After Escobar’s death, it took less than two weeks for the cocaine cartels to start up again.
Of course, the Cali Cartel had benefited greatly from the destruction of the Medellín Cartel. When you look at the history of the war on drugs, when the main group of traffickers gets dismantled, there is always another one ready to take its place. More importantly, the leaders of the Cali Cartel—the Orejuela brothers—watched and learned from all of Pablo Escobar’s mistakes while he was still alive. The leaders of the Cali Cartel learned the importance of keeping a low profile and focusing on improving their distribution networks. I’ve always made the point that the Medellín Cartel functioned like a bunch of cowboys in the Wild West, while the Cali traffickers were more businesslike, more sophisticated—like Wall Street businessmen.
I’m not saying that the war on drugs had been a complete failure. The Escobar search had been a huge success, but maybe it was successful because it was a personal war for so many of us involved. We had all lost friends and attended police funerals. We lived through kidnappings, car bombs, and the Avianca bombing—all of it caused by one man. It took nearly a decade to get rid of Escobar, but we helped the Colombians take back their country, and I’m proud of that. I’m also proud to say that this was the first time in history that an entire cartel had been dismantled.
But despite the death of the most murderous drug trafficker, little had changed in Colombia, where the new cartels still controlled the political process. By way of proof, an informant gave us a copy of an intercept that featured Miguel Ángel Rodríguez Orejuela, the head of the Cali Cartel, telling an associate that he had arranged to deposit more than $3.5 million to the presidential campaign of Ernesto Samper. The elections were days away, and Samper was neck and neck with the other leading candidate, Andrés Pastrana Arango.
Ambassador Busby listened to the tapes in stunned silence and passed them on to Joe Toft, who flew off the handle. The tapes had also been delivered to President Gaviria, who sent them off to the prosecutor general. But Toft was livid and knew that the authorities would probably do nothing before the vote, so he asked Washington for permission to leak the tapes to the press. It was denied, and we all sat back and watched as Samper squeaked to victory.
But Toft, a thirty-year veteran of the drug wars in the United States and Latin America, had clearly had enough. He leaked the tapes to Colombian and U.S. reporters, and then he personally went on Colombian TV to denounce the “narco democracy” that the country had become. After that, he resigned from the DEA.
None of us could blame him. We had all fought long and hard, and it seemed in that moment of Samper’s victory, the sacrifice of hundreds of brave police officers, jurists, and journalists who had fought against Escobar was pretty much in vain.
As I prepared to leave Colombia after Samper’s victory, I thought back on that distant summer night when my old partner Gary Sheridan and I were suddenly locked into a restaurant when Escobar’s thugs assassinated presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán during a campaign stop on the outskirts of Bogotá.
Escobar’s handpicked sicario Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, known to most of us as Popeye, was one of the goons who had pulled the trigger. Popeye, who bragged about killing nearly three hundred people while working for Escobar but is suspected of murdering exponentially more, was eventually convicted of Galán’s murder and went to prison in Colombia. But by 2014, he was out of jail after serving twenty-two years of a thirty-year sentence. The last I heard, he was leading grim tours in Medellín, showing visitors the sites of some of the worst massacres in the city and taking them to the cemetery to point out all the people he had killed.
You’d go crazy trying to make sense of things that happen in Colombia.
And it just got crazier. A few years ago, General Miguel Maza Márquez, who was a good friend of the DEA while we were hunting Escobar and in charge of the now defunct DAS—the Colombian equivalent of the FBI—was found guilty of Galán’s murder. I was devastated when I heard he had been arrested for reducing the security detail around Galán just before he was assassinated. I don’t know why he changed the security around Galán, but I am pretty sure it wasn’t to have him killed. No one was more committed to the fight against Escobar than Maza, who had survived seven different attempts on his life by the Medellín Cartel, including a car bomb that had exploded outside his Bogotá office.
