News of a Kidnapping (15 page)

“My only wish is for this drama to end as soon as possible, regardless of the outcome, so that we may all have some peace at
last,” it began. He was profoundly grateful,
he said, to María Victoria, with whom he had grown as a man, as a citizen, and as a father, and his only regret was having given greater importance to his work as a journalist than to his life at home. “I take this remorse with me to the grave,” he wrote. As for his children, who were still babies, he was reassured by the certainty that he was leaving them in the best hands. “Tell them about me
when they can understand what happened and accept with some equanimity the needless pain of my death.” He thanked his father for all that he had done for him in his life, and asked him only “to take care of everything before you come to join me so my children can receive their inheritance without major difficulties.” In this way he led into a subject that he considered “boring but fundamental” for
the future: financial security for his children and family unity within
El Tiempo.
The first depended in large part on the life insurance the paper had purchased for his wife and children. “I ask you to demand what they promised,” he said, “because it would not be fair if my sacrifices for the paper proved to be completely useless.” As for the professional, commercial, or political future of the
paper, his only concerns were its internal rivalries and disagreements, though he knew that in great families discord is never trivial. “It would be very sad, after this sacrifice, if
El Tiempo
were broken up or sold to outsiders.” The letter closed with final words of gratitude to Mariavé for the memory of the good times they had shared.

The guard was moved when Pacho handed it to him.

“Don’t
you worry, man,” he said, “I’ll make sure it gets there.”

The truth was that Pacho Santos did not have the eighteen days he had calculated but just a few hours. He was first on the list, and the killing had been ordered the day before. Fortunately, Martha Nieves Ochoa happened to hear about it—from third parties—at the eleventh hour and sent Escobar a plea for a reprieve, convinced that this
killing would leave the country in ruins. She never knew if he received it, but the fact was that the order to
kill Pacho Santos was not carried out, and in its place a second, irrevocable order was issued against Marina Montoya.

Marina seemed to have foreseen this early in January. For reasons she never explained, she decided to take her exercise in the company of her old friend the Monk, who
had returned with the year’s first change of guard. They would walk for an hour after the television programs went off the air, and then Maruja and Beatriz would go out with their guards. One night Marina came in very frightened because she had seen a man dressed in black, wearing a black mask, watching her in the dark from the laundry area. Maruja and Beatriz thought it had to be another of her
recurrent hallucinations, and they paid no attention to it. Their impression was confirmed that same night, because there was not enough light to see a man in black standing in the darkness of the laundry. And if by some chance it were true, he had to be someone well known in the house because the German shepherd did not raise the alarm, and the dog barked at its own shadow. The Monk said it must
have been a ghost that only she could see.

Two or three nights later, however, she came back from her walk in a real state of panic. The man had returned, still dressed all in black, and with frightening attention had watched her for a long time, not caring that she was looking at him too. On this night, in contrast to the previous occasions, there was a full moon illuminating the courtyard with
an eerie green light. Marina told her story in front of the Monk, and he denied it, but with such tangled reasoning that Maruja and Beatriz did not know what to believe. Marina stopped going out for walks. The doubts regarding her fantasies and reality made so strong an impression that Maruja experienced a real hallucination when she opened her eyes one night and saw the Monk in the light of the
bedside candle, squatting as always, his mask turned into a skull. The effect on Maruja was even greater because she connected the vision to the anniversary of her mother’s death on January 23.

Marina spent the weekend in bed, suffering from an old back pain that she thought had been cured long ago. Her dark mood returned. Because she could do nothing for herself, Maruja and Beatriz did everything
for her. They almost had to carry her to the bathroom. They fed her and held the glass for her, and arranged a pillow behind her back so she could watch television from bed. They pampered her, and felt real affection for her, but never had they felt so despised.

“Look how sick I am and you two won’t even help me,” Marina would say. “And I’ve done so much for you.”

Often she only succeeded in
deepening the sense of abandonment that tormented her. Marina’s only real solace during that final crisis were the furious prayers she murmured without letup for hours on end, and the care of her nails. After several days, weary of everything, she lay prostrate on her bed and whispered with a sigh:

“All right, it’s in God’s hands now.”

