TO ATTACK THE powerful drug cartels, the Colombian government organized the Bloque de Busqueda (Search Block), a combined police-army-marine antinarcotics force of 1,500 personnel, which had received training from the United States. In reality, Pablo Escobar was the only drug trafficker that Search Block seemed interested in pursuing. In his typical style of always going on the offensive, Escobar tried to relieve the heat by putting a $27,000 bounty on each Search Block member.
By now, the Colombian public was wondering if El Patron had been protected by Divine Intervention. His exploits during his years on the run had made him a legend in Colombia, and even while in prison, he remained the King of Cocaine. Like the proverbial cat with too many lives, Escobar had escaped time and again, often dramatically, as he stayed one step ahead of his relentless pursuers. Sometimes Search Block would get so close that Escobar had to use such clever disguises or tactics to flee, such as dressing as a woman or riding in a coffin in a carriage.
His legend grew as the press reported on the drug lord’s “imprisonment.” Indeed, Colombians began to wonder if he was really the jailer. “It is a prison that’s no better than any for a similar criminal in the United States,” President Gaviria assured his countrymen. “I do not think any of us would like to spend time there.”
Cynical Colombians scoffed, and dubbed the prison holding Escobar “La Catedral” – the Cathedral. Escobar’s new home stood high on a hill, part of a ten-acre spread that included a soccer field, a gymnasium, a recreational center, a discotheque, a bar and a sweeping view of the Medellin Valley below. Don Pablo, in fact, had supervised the prison’s construction. His 1,000-square-foot “cell” was bigger than the warden’s accommodations, and had a king-sized bed and a private bath with Jacuzzi, as well as fine furnishings handpicked by the prisoner.
For company, Escobar had six of his top lieutenants, including his brother Roberto. The police were not allowed inside the prison, but the press reported comings and goings from the Cathedral at all hours of the day and night. It soon became evident that Escobar was still running his empire from within the prison walls. Yet, the government did nothing. As the truth about the Cathedral leaked out, Gaviria’s popularity plummeted and his strategy for getting the drug lords to surrender became a national joke.
In the following months, mutilated corpses, including those of some of Escobar’s most trusted lieutenants, began turning up in the vicinity of the Cathedral. According to rumors, the victims had been kidnapped and taken to the prison, where, under Escobar’s supervision, they were tortured and killed.
The brazen killings showed that, even while incarcerated, the drug lord had lost none of his arrogant swagger. The king felt that Colombia’s drug trafficking industry owed him big time. After all, he was the one who had stuck his neck out against the state in the fight against extradition, and his terror campaign had benefited all of the country’s traffickers. He began referring to his war against the Colombian state as “my struggle” and demanded that his associates in the Medellin cartel pay him “taxes” – as a fee for every shipment they made.
“The problem with Escobar is that he began to kidnap all the people closest to him,” Gabriel Toboada, a U.S. prisoner and former Medellin cartel member, told the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations in 1994. “He became a person who wanted to do evil to everybody. From his compadres he knew how much each politician had earned, how much each member of the Medellin cartel had earned, and he began to demand money from them, because he said that he was the one who put his name forward in the fight against extradition, and this thing went out of control.”
Giraldo and William Julio Moncada and Fernando and Mario Galeano were among the Escobar associates who refused to pay. They, too, were lured to the Cathedral and, in July 1992, authorities found their mutilated corpses on a roadside a few miles from the prison. After the press reported the killings, the Gaviria administration launched an investigation to find out what was going on at the Cathedral.
To no one’s surprise, the government reported what every Colombian knew – Escobar was actually running the place. He had to be moved to a high-security prison, Gaviria decided, but Escobar learned of the government’s plans while watching the evening news on television. It was time to check out.
In July 1993, Escobar sneaked away into the night, even though 500 soldiers surrounded the prison. He first fled to a ranch, La Romelia, and waited in a hiding place until the initial search patrols left the area and the commotion surrounding his escape subsided. Then Escobar moved to Llanogrande, close to Rionegro, and renewed his life as a fugitive. Once again, the Patron had embarrassed the state. Gaviria knew he had to recapture the drug lord or forget about having an honorable place in Colombian history.
