Pablo cry. In addition to several dead, they had captured fourteen of our people, but none of the leaders were among them.
We had many close escapes while we were negotiating. Once we were staying on a farm we call the Cake, near the top of a hill in the wealthy area of el Poblado. While there was a very old, very large house, with fourteen bedrooms, on the land, Pablo built for himself and his close friends Otto and Pinina a Swiss chalet–type.
The house was typically well defended. We lived there with 120 bodyguards. The perimeter was established by two rows of barbed-wire fences, and the gaps between those rows was patrolled by vicious dogs. There were also twenty raised watchtowers that were manned twenty-four hours each day, and a motion-detector lighting system that warned of any intruder. There was also a battery-operated bell system that would alert us if the police had shut down the power, as well as radio scanners to hear the approach of an enemy, and surveillance cameras all around to cover the perimeter. I had supervised the installation and kept checking it to be sure each piece operated successfully.
One day Pablo called me urgently on a secure line to tell me our radio communications frequency was blocked. “It’s got to be the police,” I said. “Get prepared.” A minute later I was told that truckloads of soldiers were coming up the hill. Twenty minutes later bells were off from four places, meaning the soldiers had practically surrounded the perimeter. Pablo remained calm, as always. He noted that the bells had not run from the southwestern portion of the property, so we went in that direction. Pablo picked up a submachine gun, Pinina and Otto took their weapons, and we started walking among the pine and eucalyptus trees.
When we reached the towers 13 through 16, where the bells had not rung, Pablo took armbands with the insignia of the DAS from his pocket and we all put them on our arms and kept walking. Pablo was wearing a military cap and dark glasses, and he was dressed in the civilian way, as the DAS agents always wore. The helicopters were now flying over the house. One of the guards from the watchtowers had a rope, and as planned Pablo tied the watchmen’s hands with it. Then they began walking down the hill, as if these men were Pablo’s prisoners.
Soon we spotted several soldiers. “Hey!” Pablo yelled to them. “Come help us with these guys we caught from Pablo’s command post.” Pablo handed the four men to these soldiers and told them not to mistreat them, and that he and his men were going to go after two others from the house they had seen running. Pablo took with him one of the soldiers who carried a water canteen. As they walked, Pablo asked him where the other soldiers were posted, and this young soldiers provided that information. Once Pablo learned where the other soldiers were, Pablo told him to wait right where they were standing, that his people were going to look around and would return. He was left standing there.
Eventually we arrived at a modest farm. The farmer and his wife understood who we were and took us inside. They fed us and let us stay there safely. Eventually they loaned Pablo their car—their son even rode ahead on his motorcycle to make certain the road was open. The escape was complete.
Ten days later Pablo returned to this small farm. He admitted he loved the property, because it was secluded in the mountains and looked on to a waterfall. He offered the farmer a great amount of money for it. His offer was accepted, and Pablo had another safe house set up for himself.
Each time we were attacked we would move to another place that had been prepared. While this was happening the business continued. Pablo remained convinced that in return for an end to all the violence eventually the government would agree to his terms: There would be no extradition to the United States and if we went to jail in Colombia it would be for a reasonable time and in a situation safe for us. The search for Pablo divided much of our country; while the poor people supported Pablo, others did not. For me, like Pablo, the most difficult part of it was being separated from my life. We all had to believe our families were being watched and people were listening to their phones, so it took careful plans to be able to be in contact with them. It was painful for me, for example, to watch my second marriage fall apart and be helpless to do anything to stop it. Even in the middle of this worldwide hunt our personal lives continued.