Shortly after he left government in the summer of 1994, Gustavo de Greiff went on an international speaking tour urging the end of the worldwide war on drugs. The man responsible for prosecuting Colombia’s cocaine cartels now wanted to legalize drugs! I told you that we could never make sense of Colombia! We certainly could never make sense of de Greiff, whose decision to negotiate with a murderer like Escobar prolonged the war against him and led to the deaths of thousands of innocent victims.
But he has a point on the war on drugs. Despite the billions that have been earmarked for law enforcement and crop substitution to help poor farmers move away from lucrative coca cultivation, a lot of this war has been a failure. I recently saw statistics compiled by the United Nations that showed that Colombia had a record level of coca cultivation in 2017. Enough coca was produced to manufacture more than 1,300 tons of cocaine, up more than 30 percent from the previous year’s harvest, according to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime in Colombia.
The consumption of illegal drugs is a global problem. There are traffickers who are waiting for the chance to step up and make money, not caring who will die due to consumption or get killed because they stood in the way of doing business. We need better enforcement around the world to arrest those who are responsible for sending these deadly goods. The worst threat you can make to a foreign drug trafficker is extradition to the United States.
But we also need to be mindful of social education priorities, and we need to be better at helping people to understand the dangers of consuming drugs.
I will always remember that Pablo Escobar used to have signs at his jungle cocaine laboratories that read: “If you get caught using the product, I will kill you.”
Granted, it was over the top, but Escobar’s edict was a great message. As a society, we need to be tougher on drugs. We need to improve education on the dangers of addiction. We need to strengthen programs like Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE), which teaches schoolkids about the danger of drug abuse and belonging to gangs. But we can’t just leave this to the school systems; drug awareness needs to be all-encompassing. It needs to happen in faith groups and in the home. It’s everyone’s issue and everyone’s problem.
If there is anything I have learned in the DEA, it’s that fighting the war on drugs requires a total commitment from everyone on your team. If the good guys are going to win, they need everyone’s support.
When I arrived in Colombia in March 1988, I had trouble with neckties. It’s not that I didn’t like wearing a suit and tie, it’s just that my fingers were awkward when it came to that elaborate knot. They weren’t nimble or practiced enough around such niceties, largely because I had spent most of my career chasing bad guys all over Texas and Mexico.
I could pull a trigger on any firearm, but I was hopeless with a necktie. Take it from me, there was never a need for a suit and tie when you were swilling stale beer in the grimy border towns where I cut my teeth as a young cop and then as an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration.
But Colombia was suddenly different. Even before I arrived, I knew it would be a milestone in my law enforcement career. As a special agent for the DEA assigned to Bogotá, I was now a diplomat of sorts. My office was located in the U.S. embassy in Colombia’s capital city, and I was expected to dress the part every day when I went into work.
Suit-and-tie. Suit-and-tie. Every day. I told myself it would be okay, as long as I could still wear my cowboy boots.
But I couldn’t master the knot before I was scheduled to take up my new position. At home in Texas, every time I got in front of a mirror determined to conquer the knot, it always confronted me as if it were mocking my inability to deal with such a simple task. When I looked at my reflection after grappling with the tie, I focused on the thin piece of silk around my neck. Why couldn’t I get it right? It was always lopsided and messy.
At first, my new girlfriend helped me out. We started dating shortly after I arrived in Bogotá, after she came out of a relationship with her State Department boyfriend. She was a tall, slim brunette with hazel eyes, and she was a veteran of DEA administrative posts in Europe. She was an incredibly hard worker, heading into the embassy on weekends to keep up with the cable traffic and working late most weeknights. We kept our relationship a secret, but everyone eventually found out. Before joining the DEA, she worked in the men’s department at Saks Fifth Avenue, and she professionally knotted my small collection of ties and then ingeniously mounted each of them on Velcro. In my closet in Bogotá, I had several Velcro-mounted ties with immaculate knots. All I needed to do was wind one end of the knotted tie around my shirt collar and fasten the Velcro strips together.
But I never imagined that my posting would last as long as it did. Halfway through my six years in the country, those Velcro ties started to look tired. The knots were dangerously close to unraveling, and the colors had started to fade. So I went back to the mirror, and I practiced with a new set of ties. I was determined more than ever to master the elusive knot.