This time Escobar would have a much more difficult time eluding his enemies, for Search Block was just one foe among exit the king many he had to worry about. The families of the Moncadas and Galeanos had vowed revenge and were scheming to exact it. The associates who still remained alive were tired of his bullying ways and of having to put up money to finance his wars with the state. They did not want to be next to be lured to a meeting with El Patron, only to be summarily tortured and killed.
Even his powerful paramilitary allies began to wonder if they could trust Pablo. Paramilitary leader Fidel Castano, who was good friends with the Galeanos and the Moncadas as well an associate of Escobar, was on the “guest” list at the Cathedral the night they were killed. So Escobar had few allies upon whom he could count for strong support. And he also had to worry about the godfathers in Cali, who knew they would never have a good night’s sleep until they removed their bitter enemy from the scene.
On 30 January 1993, a bomb exploded in downtown Bogota, killing twenty people. It was narco war as usual in Colombia. The country’s public enemy number one had sent a message to the nation: Brace yourself. I’m back in the business of attacking the state and unleashing mayhem. But then there was a surprise. The following day, two bombs – one containing an estimated 100 kilos of dynamite and the other containing eighty kilos – exploded in Medellin in front of apartment buildings where Escobar’s wife, two children, his sister and his mother-in-law were staying. It was another close call for the Boss.
Meanwhile, five men showed up at the weekend country retreat of Escobar’s mother, located about forty-five miles from Medellin, ordered the lone caretaker out and blew up the place. In a communiqué released to the press on February 2, a new group calling itself “Persecuted by Pablo Escobar” (Los Pepes) claimed responsibility for the attacks. The communiqué declared that Pepes were working toward “the total elimination of Pablo Escobar, his followers, and his assets to give him a taste of his medicine, which he unfairly dishes out to so many.”
Escobar struck back. Mid-morning on February 15th, two powerful bombs exploded five minutes and twelve blocks apart in downtown Bogota, killing four people and injuring more than 100 others. They were the fifth and sixth car bombs since Escobar’s mid-January declaration of war against the state. But a few hours later, in Medellin, unidentified men traveling in a blue Toyota camper torched an Escobar-owned luxury house in the exclusive El Poblado section.
It was the Pepes again, showing they meant what they had vowed – tit for tat each time Escobar committed a terrorist act. Two days later, gunmen killed Carlos Mario Ossa, a high ranking Escobar financier who was helping to pay for Escobar’s terrorist campaign. The same day, Carlos Alzate, a coordinator of Escobar’s sicario groups, surrendered. Ossa was a key person in passing instructions from Escobar to Alzate, and with Ossa’s death, Alzate had no way of communicating with the Patron. Better to come out of the cold than to end up in a morgue. The Pepes were seriously starting to disrupt Escobar’s organization.
But on March 5th, the Pepes declared a ceasefire, giving no reason for their action, although the press speculated that it was done to give Escobar time to surrender. That did not happen, and exactly one month later the Pepes issued another communiqué, announcing their “commitment to the total annihilation of Escobar,” even if “he was captured and put in jail.” In other words, the Pepes were saying, “We will get you, Pablo, no matter what you do.”
The Pepes continued to attack Escobar’s infrastructure, causing anyone associated with him to fear for their lives. Assassins gunned down two lawyers employed by Escobar’s brother Roberto and associate Carlos Alzate. The same day, the Pepes killed Escobar’s most important attorney, Guido Parra, and Parra’s eighteen-year-old son in retaliation for Escobar’s north Bogota car bomb that killed eleven and injured over 200 people.
It became obvious that the Pepes were actually trying not only to kill Escobar but also to humiliate him. That was evident when they stole “Terremoto,” a stallion owned by exit the king Escobar’s brother Roberto and valued at more than $1 million, and then returned it in a slightly altered condition – gelded. Terremoto was tied to a sign that read: “We return the horse to the terrible Escobar and his brother.” The Pepes also murdered Roberto’s horse trainer, Oscar Cardona Zuleta. In a cable, the U.S. embassy noted, “The loss of Terremoto as a sire is seen locally as a grave insult to the Escobars.”