On the afternoon of January 22, they were visited by the
“Doctor” who had been there during the first few days of captivity. He spoke in secret to the guards and listened with great attention to Maruja’s and Beatriz’s comments on Marina’s health. At last he sat down on the edge of the bed to talk to her. The topic must have been serious and confidential because their whispers were so faint no one could make out a word. The “Doctor” left the room in a better
humor than when he came in, and promised to return soon.

Marina remained in bed in a state of utter dejection. She cried from time to time. Maruja attempted to comfort her, and Marina thanked her with gestures so as not to interrupt her prayers, and almost always responded with affection, squeezing Maruja’s hand with her stiff, ice-cold one. She treated Beatriz, with whom she had a warmer relationship,
with the same affection. The only habit that kept her alive was filing her nails.

At ten-thirty on the night of Wednesday, January 23, they began to watch “Enfoque,” eager for any unusual word, familiar joke,
casual gesture, or subtle changes in the lyrics of a song that might contain a coded message. But there was no time. Just as the theme music began, the door opened at this unusual hour and
the Monk came in, though he was not on duty that night.

“We came to take Granny to another house,” he said.

He said it as if it were a Sunday outing. In her bed, Marina looked like a marble carving, with her hair disheveled and a pallor so intense that even her lips were white. Then the Monk spoke to her in the affectionate tones of a grandson.

“Get your things together, Granny,” he said. “You
have five minutes.”

He tried to help her up. Marina opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. She stood without help, picked up the bag that held her personal effects, and went to the bathroom with the light step of a sleepwalker who does not seem to touch the ground. Maruja confronted the Monk, her voice steady.

“Are you going to kill her?”

The Monk bristled.

“You can’t ask
a thing like that!” he said. But he regained his composure right away and said: “I told you she’s going to a better house. I swear.”

Maruja tried everything to stop them from taking her away. Because no boss was there, which was very unusual in so important a decision, she told them to call one for her so that they could discuss it. But the dispute was interrupted when another guard came in to
take away the radio and television. He disconnected them with no further explanation, and the last traces of the New Year’s Eve party vanished from the room. Maruja asked them to at least let them see the end of the program. Beatriz’s response was even more aggressive, but it did no good. They took the radio and television and said they would be back for Marina in five minutes. Maruja and Beatriz,
alone in the room, did not know what to believe, or whom, or to what extent this inscrutable decision played a part in their own destinies.

Marina spent much more than five minutes in the bathroom. She came back wearing the pink sweatsuit, the maroon men’s socks, and the shoes she had worn on the day of her abduction. The sweatsuit was clean and freshly ironed. The shoes were mildewed and seemed
too big, because her feet had shrunk two sizes in four months of suffering. Marina looked ashen and gleaming with icy perspiration, but she still held on to a shred of hope.

“Who knows, maybe they’re going to release me!” she said.

Without arranging it ahead of time, Maruja and Beatriz each decided that, regardless of Marina’s fate, the most Christian thing was to deceive her.

“Of course they
are,” said Beatriz.

“That’s right,” said Maruja with her first radiant smile. “How wonderful!”

Marina’s reaction was surprising. In a half-joking, half-serious way she asked what messages they wanted to send to their families. They did their best to improvise something. Marina, laughing at herself a little, asked Beatriz to lend her some of the aftershave that Spots had given her on New Year’s
Eve. Beatriz did, and Marina dabbed it behind her ears with innate elegance, arranged her beautiful snow-white hair without a mirror, touching it lightly with her fingertips, and when she was finished seemed ready to be free and happy.

In reality she was on the verge of fainting. She asked Maruja for a cigarette and sat on the bed to smoke it until they came for her. She smoked slowly, in great,
anguished mouthfuls, while she looked over every millimeter of that hole where she had not found a moment’s pity, and where at the end they did not even grant her the dignity of dying in her bed.

Beatriz, to keep from crying, repeated with absolute gravity the message for her family: “If you have a chance to see my husband and children, tell them I’m well and love them very much.” But Marina
was no longer of this world.

