Cocaina: A Book on Those Who Make It (20 page)

El sicariato
exemplifies very well the sort of religiously coded violence that characterises gang-related phenomena in Latin America, where ‘murdering’ and ‘mothering’ paradoxically go hand in hand. The fact that death — either someone else’s or one’s own — is always lurking around the corner is simply accepted as a fact of life. No
sicario
imagines himself living very long. And the only person a
sicario
truly loves and reveres, a sort of emblem for him, is his mother. She who gives life; the caring individual, normally deserted by the drifting father, who must be supported at all costs and must never be abandoned.

This is exactly how the relationship between Pablo and his mother, Doña Hermilda, developed; the fact that he supported the family financially made him his mother’s favourite son, and a mutual idealisation ran throughout their lives. Escobar built a church in his mother’s honour, and until her death in 2006 Hermilda insisted that her son’s life had been nothing but a long list of good deeds sanctioned by God. The Catholic Church refused to bless her chapel, however, and in a desperate attempt to convince the religious powers that her son’s altar was holy, she sent not only annual letters of prayer to every bishop in the country, but also figurines of saints. They refused to accept them, fearing they were letter bombs.

ACCORDING TO JAMES
Mollison and Rainbow Nelson’s
The Memory of Pablo Escobar
, by mid-1984 the Medellín Cartel controlled 80 per cent of all the cocaine consumed in the world, a figure that to this day no crime syndicate in the global drug market has come close to matching. The fundamental business concept was neither production nor distribution but control, and in order to control anything in Colombia, it is essential that the organisation, whatever it happens to be, has three branches: one financial, one military, and one political.

Gacha, the Ochoa family, and Gustavo managed the finances, while the Castaño brothers, assisted by people such as Guttnan, handled the military. Lehder and Escobar — mostly the latter — tended to the political ambitions of the cartel. Virginia Vallejo had helped them to produce an image of Pablo’s political career as the perfect mix of Messianic populism and nationalistic anti-imperialism, both highly marketable attributes in Latin America. But underpinning the quasi-revolutionary surface was a more fundamental political need: to engage with policy-makers at all levels to ensure the smooth running of the business. Escobar courted everyone from mayors and governors to senators and administrative managers, from directors-general to presidential candidates, and most were easy to manipulate for the right price.

By 1984 Escobar was running the city of Medellín like he was a CEO and it was his own company, while Bogotá, the centre of power, was a different matter entirely. In Bogotá a number of upstanding, uncorrupted ministers, senators, editors, and colonels made it a point, much to the surprise and consternation of the cartel, not to accept bribes, and Escobar soon realised that the hallmark of his working method —
plata o plomo
, money or lead — had to be adjusted so that there would be more of the latter. Many of those who refused his bribes had already been shot, but it became increasingly apparent that much more of this sort of language would be needed.

In the beginning the cartel functioned mostly as an illegal insurance and logistics company, which Escobar used to ensure that no cocaine left Colombia without his knowledge. He took 35 per cent of the earnings on all shipments against guarantees of their arrival, but business quickly expanded, and he and his partners, encouraged by escalating profit margins, began to step up production. They created the largest cocaine laboratory the world had ever seen, located on the Yarí River along the Peruvian border, to which paste was flown in from Peru and Bolivia for industrial-scale processing. ‘Tranquilandia’, as it was cavalierly called, was a conglomerate consisting of 14 labs, plus a barracks for 40 workers and the capacity to produce 20 tonnes of pure cocaine every month. If Nápoles was where Escobar spent money, Tranquilandia was where it was made.

But both playgrounds were about to be taken away from him. Justice minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla not only arranged a debate on the mafia’s foray into politics around the time Escobar was running for Congress, but it was also during Bonilla’s ministry, in March 1984, that the police seized almost 14 tonnes of narcotics, all packed and ready for shipment, in the little cocaine jungle republic of Tranquilandia. The biggest Colombian drug bust in history was a fact. Escobar realised that Lara Bonilla was a new kind of politician with a potential entourage, and one month after the raid the justice minister was found dead.

Yet Escobar underestimated how difficult it would be to silence his opponents. On 28 July 1985 — coincidentally, five days after the murder of Tulio Castro, a judge who had signed an arrest warrant for Escobar and Gacha — Guillermo Cano of
El Espectador
published a scathing editorial:

Mafia leaders begin offering money and if the bribe is rejected, threats are made. If threats go unacknowledged, hit men start executing using machine guns, pistols, and grenades. The judge who refuses blackmail is issued an immediate death sentence without the option to appeal. This is the terrifying situation our judicial system now finds itself in.

The following year Cano was also found dead, but his and Lara Bonilla’s murders gave Colombians something new to fear, and what remained of Escobar’s popularity — stemming primarily from the poor and excluded inhabitants of Medellín — was starting to fade. Fabio Castillo, an investigative reporter for
El Espectador
at the time, exposed Escobar just as he won a seat in Congress for the Liberals, and in this hardening climate both Escobar and Lehder went from having high-flying visions of an ideal society funded by drugs to having to defend themselves with every sort of violence imaginable against increasing demands for their extradition to the United States. For the drug barons, the ten-year span from 1983 to Escobar’s death in 1993 was characterised by the fear of ending up in a US prison, and that was reflected in the homicide rate for 1991, which reached record proportions. That year in Medellín alone, a city with a population of no more than 1.5 million inhabitants, 7081 people were murdered. Seventeen years later, in 2008, Mexico, a country with a population of 108 million, experienced a total of 6000 murders, a fact that led the rest of the world to talk about it as a nation on the verge of total collapse, under attack from a drug mafia. Yet in terms of drug-related violence, Colombia is a nation that knows no equal.