The carnage caused by the Pepes was unremitting. By mid-November, they had assassinated fifty of Escobar’s people, including his brother-in-law, and destroyed some twenty properties belonging to his relatives and associates. The vigilantes could not catch the big fish, but they were slowly poisoning the sea in which it swam. They were embarrassing the Colombian government as well. Why was not the Gaviria administration getting control of the situation, Colombians wondered? Are the Pepes and government working together?
Gustavo De Greiff, the country’s prosecuting attorney general, said that his office seriously tried to investigate the Pepes, but it was never able to get any good information or leads on the people behind it.When the Gaviria administration issued a $1.39-million dollar reward for the capture of the Pepes’ leaders, the group once again announced its intention to disband. Escobar, however, was not impressed. The drug lord suspected the government and the Pepes were in cahoots against him, and he didn’t believe the administration had any real intentions of identifying the people behind Los Pepes.
In a letter to the government dated August 29th, Escobar charged that “the government offers rewards for the leaders of the Medellin Cartel and for the leaders of the guerrillas, but it doesn’t offer rewards for the leaders of the paramilitaries, nor for those of the Cali Cartel, authors of various car bombs in the city of Medellin.” He identified the individuals whom he believed to be behind the Pepes: the four leaders of the Cali cartel (the Rodriguez brothers, Santacruz Londono, and Herrera) and paramilitary leader Carlos Castano.
Were the Pepes and the Colombian government working together? During the period that the Pepes launched their campaign against Escobar, U.S. and Colombian officials publicly denied the Cali cartel had supplied them with information that was helping in the hunt for Escobar. Today, officials readily acknowledge that the men from Cali played the key role in taking down Escobar. “As soon as Escobar killed the Galeanos and Moncadas, their people saw themselves as vulnerable and they ran to the Cali cartel and said, ‘ We want to change sides,’” said Joe Toft, chief of the DEA’s Bogota office from 1988 to 1994. “The Cali people said, ‘Okay, if you want to change sides, you need to pay us.’ A lot of money changed hands.”
The Colombian government was in a death struggle with Escobar and it did not care where information came from, so long as it was credible. “The Colombian government wasn’t going to get information about Escobar from the Vatican,” explained Robert Nieves, the DEA’s chief of international operations from 1989 to 1995. “Sometimes, having to deal with scumbags is the nature of the beast. Sometimes, you have to get into the sewer because that’s where you’ll get the best information.”
The Cali intelligence operation rivaled those of many governments and this was a major factor in taking down Escobar, sources confirmed. As Ernesto Samper, Colombia’s former president, explained, “The cartel’s intelligence network was the key element”. The Cali mafia had a highly sophisticated computer system that they used to gather information on the Medellin cartel, which helps to explain why the Pepes were able to find and kill so many rivals when they were most vulnerable.
The cartel kept its computer system in Bogota before moving it to Cali. Always in step with state-of-the-art technology, the cartel replaced it with a more sophisticated and expensive system that Santacruz bought in the United States and kept in one of his businesses. Still, some former U.S. officials remained ambivalent about the cartel’s assistance. “No question the [Colombian] government was getting intelligence about Escobar from the Cali cartel,” said Robert Gelbard, who served as assistant secretary of state for Latin American affairs during the hunt for Escobar. “In some ways that was all right, but it wasn’t all right that the Cali cartel bought off some members of the Colombian government.”
In September 1995, an interview with Pacho Herrera appeared in El Tiempo. The reporter asked him, “How did you bring down Pablo Escobar?” Herrera replied, “I spent a fortune on that. I paid informants so that they would pass information to the law, and the law annihilated Pablo Escobar. Personally or physically, I never contributed anything.” Herrera denied ever being involved with the Pepes, but after the Pepes episode, reports were published alleging that the United States had turned a blind eye to the ruthless actions of Herrera and his associates.
In an article in the Miami Herald, Colonel Oscar Naranjo, the director of the Colombian police intelligence services during the search for Escobar, said that American drug agencies knew of the direct channel of communications existing between the police and the Pepes and that American anti-drug agencies knew of its existence and took advantage of it.” A source known as “Ruben,” who had been a Pepes member, asserted that the group had actually kept in contact with DEA agent Javier Pena, who worked in Medellin as the DEA’s liaison to Search Block. Time magazine also reported that Carlos Castano visited Disneyland as a reward for his work in getting Escobar, which Amnesty International characterized as a euphemism for his work for the Pepes.