Strangely, my necktie skills came together right after we tracked down and killed Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria. It was our colleagues from the Colombian National Police who actually pulled the trigger, but after spending every waking minute going after that scumbag for six years, it was our victory as well.
The CNP officers were so excited and relieved by the death of the notorious cocaine kingpin that it seemed they couldn’t wait to honor every officer who had been part of the search, including the American DEA agents who had labored for so long by their side.
Those Americans were my partner Steve Murphy and me, both of us longtime cops who had somehow ended up far from home, chasing the world’s most notorious criminal.
And so back to the tie. On the proudest day of my career, I took extra time in the mirror with the patterned red tie I had picked out the night before. I laid out a starched white shirt and made sure that my light gray suit was pressed. I combed and gelled my hair, and when I was done, I thought maybe I did look okay. Actually, I can admit it now as I look back on the photographs taken all those years ago: I looked better than okay. I looked great!
I glanced in the mirror again and adjusted my glasses. The Colombian government was about to proclaim me a hero, and I wanted to look my best at the awards ceremony organized by the director of the CNP and attended by the men I most admired in Colombia, who had been our local partners in the search for Escobar.
Sorry, I should really reverse that: We were their partners; they were always in charge, and they were among the bravest men I had ever met, willing to go out day and night knowing that there was a big chance they would never return. To me, the elite members of the CNP were the best of the best. And I knew that what made them so good was the knowledge that the fight against Escobar wasn’t about dope or money.
It was revenge, pure and simple. Revenge for all the innocent people and hundreds of police officers and special agents Escobar had killed. The fight against Escobar was personal for them, and after I had lost trusted colleagues in Colombia and lived through the worst of Escobar’s terror, the hunt for the world’s most wanted drug trafficker became personal for me too.
Weeks before the CNP presented us with our awards, Escobar had been gunned down in Medellín, his body splayed among the broken terra-cotta roof tiles of the home that proved his final hideout. His shooting ended years of dangerous investigative work on the part of both Colombian and U.S. authorities—all of us working together to quite simply rid the world of evil.
For Escobar was pure evil. He was no hero. He may have spent a small fraction of some of the billions he made selling cocaine to fix up Medellín shantytowns and build a soccer stadium, but his brutality had brought Colombia to its knees for years.
The ceremony was very formal, and I was surprised to see all the men I had worked with in the upper echelons of the Colombian police in suits and formal police attire. During the two manhunts for Escobar, we had spent a great deal of time together living at the Carlos Holguín CNP base in Medellín, many of us in the plainclothes uniform of the undercover cop—in faded blue jeans and polo shirts.
Contrary to U.S. policy, which prohibits federal agents from accompanying local law enforcement on raids, Steve and I had accompanied these courageous officers on thousands of failed operations and ambushes in and around Medellín to bring Escobar to justice.
Now, here we were in our Sunday best, mingling and chatting over tumblers of whiskey like dignitaries at a cocktail reception. It was hard not to relive the events of December 2, 1993, the day that Escobar was killed and the Medellín Cartel ceased to be a force in cocaine trafficking or a terrorist menace. It was hard to put an exact number on the tens of thousands of innocent civilians Escobar and his army of sicarios had killed during a reign of terror that began when he ordered the fatal hit on a federal attorney general in 1984. It continued with the assassinations of judges, a presidential candidate, journalists, and hundreds of law enforcement officers.
Standing in the grand nineteenth-century hall where the awards ceremony was taking place, I flashed back to many of the police funerals I had attended in Medellín in the days that Escobar was offering his teenage assassins one hundred dollars per dead cop.
I knew I was accepting my award for those earnest young officers who had died in the line of duty. And I was proud to be standing next to their fearless commander, Colonel Hugo Martinez, the upstanding military man who had risked his own life as head of the Bloque de Búsqueda—the Search Bloc that had brought together six hundred elite law enforcement officers in the hunt for the world’s first narcoterrorist. Whiskey in hand, I offered an informal toast to Martinez and his son, the lieutenant who had been named after his father, and made the older man beam with pride. Hugo Martinez Jr. was as fearless as his old man, possessed of an unshakeable resolve.
