Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (22 page)

The murders at La Catedral made the brothers ally themselves with Escobar’s opponents, and Los Pepes was an illustrative example of Castaño’s theses: the Colombian and US governments needed their help. But everything had to remain top secret. They contacted Cali Cartel leader Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the new national cocaine strategist, and a network of money, threats, intelligence, assassinations, extortion, drug interests, and Colombian and US military operations all started to become intertwined. The Cali Cartel offered huge sums of money in exchange for information that revealed the movements of Escobar and his men, and paid handsomely for sanctioned killings; Los Pepes offered protection to the last of Escobar’s allies who wanted to switch sides.

Much later, when his career was back on track and everything had cooled down, DEA head Joe Toft spoke to the author of
The Memory of Pablo Escobar
, offering his insights into what the connection between Los Pepes, the Cali Cartel, and the Colombian government actually entailed:

They all ran up to Cali and worked out a deal with the Cali Cartel. Cali accepted them and provided them with the intelligence that they had been collecting for a long time. In the process there was also a connection made with the government, although it is not clear how that happened. Cali went and said, ‘We will help you get rid of him’, and the government just looked the other way.

Bloque de Busquda, the government’s tool against Escobar, had conducted thousands of raids against what remained of the Medellín Cartel and its operations since the 1989 assassination of Galán; 1314 people had been arrested while 1215 firearms, 7000 kilos of dynamite, and 1.4 million USD had been confiscated. The latter figure was surprisingly low, and Escobar’s men maintain that the police made off with large sums of money that they divvied among themselves. Popeye, one of the few of Escobar’s men to survive, would later claim that on just one of the cartel’s sites the police took over there was three million USD.

Today there are an abundance of incredible stories about how certain poor policemen got rich during these years, and it’s hard to know which are true and which are myths. More certain are the accounts of all the people whose lives went up in smoke during this time. In the six months that Escobar was on the run, a total of 3479 people were killed in Medellín alone — approximately 20 a day — and the war between the Search Bloc and Los Pepes, on the one hand, and the gangs still loyal to Escobar, on the other, seemed only to intensify. For every policeman shot, large numbers of young people were killed in a series of sweeping purges, and when a human-rights commission began to investigate the wave of violence, the state was forced to come clean about the active role it had played in various massacres.

By mid 1993 Los Pepes and all the military actions were putting Escobar under more pressure than ever before. It became increasingly difficult for him to access money from his stashes and to move about freely. In February several of the men closest to him surrendered, throwing a wrench into his armed network, and what freedom he had been able to retain was further curtailed. In November he took over a house in Los Olivos, a middle-class area located behind the city’s bullfighting ring, where he was happily oblivious to just how little time he had left. His mother’s cousin Luzmila Gaviria and his last remaining bodyguard, known as Limón, were two of the few people who looked after him. Luzmila felt him to be in good spirits, though ‘changed’.

Escobar was a guy from the streets, and his aim in life was to use cocaine not only as a means to become wealthy but also as a weapon to rebel. Against the United States. Against the Colombian upper class. Against the members of elite society, who gave him congratulatory pats on the back and were happy to spend time with him at the height of his popularity but who, as soon as the United States took over, turned their backs on him. Against the political class, which — unlike him, at least in his own mind — had never lifted a finger to help the poor masses up out of the misery in which they lived and into homes of their own.

While Luzmila made his meals, Escobar kept mostly to himself. He read the papers, watched television, and smoked grass. When US aid to the Colombian army forced Escobar into further seclusion, he gradually began to morph into a sort of warped Che Guevara figure: he started plotting an escape to the mountains, where he would make a temporary home for himself in the jungle and recharge his batteries, after which he hoped to return to society with a vengeance, and with his own guerrilla movement: the Antioquia Rebels.