In his autobiography, My Confession, published in 2001, paramilitary leader Carlos Castano said he met with Gilberto Rodriguez seven times and loaned him helicopters. “They were the bosses,” recalled Castano in reference to the Cali godfathers. “It’s normal to have these types of relations in a country like Colombia.”
Paul Paz y Minao, a spokesperson for Amnesty International, said that revelations about the U.S. connection to the Pepes raised the question as to whether the U.S. government acted within the law. “The organization was illegal and it committed criminal acts,” he explained. “U.S. law forbids government agencies from collaborating with them.” Amnesty International filed lawsuits to get access to CIA records relating to the Pepes.
Both the Cali cartel and U.S. government intelligence helped get Escobar, along with input from the elite Delta Force unit of American Special Forces troops, but U.S. officials stressed that good police work done by Colombian security forces on the case should not be underestimated. “I know Delta Force is credited with being the difference, but we shouldn’t give it too much credit,” Pena explained. “To do so is to short-change the Colombian National Police. The Delta Force is good at what they do and they did train the Colombian police how to read coordinates and plan the operations, but Delta Force was never directly involved, lthough they did provide logistical support.”
As the Pepes and the Colombian government destroyed Escobar’s infrastructure, he became desperate for his family’s safety and tried to get his wife, Maria Victoria Henao, and their children out of Colombia. Colombian immigration authorities, however, denied his wife permission because she didn’t have Pablo’s written approval. Morris Busby, U.S. ambassador to Colombia, noted in a cable that Escobar’s “continued efforts to get his children out of Colombia and to re-constitute his terrorist bombs suggest that he has not given up on his war against the government, but consistent police work that target his trafficking and terrorist infrastructure are threatening his plans.”
Colombia’s nightmare ended on 2 December 1993, when the alliance of the CNP, U.S. law enforcement and the Pepes achieved their objective of poisoning the sea around the big fish. When all the escapes and violence had ended, Escobar was alone with a single bodyguard, Alvaro de Jesus Aguela, in a middle-class, two-story house in a Medellin barrio. Using the high-tech equipment supplied by the United States, Search Block intercepted a call Escobar made to his family, who were holed up in room 2908 of the Residencia Tequendama in Bogota. Security personnel surrounded the house and cut the telephone lines in the barrio so no one could warn the drug lord.
Escobar never had a chance. Authorities knocked the door down and stormed the apartment. Dressed only in a T-shirt and jeans, Escobar tried to flee to the roof, but his pursuers gunned him down. Autopsy reports later showed that he had been hit three times, with a shot to the head killing him instantly.
Escobar’s death raised a relevant question. Had he been killed trying to flee or was he executed? Most Colombians could care less. A Bogota radio station reported the news of Escobar’s death in mantra like fashion, while in the background, carolers sang “Joy to the World.” Colombian newspapers, once bludgeoned into timidity by Escobar’s power and violence, printed in bold headlines, “Escobar has fallen!” “The King is dead!” When Cali radio stations broadcast the good news, residents celebrated by forming caravans of horn tooting automobiles and waving white flags from the Rodriguez-owned Drogas La Rebaja pharmacies.
An elated Cesar Gaviria called Ambassador Busby to thank him for all the assistance the U.S. gave Colombia in its hunt for Pablo, and Busby, in turn, called Colombia’s defense and foreign ministries to congratulate them. The U.S. embassy in Bogota issued a press release congratulating the Colombian government.
A spy in the CNP called Miguel Rodriguez from Medellin to inform him of the good news. Miguel immediately called his brother Gilberto, and during the conversation, he began to cry. Later he hugged his startled accountant Guillermo Pallomari. The uncharacteristic gesture from the normally intense and business-like Godfather frightened the accountant and revealed how much strain the gentlemen from Cali were under in their war with Escobar. According to Pallomari, Miguel then got on his private line and called Gustavo De Greiff to inform him.
On December 18th, less than ten days after being put in isolation in Itagui Prison in Medellin to protect him from his enemies, Pablo’s brother Roberto received a package. As he tried to open it, it exploded in his face. The package had the seal of the prosecuting general’s office, and prison officials had not opened it because they believed it carried privileged information. The package should have been x-rayed as part of normal security procedures, but the equipment curiously malfunctioned about an hour before the package arrived.
