I never thought I would go back to Medellín after Escobar was killed, but a few months later, I found myself in a familiar routine, sitting in the back seat of a CNP jeep for the stomach-churning ride through the winding roads into the city. This time, Connie sat next to me. We were on our way to adopt our baby daughter, Mandy, from an orphanage in the city. We were full of anticipation and excitement as we left our Bogotá apartment in a predawn mist, even though it meant traveling to a place to which I had no desire to ever return. We left Monica asleep with a babysitter and happily set out on our journey.
Connie didn’t say anything after we landed in Medellín, her first time in the city. I could tell she was nervous, probably reliving all the times that I had traveled to the city under much worse circumstances. We never spoke about it, but the full horror of what my job had entailed in the hunt for Pablo Escobar must have hit her all at once, and she had already turned visibly pale as we disembarked from our Avianca flight and were met on the tarmac of the Rionegro Airport by a full security detail of heavily armed CNP officers to escort us into the city. They were all members of the Search Bloc, and for me, it was a happy reunion. For Connie, it was more of a horror show.
They had wanted us to board the Huey helicopter gunship that was waiting for us on the runway, but Connie stopped in her tracks. She took one look at the helicopter and squeezed my hand, and then in a barely audible whisper, she leaned over and said, “There’s absolutely no way I’m getting into that thing.”
Maybe the security did seem over the top, but I barely noticed. I had gotten used to being a gringo target, and for all I knew, I was still a target in Colombia even after Escobar was dead and the Medellín Cartel was in tatters. For the past year and a half, I had become accustomed to looking over my shoulder and being escorted at all times by square-jawed Colombian police officers armed to the teeth. And while Connie had lived in Bogotá during Escobar’s reign of terror, Medellín was different. For years, it had been ground zero for the drug wars—a city constantly on edge, where every parked car could still hold a bomb.
In fact, I had to get special permission from the embassy to return to Medellín to adopt Mandy. After Escobar’s death, Connie and I knew that we had very limited time in Colombia, which remained a nondependent post for DEA agents. We needed to leave with our daughter Monica, but we desperately wanted a sister for our baby. Alissa, who had served us so well during our first adoption, was leaving her job at the federal agency in Bogotá and could no longer help us. This time, I was the one who took the initiative after I met the deputy director of a Medellín adoption agency. She was visiting the embassy with a group of Americans who had just adopted children through the Medellín agency, Casa de María y el Niño. Connie gave the information to Alissa, who made the initial contact for us before she left her post in Bogotá. Weeks after Escobar was killed, we had several conversations by phone with the director, an enthusiastic woman named Maria who spoke excellent English. She promised to find us an infant, and by April 1994, she sent us a picture of Mandy in the mail. Of course, she was beautiful, with almost a full head of dark hair and deep dimples. We held out the small picture to Monica, who seemed nonplussed by the prospect of meeting her new little sister, but we were ecstatic and couldn’t wait to hold Mandy in our arms.
Ambassador Busby himself signed off on our trip to Medellín to finalize Mandy’s adoption, and I had warned Connie ahead of time that we would need armed escorts the whole time we were there. Moreover, we would only be allowed to be in the city during daytime hours. Staying overnight was considered too risky. While Escobar was no longer a threat, the situation was still tense with the remnants of gangs of sicarios roaming the hillside shantytowns.
When Connie pulled me aside at the Medellín airport, I approached the lieutenant who had come to meet us, and as graciously as I could, I told him that the helicopter would not work for us, as we had numerous appointments in the city. The lieutenant radioed the CNP colonel in charge in Bogotá who had set up our security detail, and he explained the situation. The colonel instructed the lieutenant to do whatever we needed done and to stay with us as long as we were in Medellín.
I’m not sure Connie was happy with the alternative as we were escorted throughout the city in a caravan of CNP jeeps in the company of heavily armed plainclothes police officers.
Once out of the airport, they drove through the winding highway into the city at breakneck speed.
Of course, Connie had heard me tell stories about this harrowing drive before, but she really didn’t appreciate the circumstances until she lived it for herself. Although we no longer carried our pistols, our fingers hovering over the trigger, the driving was every bit as fast and dangerous. Connie was white-knuckled the entire trip, holding on to anything she could get her hands on. As we rattled over the treacherous mountain roads, I reached over to her, but she sat stock-still, visibly horrified by this crazy operation.
Casa de María y el Niño was the only home on a quiet street on the outskirts of the city. A long dirt driveway led to a gated fence that surrounded the property. When we passed the gate, we saw young children running and playing in the fields that surrounded the orphanage. They were excited by the arrival of the two gringos who descended from the police caravan, and some of the kids ran to greet us as we got out of our jeep. Others followed us and grabbed on to our hands as we made our way through the front lawn to the main building. Later, we found out that they were all hoping we had come to adopt them.
The building where the adoption agency was located was clean but spare. There were lots of pictures of children on the walls, and everyone we met there was polite and professional. As we walked through the halls, we could hear children singing, playing, and laughing. This was very impressive to us. We didn’t hear any kids screaming or crying.