The Colombian and US governments saw the future of the nation as dependent on how the Escobar story would end and were anxious for a resolution. Meanwhile, the Cali Cartel calmly began setting the infrastructure in place that would revolutionise cocaine production in the 1990s, forging an increasingly intimate collaboration with the military. At one point a tape recording turned up in which Cali leader Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela explained to a senator that he and the Colombian National Police had agreed to make a payment of ten million USD as soon as Escobar was captured or killed: eight million to the Search Bloc and two million to whoever provided the information essential for a successful operation.

Joe Toft was alarmed by the disclosure. What were they up to? The Pentagon, the White House, the DEA, and the CIA were all now deeply involved in an operation that was apparently infected with the same criminality they were supposed to be putting a stop to. Colombia seemed a hopeless case. Its layers of crime were infinite. A sense slowly developed among those working in various local DEA branches that the excessive concentration on Escobar was actually strengthening structures within the Colombian cocaine industry, rather than weakening them. Los Pepes continued to wreak terror everywhere and with everyone’s consent, and the Escobar family watched in horror as those nearest and dearest to them began falling like flies: on 5 November Juan Herrera, a friend residing with the family, disappeared; on 8 November the family’s domestic servant was murdered and the manager of one of their apartments killed; on 10 November the children’s private tutor disappeared; and, according to Escobar’s son, on 15 November police attempted to kidnap their chauffeur. A few years later, Carlos Castaño would boast in his autobiography, to many readers’ despair:

Everybody accepted us. The Chief Public Prosecutor, the police, the army, the Security Service, the Attorney General, and even president César Gaviria Trujillo. No one tried arresting us. Even the journalists secretly applauded our actions. Everything was just as it should be.

But for the United States at this point, there was no other way out. The coup de grâce was near, thanks to the assistance from the Cali Cartel and the tactics of Los Pepes. By the end of November this joint venture between the United States, Colombia, and the next generation of drug lords finally led them straight to Escobar’s hideout; now it was a matter of striking while the iron was hot. The only dilemma was whether they should take him dead or alive. No one — absolutely no one — was in favour of the latter option, but both legal and religious law forbade anyone from being killed unnecessarily. Could they not, though, make just one exception?

ON WEDNESDAY 1
December, Escobar had a long telephone conversation with his wife and children from his house in Los Olivos. It was his 44th birthday, and they offered their best wishes. The only people by his side on this special occasion were Luzmila and Limón. Escobar — as the story goes in Luis Cañon’s book
El Patrón
— celebrated with wine, cake, and marijuana.

Everything had been going according to plan, with the exception of two incidents, which his friends regarded as bad omens. The day before, a large fly, the type that tends to buzz around decaying bodies, had insisted on circling around Escobar all day; and later, after they had all sat down at the table to enjoy the birthday dinner and Luzmila had poured the wine, a glass fell to the floor but did not break. ‘What good luck,’ she exclaimed. But Limón shook his head and explained that this was actually a sign that something bad was sure to happen. Escobar, who was less superstitious, ignored their pessimism and appeared quite content as he reached for a letter from his daughter, on which she had drawn a pink heart, and proceeded to read aloud the words she had written:
Daddy, I love you and wish you happiness on your birthday. You are the heaven, the moon, and the stars to me. I adore you. Your girl
.

The next day he woke around lunchtime and had some lasagna before retiring to his room again with a cordless phone, a move that was cause for jubilation for the chief investigator at the Search Bloc. He was following it all on a monitor from a hotel room in Bogotá, and the phone call confirmed that Escobar was where they thought he was. Los Olivos was teeming with spies, snipers, surveillance vans, policemen, and neighbours who had begun taking orders from the commando. Everything was happening covertly, and all the organisations were present — the DEA, the CIA, Delta Force, Centra Spike, the Colombian police force, the military, and the security police, but most of all the elite force, which had been distilled from all available resources, the entity that would now close the deal: Bloque de Busqueda. The operation was ready to commence.