Roberto suffered severe damage to both eyes, and he was transferred to a hospital for surgery. Colombian authorities launched an investigation the day after to see if the three guards who handled the letter had any link to the perpetrators. In a report to the State Department, the U.S. embassy in Bogota assessed, “while no one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack on Roberto Escobar, the Pepes are the most likely suspects.” Escobar’s family remained in seclusion at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota, still looking for a country to accept them.
Pablo’s eight-year-old daughter Manuela made an emotional appeal on television to the Pepes, imploring them to stop their attacks on her family, and another one to President Gaviria, asking him to help them leave the country. “What have I done for this to be happening to me?” Manuela asked.
Cali’s godfathers felt relieved that their bitter enemy was finally buried in a grave, but they were uncomfortable with being crowned “the New Kings of Cocaine” by the press. What course of action the Colombian and U.S. governments would take in the War on Drugs remained uncertain. Some U.S. officials, such as Robert C. Bryden, the head of the DEA’s New York regional office, pointed out that the Cali cartel now had no competition, “so they can go on any corner of any city in this country [the U.S.] and nobody in the drug business can oppose them.”
Other analysts and law enforcement officials wondered how aggressively the Colombian government would pursue a more peaceful breed of drug trafficker not known for narco-terrorism. Still, the Colombian government announced it would keep Search Block together to begin their pursuit of the Cali cartel.
In its hunt for Escobar, the U.S. and Colombian governments had not totally ignored Cali. Even as the pursuit of Escobar intensified, authorities were working to penetrate Cali’s infrastructure. They conducted a series of raids on drug processing labs, official residences, and office residences belonging to the godfathers, destroying nearly twenty tons of processed cocaine and 100 laboratories.
In January 1992, the Colombian security forces conducted their first operation against the cartel’s money-laundering operations, carrying out thirty-two simultaneous raids, not only in Cali but also in Bogota and Baranquilla. They seized numerous computers, floppy disks and 20,000 other financial records and uncovered information that led to three arrests and the freezing of $15 million in bank accounts in Colombia, Britain, Germany, Hong Kong, and the United States.
By March 1992, U.S. officials began to see a change in the cartel. In a cable, the U.S. embassy noted, “The Cali cartel is very concerned about the capabilities of the U.S. government to interfere with their operations. They appear to be paranoid.” As evidence of their paranoia, the report noted that the godfathers were living less ostentatiously and driving cars built and sold in Colombia as an effort to keep a low profile in an environment that was increasingly hostile to them.
Through Operation Belalcazar III, authorities arrested Diego Martin Buitrago on September 18, 1993, one of the cartel’s major contacts in Cali. On December 1st, police raided an estate near Cali belonging to Jose Santacruz Londono. Ambassador Busby told his superiors in Washington D.C. that “Pablo Escobar’s death and the disabling of the Medellin cartel are great successes for Colombia, but now they should continue with the Cali cartel.”
On December 13th, the U.S. embassy announced that 120 U.S. army engineers were arriving in Colombia in late December to undertake a ten-week construction project in the jungle village of Juanchaco, about seventy-five miles from Cali. Officials from both countries insisted that the troops were there solely to build schools and roads, but many Cali residents believed the project’s true purpose was to construct a major base to gather intelligence and stage raids on the cartel infrastructure.
In late December, the press reported that lawyers for the Cali cartel and officials from the office of Prosecuting Attorney General Gustavo De Greiff’s office had made contact and were negotiating. A special jail was being built to accommodate up to 300 gang members, including three of the godfathers, who were planning to surrender, or so the story went. Under an agreement, said the rumor mill, the godfathers would keep their assets and get light sentences, as little as two years.
Meanwhile the cartel was exploring its options in the post-Escobar period. Its leaders held an important meeting to discuss their future and how they could increase drug trafficking to the United States and grow internationally. “We need to control the drug trafficking market at the world level,” Miguel told his partners. “We need to be able to set the price and to control the price.” The cartel had big dreams and big plans, but its next nightmare was already taking shape.