Maria, the director whom we had spoken to numerous times on the phone, was there to greet us when we entered. She was middle-aged, well-dressed, and extremely polite. Her English was fluent, and she told us that she had traveled many times to the United States. She carried a sheaf of documents that would allow us to become temporary foster parents until the adoption could be completed. We would need to return to Medellín another time to finalize everything, but we would be allowed to take Mandy with us once we saw her.
We signed all the paperwork in Maria’s office, quickly noting Mandy’s birth date, her weight at birth, and her mother’s name. After the bureaucratic formalities, we were then shown to a larger room where Mandy was brought to us by an employee. She had been dropped off that morning by her foster mother, who had received another baby that same day.
Mandy, all of five months old, smiled at us as soon as we saw her, the little dimples forming on her soft cheeks. She had the most beautiful eyes and the longest eyelashes we’d ever seen on a child. She never once cried or fussed when people held her. Maria allowed us to hold her, and we fell in love right away.
We worried about Monica, who was now fourteen months old. We didn’t know how she would handle a younger sister. On the night we arrived, Monica met us at the front door with Susan Jaquez, our closest friend in Colombia and the wife of a fellow DEA agent. Susan had been taking care of Monica while we were in Medellín and had helped to prepare her for Mandy’s arrival, although we had been doing this for weeks, explaining to Monica that she would soon have another little girl to play with. When we walked into the apartment, she was very excited and immediately started acting like the big sister.
We arranged blankets on the floor and got down to introduce all the girls, including Susan. Connie introduced Monica to Mandy and explained that this was her new sister. Immediately, Monica got next to Mandy and started babbling, offering Mandy a baby bottle, bringing her tissues and a little doll to play with. We kept a very close watch on the two of them because Monica didn’t fully understand how delicate a baby can be. Monica tried to hand bigger toys and dolls to Mandy, who was too little to physically handle most of those items, so Monica would simply drop them. Most landed next to Mandy, but one or two landed on Mandy, so we had to be alert to that. But all in all, Monica and Mandy immediately became sisters and have had that special sister bond since that first day.
A few weeks later, we returned to the orphanage to finalize Mandy’s adoption. Members of the CNP picked us up at Rionegro Airport, and this time there was no talk of getting into the helicopter gunship; we simply got into the waiting jeeps and were whisked into the city, where we would sign the legal paperwork officially making Mandy a member of our family.
We signed the papers in the spare office and prepared to go, eager to return to our two little girls in Bogotá.
Once the formalities were finished, Maria asked us if she could speak to us privately before we returned to Bogotá. We sat in straight-backed chairs in her office, worried that maybe something had gone wrong with the adoption. But Maria assured us that Mandy was legally ours and that no one could take her away from us.
“I want to know who you really are,” said Maria, fixing me with a steady gaze.
When I asked her why she would ask us that, Maria apologized for the directness of the question, but by way of explanation, she said that her agency had finalized adoptions with many Americans but that she had never seen anyone like us—with so much attendant security.
“I work for the Department of Justice,” I said, maybe too curtly. Anyway, I was hoping to leave it at that.
But she knew that there was something more to our story—something beyond what we had included in our official paperwork, where we had identified ourselves as U.S. government employees.
“Please, tell me what you do for the Department of Justice,” she said. “It won’t go beyond this room, but I need to know.”
That’s when I asked her if she knew what DEA stood for. Maria raised her eyebrows and then broke into a big smile.
“I thought that might be the case,” she said. Then she pointed out the large window in her office to an eight-story condo that was located on a hill above the orphanage. She asked me if I knew who had once lived there.
I told her that it was the Monaco building, now abandoned, where Pablo Escobar once lived with his family—the same building that Los Pepes had attacked during the final months of their own murderous campaign against the Medellín Cartel.
I was still hesitant about this line of questioning and asked if this was a problem. Maria immediately answered that there was no problem and that she and all her employees at the orphanage had immense respect for the Colombian National Police and for what the Americans had done to try to sort out the problems with drug trafficking and violence in her country.
And then, with tears in her eyes, she told us the story of her teenage son who had been finishing high school and working hard to get into college. One day, he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, passing a group of drug traffickers who were in the midst of a heated argument. Before her son and his friends could leave the area, the narcos started shooting at each other, and her son was stuck in the cross fire, killed instantly by a stray bullet.
I can’t imagine how awful this was for Maria and her family, but I knew that it was the story of all of Colombia under the evil that was Pablo Escobar. There were thousands of similar stories of innocent people—children—who had paid the ultimate price.
At that point, I felt I owed Maria the truth, and I explained to her that my partner Javier and I were the two gringos who had spent nearly two years living at the nearby Holguín base, working with the Bloque de Búsqueda to get Escobar.
Maria was overwhelmed, and the tears flowed freely. She came around her desk and hugged both Connie and me.
“Thank you,” she said through her tears as she held me in a tight embrace. “Thank you for adopting this sweet little girl. And thank you for all you have done for Colombia.”
Then Maria escorted us to the police convoy that was waiting for us in front of the building and waved us goodbye.