“Don’t ask me to do that,” she replied, not even looking at her. “I know I’ll never have the chance.”

Maruja brought her a glass of water with two of the barbiturates that could have put her to sleep for three days. She had to hold the glass for her while she drank because Marina’s hands were trembling so much she could not raise it to her lips. That was when Maruja
looked deep into her brilliant eyes and realized that Marina was deceiving no one, not even herself. She knew very well who she was, how much she was worth to her captors, and where they were taking her, and if she had followed the lead of the last friends left to her in life, it had been out of compassion.

They brought her a new hood of pink wool that matched her sweatsuit. Before they put it
over her head, she said goodbye to Maruja with a hug and a kiss. Maruja blessed her and said, “Don’t worry.” She said goodbye to Beatriz with another hug and kiss and said: “God bless you.” Beatriz, true to herself to the end, kept up the illusion.

“How marvelous, you’ll be seeing your family,” she said.

Marina turned to the guards without a tear. They turned the hood around, with the openings
for the eyes and mouth at the back of her head so she could not see anything. The Monk took both her hands and led her out of the house, walking backward. Marina followed with unfaltering steps. The other guard locked the door from the outside.

Maruja and Beatriz stood motionless in front of the closed door, not knowing how to take up their lives again, until they heard the engines in the garage
and then the sound fading away in the distance. Only then did they realize that the television and radio had been taken away to keep them from knowing how the night would end.

At dawn the next day, Thursday, January 24, the body of Marina Montoya was found in an empty lot north of Bogotá. Almost sitting upright in grass still damp from an early rain, she was leaning against the barbed-wire fence, her arms extended. Criminal
Investigation magistrate 78, who examined the body, described her as a woman of about sixty with abundant white hair, dressed in a pink sweatsuit and a pair of maroon men’s socks. Beneath the sweatsuit she wore a scapular with a plastic cross. Someone who had arrived on the scene before the police had stolen her shoes.

The head of the corpse was covered by a hood, stiff with dried blood, that
had been put on with the openings for the mouth and eyes at the back of the head, and it was almost in tatters because of the entrance and exit holes of six bullets fired from a distance of more than fifty centimeters, since they had left no powder burns on the cloth and skin. The bullet holes were distributed over the skull and the left side of the face, and there was one very clean hole, like a
coup de grâce, in the forehead. However, only five 9mm shells were found near the body soaked by wet grasses, and
the technical unit of the investigative police had already taken five sets of fingerprints.

Some students from the San Carlos secondary school across the street from the lot had gathered there with other curious onlookers. Among those who watched the examination of the body was a
flower-seller at the Northern Cemetery who had gotten up early to enroll her daughter in a nearby school. The body made a strong impression on her because of the fine quality of the dead woman’s underwear, her beautiful, well-tended hands, and her obvious distinction despite her bullet-riddled face. That afternoon, the wholesaler who supplied the flower-seller at her stand in the Northern Cemetery—some
five kilometers away—found her suffering from a severe headache and in an alarming state of depression.

“You can’t imagine how sad it was to see that poor lady just thrown onto the grass,” the flower-seller told her. “You should have seen her underwear, she looked like a great lady with her white hair, her fine hands, her beautiful nails.”

The wholesaler was concerned about her and gave her
an analgesic for her headache, advised her not to think sad thoughts, and above all not to take other people’s problems to heart. Neither of them realized until a week later that they had been involved in an unbelievable event: The wholesaler was Marta de Pérez, the wife of Marina’s son, Luis Guillermo Pérez.

The Institute of Forensic Medicine received the corpse at five-thirty on Thursday afternoon
and left it in storage until the next day because bodies with more than one bullet hole are not autopsied at night. Two other corpses, males picked up on the streets that morning, were also awaiting identification and a postmortem. During the night two more adult males, also discovered outdoors, were brought in, as well as the body of a five-year-old boy.