Silence descended on the ornate, high-ceilinged room with its oil paintings of Colombia’s greatest heroes of independence. We knew that the death of Escobar was a milestone in Colombia’s history, as important as its historic wars with Spain. With Simón Bolívar and the soldier and statesman Francisco José de Paula Santander Omaña staring down at us in their own elaborate military uniforms, we came to stiff attention as the awards presentation was about to begin. CNP general Octavio Vargas Silva, himself formally dressed in a khaki ceremonial uniform, the myriad and colorful medals arranged with military precision over the left breast pocket of his woolen suit, cleared his throat. Then he read a proclamation from the Colombian government before conferring the country’s most prestigious law enforcement awards. Vargas was the original architect of the Bloque de Búsqueda and handpicked every officer who was part of that incredible team, although he didn’t get much credit for it in the end. For me, he was a great leader and an upstanding citizen. After he received his bonus from the Colombian government for leading the successful search against Escobar, he donated the cash to a fund for the families of officers who had been killed by Escobar’s henchmen in the line of duty.
A woman police officer, also dressed in full regalia, solemnly followed Vargas holding a leather-bound box. Each medal was tied to a ribbon in the red, blue, and yellow silk colors of the Colombian flag and rested on a velvet pillow inside the boxes. When it came to my turn, I stood at attention as the general carefully removed the medal from the box and pinned it to the left side of my suit, just above my heart. We shook hands.
“Colombia thanks you for your bravery, Javier,” said Vargas, a stocky military man with graying black hair and thick, bushy eyebrows. “You are a hero.”
“Soy un gran amigo de la Policía Nacional,” I said, overwhelmed.
I had always felt very close to Vargas, partly because we both started at the same time chasing Escobar. He always called me by my first name, and he always listened to my advice on search strategies, even though I was just an agent and he was the head of Colombia’s national police.
After he pinned the ribbon on my jacket, Vargas continued down the line to confer the other awards.
I was then, and remain today, deeply humbled by the whole ceremony. I still have the medal hanging in my man cave at home. The Colombians honored the DEA alongside their own brave law enforcement heroes, even though it was the Colombians who had made the ultimate sacrifice, losing so many police officers in the hunt for Escobar.
During the years I spent hunting Escobar, I had wanted to give up many times, outraged by the deaths of so many Colombians whom I counted as among my best friends. There was Captain Pedro Rojas, whom my old partner Gary Sheridan and I had convinced to go after cartel members in Montería. He and his driver ended up tortured and killed, their bodies cut into small pieces. I was devastated at that time. But somehow, the sacrifice of officers like Rojas who valiantly and unquestioningly gave their lives in the battle against evil renewed my spirit and gave me the strength to stay on and fight.
And I learned a great deal from them. The number-one thing I learned is that you cannot ever back down, especially as the rest of humanity is looking to you to see what you are going to do.
We are the good guys, and we will always win.
Weeks after the awards ceremony, I replayed every moment over and over in my mind, basking in the honor—the pride and sense of accomplishment of having had a role in history.
The Colombian government had recognized our valor and determination.
I held on to that precious thought for a long time, largely because in my own country, our work tracking down the world’s most sought-after fugitive went pretty much unnoticed.
I didn’t get into police work to win awards, and we don’t do our jobs to get special recognition.
Like Javier, I was deeply honored to be recognized in Colombia with the National Police’s Distinguished Service Cross, but I was pretty dismayed when the death of the world’s most wanted man didn’t even make the front page of DEA World, our bimonthly, in-house publication, which is edited in Washington.
We got a small write-up in the magazine, and our boss Joe Toft promised he would put us up for the Attorney General’s Distinguished Service Award, one of the most prestigious prizes in U.S. law enforcement. With our input, he wrote up the recommendations while Javier and I were still in Colombia, but the paperwork was submitted late, and the AG’s office in Washington wouldn’t accept it. By then, Javier and I had transferred back to the United States, and Toft had already retired. Our first- and second-level supervisors, who were still in Bogotá, promised us that they would do the follow-up and resubmit the recommendation the following year, in 1995. The write-up was finally submitted to the AG, but the names had been changed to our first- and second-level supervisors. It was hard for us not to feel that we had just been written out of history.