Escobar was wearing sandals and jeans rolled up over his ankles when a man in charge of one of the mobile units, Hugo Martinez, coasted down the street in a white van. They knew which block Escobar was on but were unsure of the exact house. Suddenly Martinez saw a man he recognised, but at the same time did not, standing at a second-storey window holding a telephone. He had only ever seen Escobar in photos and on television, and he had always appeared well kept and clean-shaven, except for his famous moustache. This man in the window, on the other hand, had thick, curly hair and a full beard. Nevertheless, he was absolutely sure who it was. Something clicked: it was Escobar.

Hugo Martinez, together with his father — head of the Search Bloc — had been working on the case for a long time, so it was quite exciting for him to get the chance to see Escobar in person. After so many years of hard work and effort, thousands of deaths, hundreds of failed police raids, several false alarms, millions of dollars, and all the humiliation experienced by the police and military, there he stood before them. Within reach. The most wanted man in the world. The street gangster who had become one of the richest men in the world, and for almost 20 years had reigned over an entire underworld. The godfather of Medellín; Colombia’s biggest living legend. He could hardly believe it. He was so close — just a shot away, in fact.

‘I see him,’ Martinez exclaimed to his father by radio, and then he dispatched two armed men, who carefully crept their way to the front door, pressing their backs up against the outside of the house on either side when they reached it. He called for reinforcements, circled around the block, and parked in the back. Escobar’s building was connected to the neighbouring houses on both sides, but in the back there was a possible line of retreat over the roof of one of the bungalows. But Martinez now had backup, as Bowden reports, with all spots covered. All possible escape routes were blocked.

He gave the orders to begin.

Martín, one of the commando lieutenants, broke through the front door with a sledgehammer and barged in, accompanied by five other men. They immediately began shooting. One after the other commandoes ran up the stairs; but just as Martinez had predicted, the thugs tried to escape out the back window. Limón was the first to attempt a getaway, jumping two metres to the bungalow’s roof, which would give him access to the street. He didn’t make it far, though, and was shot dead just as he began to bolt.

Then came Escobar. After kicking off his sandals, he heaved his now rather corpulent body out the window and slid down the roof. Having witnessed Limón’s fatal error, he stayed close to the wall, which offered temporary protection. Commando marksmen, deployed like scattered birds, sat on the neighbouring rooftops, but Escobar’s position made it difficult for them to find a good angle from which to shoot. They held their fire momentarily. With two revolvers in hand, Escobar slid barefoot down the roof, coming to a stop at the edge, but from there his only option was to try and make it to the other side. With his next step he suddenly found himself in the line of fire, and the shooting resumed. The first bullet went through his chest, the second through his leg, while a third entered through the left ear, exiting the other side. The drug baron fell headfirst.

Once the shooting stopped, one of the marksmen climbed up onto the roof and shouted: ‘It’s Escobar! It’s Escobar!’ Crowds formed in the street, and men from all the military units on the scene craned their necks to get a look at their catch. Major Aguilar, one of the Search Bloc officers, rolled the body over to get a look at his face. With his thick beard and the curly hair sticking out from behind his ears, Escobar, despite his obesity, resembled the world-famous image of the dead Che Guevara, also killed with help from the CIA. Aguilar called Bogotá and conveyed his message as loudly as possible so that everyone who had gathered on the street could hear: ‘We have killed Pablo Escobar! Viva Colombia!’

MORE THAN ANYTHING
else, Pablo Escobar was a product of Colombia. When the agrarian society, with its deep class divisions, became urbanised rapidly in the 1970s and 1980s, injustices and inequality became even more visible than before. In this social soil of religious yet poor people with no prospects, the door was wide open for all kinds of people claiming to be saviours. Escobar was one of many. A little smarter. Definitely a lot wilder. The fact that his personal and political objectives were funded by illegal activity had very little, if any, bearing for the working class, which had never seen either the state or the oligarchy respect any laws other than those of economics. To the inhabitants of Barrio Escobar the conclusion was obvious: their Pablo had been opposed and pursued not because he was a drug dealer, but because he was not an organic part of the Colombian upper class — and because he was a threat to the United States.