Dr. Patricia Alvarez, who began the autopsy
of Marina Montoya at seven-thirty Friday morning, found the remains of recognizable food in her stomach and concluded that death had
occurred very late Thursday night. She too was impressed by the quality of the underwear and the buffed and polished nails. She called to her supervisor, Dr. Pedro Morales, who was performing another autopsy two tables away, and he helped her find other unequivocal
signs of the dead woman’s social position. They took a dental impression, photographs, X rays, and three more sets of fingerprints. Finally they did an atomic absorption test and discovered no trace of psychopharmacologicals despite the two barbiturates that Maruja Pachón had given Marina a few hours before her death.

When they had completed the essential procedures, they sent the body to the
Southern Cemetery, where three weeks earlier a mass grave had been dug for two hundred corpses. She was buried there along with the four unidentified males and the boy.

It was evident during that savage January that Colombia had reached the worst circumstances imaginable. Since 1984, when Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla had been assassinated, we had experienced all kinds of abominable acts, but
it was not over yet, and the worst was not behind us. All the elements of violence had been unleashed and exacerbated.

Among the many atrocities that had convulsed the country, narcoterrorism stood out as the most virulent and cruel. Four presidential candidates had been assassinated before the 1990 campaign. Carlos Pizarro, the M-19 candidate, was killed by a lone assassin on a commercial plane,
even though his flight reservations had been changed four times, in absolute secrecy and with every kind of misleading subterfuge. Ernesto Samper, a pre-candidate, survived eleven bullets and reached the presidency five years later with four of them still in his body; they set off airport security alarms. A car bomb made with 350 kilos of dynamite exploded in the path of General Maza Márquez,
and he had escaped
from his lightly armored automobile, pulling out one of his wounded bodyguards. “All at once I felt as if I had been tossed into the air by the surf,” the general commented. The upheaval was so great that he needed psychiatric help to regain his emotional equilibrium. He was still in treatment seven months later, when a truck carrying two tons of dynamite destroyed the huge
Administrative Department for Security building in an apocalyptic explosion that left 70 dead, 620 wounded, and incalculable physical destruction. The terrorists had waited for the precise moment when the general walked into his office, but in the midst of the cataclysm he was not even scratched. That same year, a bomb exploded aboard a passenger plane five minutes after takeoff, causing 107 deaths,
among them Andrés Escabí—Pacho Santos’s brother-in-law—and Gerardo Arellano, the Colombian tenor. The accepted version of events was that the intended victim had been the candidate César Gaviria—a sinister mistake, since Gaviria never intended to take that flight. His campaign security services had forbidden him to use commercial planes, and on one occasion when he made the attempt he had to stop
because the other passengers panicked and tried to get off to avoid the danger of flying with him.

The truth was that the country was trapped in a vicious circle. On one hand, the Extraditables refused to surrender or temper the violence because the police gave them no quarter. Escobar had denounced in all the media the fact that the police would go into the Medellín slums at any hour of the
day or night, pick up ten boys at random, ask no questions, and shoot them in basements or empty lots. Their blanket assumption was that most of the boys were working for Pablo Escobar, or supported him, or soon would do one or the other, either by choice or through coercion. On the other hand, the terrorists were relentless in their murder of ambushed police, their assaults and abductions. And for
their part, the two oldest and strongest guerrilla movements, the Army of National Liberation (ELN) and the Revolutionary Armed Forces
(FARC), had just responded with all kinds of terrorist acts to the first peace proposal offered by the government of César Gaviria.

One of the groups most affected by the blind warfare were journalists, the victims of assassinations and abductions, and also of
desertions because of threats and corruption. Between September 1983 and January 1991, twenty-six journalists working in various Colombian media were murdered by the drug cartels. Guillermo Cano, director of
El Espectador,
and the gentlest of men, was killed on December 17, 1986, by two gunmen who followed him to the door of his newspaper. He drove his own van, and although he was one of the most
threatened men in the country because of his suicidal editorials attacking the drug trade, he refused to use a bulletproof car or travel with a bodyguard. His enemies even tried to go on killing him after his death. A bust erected in his memory was dynamited in Medellín. Months later, a truck carrying three hundred kilos of dynamite exploded, reducing the paper’s presses to rubble.