In June 1995, then attorney general Janet Reno presented the second-highest form of recognition bestowed on an employee of the Department of Justice to our first-and second-level supervisors at DEA. “For their dedicated, energetic efforts under dangerous and hostile conditions, in the eighteen-month investigation and recapture of Pablo Escobar Gaviria. Their emotionally and physically exhausting day-to-day supervision of the case eventually led to the demise of Escobar and his murderous associates within the Medellín Cartel, ending the Medellín Cartel and their reign of terror over Colombia,” Reno said.
The two men were stand-up law enforcement guys with a ton of experience. One of them had helped put together the U.S. government’s case against Carlos Lehder, the only member of the Medellín Cartel to be extradited and convicted in the United States.
But they had barely been to Medellín. They didn’t live day in and day out at the mosquito-infested CNP barracks, where the Bloque de Búsqueda was based. They did good work at the embassy in Bogotá, but it was Javier and me who were the frontline soldiers in America’s war on drugs. We were the gringos with the $300,000 price on our heads—the secret targets that Escobar’s army of young hitmen would have loved to have killed.
After we returned to the States, a lot of people asked us how we survived those years in Colombia under so much pressure and fear. I think that we managed to survive in the face of so much horror because we were determined to rid the world of the evil Escobar. And I have to say that it was our belief in God that sustained us in our battle. Like some knights of yore, we were part of God’s army, and we believed on some level that he had a plan for us. And that plan didn’t include dying in Colombia.
We also knew that the DEA had our backs, especially after the torture and murder of our former DEA colleague Enrique “Kiki” Camarena Salazar in Mexico in 1985. The U.S. government responded to his death at the hands of Mexican drug kingpin Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo’s goons with swift and brutal force, going after the men who had brutally kidnapped Kiki, injecting him with amphetamines so that he remained conscious during more than thirty hours of torture before they killed him. On some level, Escobar must have realized that if he directly and deliberately came after Javier and me, the U.S. government would impose sanctions and restrictions that might actually halt or dramatically hinder his drug-trafficking operation and the flow of billions of dollars in proceeds. In this case, profits were probably much more important to Escobar than the murder of two DEA agents.
Javier and I also knew that the elite members of Colombian law enforcement—the CNP and DIJIN men we came to know so well—who worked on the search for Escobar always had our backs. These are the people we shared information with, who we lived with, ate with, shared some of the same dangerous situations with. We trusted them with our lives. When the bullets started flying, we knew these guys would stand and fight, not run away to safety. But because of the mutual respect we developed for each other, they knew we would stand beside them and fight as well.
After Escobar died, Javier and I went our separate ways. Javier spent some time in Puerto Rico chasing another group of narcos and eventually returned to Colombia to target the Cali Cartel, which had grown in importance after Escobar was out of the picture. In the summer of 1994, I left Colombia with my young family and took up postings in Greensboro, North Carolina, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C.
For years, we were silent about our roles in one of the world’s greatest manhunts. We made no comment, even as a flurry of press reports and books erroneously credited others with Escobar’s demise. One author even accused us of cooperating with Los Pepes, the murderous Colombian vigilantes who went after Escobar during the tail end of the second manhunt. Even though it was simply untrue, we remained silent. That kind of restraint is something you learn when you spend a lot of your working life undercover. You don’t engage; you just do your job.
For years, we just did our jobs, which was dedicated to ridding the world of the scourge of drug traffickers.
And then six years ago, we suddenly found ourselves in the international spotlight when Netflix asked us for our help in putting together Narcos. Our work on the Escobar case was finally revealed to the world, albeit with poetic license on the part of the writers and producers of what has become a wildly popular series.
Both of us still look back at the Escobar hunt and pinch ourselves. We were really just two small-town guys who got the opportunity to work the case of a lifetime—to be frontline soldiers in the greatest manhunt in history.