Easy money,
a narcotic more harmful than the ill-named “heroic drugs,” was injected into the national culture. The idea prospered: The law is the greatest obstacle to happiness; it is a waste of time learning to read and write; you can live a better, more secure life as a criminal than as a law-abiding citizen—in short, this was the social breakdown typical of all undeclared wars.

Abduction was not a new
element in recent Colombian history. None of the four preceding presidents had escaped the destabilizing trials of an abduction. And certainly, as far as anyone knows, none had given in to the demands of the kidnappers. In February 1976, during the government of Alfonso López Michelsen, the M-19 had kidnapped José Raquel Mercado, the president of the Federation of Colombian Workers. He was tried
and condemned to death by his captors as a traitor to the working class, and executed with two bullets in the back of the head when the government refused to comply with a series of political demands.

Sixteen elite members of the same armed movement took over the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogotá as they were celebrating their national holiday on February 27, 1980, during the presidency
of Julio César Turbay. For sixty-one days almost the entire accredited diplomatic corps in Colombia, including the ambassadors of the United States, Israel, and the Vatican, were held hostage. The M-19 demanded a fifty-million-dollar ransom and the release of 311 of their members who were in prison. President Turbay refused to negotiate, but the hostages were freed on April 28 with no expressed
conditions, and their abductors left the country under the protection of the Cuban government, which had responded to a request by the Colombian government. The guerrillas stated in private that they had received a ransom of five million dollars in cash collected by the Jewish community in Colombia with the help of other Jews throughout the world.

On November 6, 1985, a commando unit of the M-19
took over the crowded Supreme Court building at the busiest time of day and demanded that the highest court in the nation put President Belisario Betancur on trial for not having kept his promise to establish peace. The president did not negotiate, and the army stormed the building and recaptured it after ten hours of bloody fighting that cost an unknown number of missing and ninety-five civilian
deaths, including nine magistrates of the Supreme Court and its president, Alfonso Reyes Echandía.

President Virgilio Barco, who was almost at the end of his term, did not resolve the abduction of Alvaro Diego Montoya, the son of his secretary general. Seven months later, Pablo Escobar’s rage blew up in the face of Barco’s successor, César Gaviria, who began his presidency facing the grave crisis
of ten well-known hostages.

In his first five months, however, Gaviria had created a less turbulent atmosphere for weathering the storm. He had achieved a political agreement to convene a Constituent Assembly, invested
by the Supreme Court with unlimited power to decide any issue—including, of course, the hottest ones: the extradition of Colombian nationals, and amnesty. But the underlying problem,
for the government as well as the drug traffickers and the guerrillas, was that as long as Colombia did not have an effective judicial system, it was almost impossible to articulate a policy for peace that would position the state on the side of good, and criminals of any stripe on the side of evil. But nothing was simple in those days, least of all obtaining objective information from any
quarter, or teaching children the difference between good and evil.

The government’s credibility was not at the high level of its notable political successes but at the abysmal level of its security forces, which were censured in the world press and by international human rights organizations. Pablo Escobar, however, had achieved a credibility that the guerrillas never enjoyed in their best times.
People tended to believe the lies of the Extraditables more than the truths told by the government.

Decree 3030 was issued on December 14, 1990, modifying 2047 and nullifying all previous decrees. Among other innovations, it introduced the judicial accumulation of sentences; that is, a person tried for several crimes, whether in the same trial or in subsequent ones, would not serve the total
time of the various sentences, but only the longest one. It also established a series of procedures and time limits relating to the use of evidence from other countries in trials held in Colombia. But the two great obstacles to surrender were still firmly in place: the somewhat uncertain conditions for non-extradition, and the fixed time limit on pardonable crimes. In other words, capitulation and
confession remained the indispensable requirements for non-extradition and reduced sentences, as long as the crimes had been committed before September 5, 1990. Pablo Escobar objected in an angry message. His reaction this time had another motivation he was careful not to reveal
in public: the accelerated exchange of evidence with the United States that facilitated extradition hearings.

Alberto
Villamizar was the most surprised of men. His daily contacts with Rafael Pardo had led him to expect a more lenient decree, but this one seemed harsher than the first. And he was not alone in his response. Criticism was so widespread that on the same day the second degree was issued, a third one began to be considered.