By the late 1980s all but one of the people who had distinguished themselves as Escobar’s most outspoken enemies had been killed. Luis Carlos Galán was not just the Liberal Party candidate for the 1990 presidential election whose victory had been predicted by every opinion poll in sight; he was also was a staunch defender of extradition. For Galán, who was more social democrat than liberal, the drug mafia was just the latest link in a long chain of Colombians who had become accustomed to buying their freedom from national politicians, and this was a phenomenon he despised. Escobar knew that if Galán were elected president, the entire Medellín Cartel would soon find itself sitting in North American prison cells.

FOR 17-YEAR-OLD JUAN
Manuel Galán, 18 August 1989 was a Friday like any other: grey skies, school, and an upcoming weekend. He was a senior, had a new girlfriend and, when love was not on his mind, was thinking about which university he would like to attend.

At 5.00 p.m. he got a call from his father, who scolded him for visiting his girlfriend rather than coming straight home as promised. The family had special safety provisions that were not to be ignored. Juan Manuel kissed his girlfriend goodbye, went home and, three hours later, he was sitting around the television with the rest of the family: his mother, Gloria, and two brothers. On the news that evening, he and the family would watch his father deliver a campaign speech in Soacha, one of Bogotá’s poorest suburbs, before an enormous crowd of supporters.

Climbing into the bed of a truck among cheering proletarians, Galán reminded many of the late Gaitán; he was also a politically passionate man and a brilliant orator who thrived among the people and despised the inherited privileges of the elite. Once again a cautious sense of optimism was in the air; Colombians were more hopeful than they had been in a long time that a new era was on the horizon — one that would prove fairer, more democratic, and less violent.

But just when it looked like a change for the better was about to happen, an all-too-familiar sound rang out on television sets all across Colombia.

While a call on the family telephone just a few minutes before the news broadcast spared the children from seeing the grisly images, the rest of the country watched their hero go down in a shower of bullets. A guard in a light-blue suit was close to his side; both were shot. As the gunfire continued, and images of chaos and screaming bystanders flashed across television screens, the bodies lay there like two motionless piles of clothes. A few minutes later Galán’s bloody body was loaded into a black car and driven to the nearest hospital. Juan Manuel, Gloria, and the brothers jumped into a taxi and headed there too. But all hopes were crushed — for Galán, for his family, and for Colombia.

The assassination of Luis Carlos Galán was Pablo Escobar’s most costly mistake: on 18 August 1989 all of Colombia turned its back on him, and the Medellín Cartel began its downward spiral. Virginia Vallejo had long since left him. Carlos Lehder was arrested. Escobar was now the world’s most wanted terrorist. And he was desperate. As the Berlin Wall came tumbling down, the United States was called in to clean up the most turbulent corner of South America, and the only means by which the cartel could defend itself was unadulterated violence. Between 1989 and 1991 US expenditures for the global anti-drug war increased from 300 to 700 million dollars, with the lion’s share going to Colombia. An unholy alliance of forces was established between the CIA, the Colombian military, the DEA, and Cali Cartel drug lords (keen on taking over the Medellín Cartel’s routes and markets), and in December 1989 they were all able to toast in celebration of their first victim: Rodriguez Gacha, El Mexicano, killed in an operation on the Caribbean coast.

Gacha’s downfall was largely brought about by a former ally, who had crossed over to the rival Cali Cartel and tipped off the police. This not only led to the loss of numerous lucrative routes for Escobar, but also to several paramilitary groups in Magdalena Medio, Gacha’s home region, following suit and turning their backs on the drug lord to start complying with police.

Bombs went off in Bogotá and Medellín every day that fall, and the only people happy about it were the glaziers. The more pressure put on Escobar, the worse his methods became. In Bogotá, a city with a developed sense of gallows humour, old boozers sat chuckling every time an explosion went off. Each burst sent shock waves through the alleys, resulting in entire glass walls of skyscrapers falling to the ground. In September, a bomb went off in the editorial offices of
El Espectador
, blowing out an entire floor; in November, Avianca Flight 203 exploded, with 107 people losing their lives; two weeks later, on 6 December, the security-police headquarters was bombed, killing 89 employees and leaving 500 injured.

But Escobar was on the loose.

During a raid, Hacienda Nápoles estate manager Hernán Henao, one of Escobar’s right-hand men, was arrested. In August 1990 the police, using new surveillance technology from the United States, were able to trace Escobar’s cousin, Gustavo Gaviria, to a house in a suburb of northern Medellín from which he was running cartel operations. He was executed on the spot, and with this death Escobar’s empire was sucked into an even faster downward spiral; the drug routes, essential to the cartel, lost their control officers, and the demise of the cartel was a fact. Escobar desperately tried raising taxes on the smuggling routes he had been able to retain control over, but he was increasingly turning to kidnappings and extortion. The Cali Cartel watched contentedly as the state dismantled their competition, and El Patrón slowly came to the realisation that it would be impossible to win after the United States, which he now despised more than ever, had entered the war in earnest.

But despite a temporary advantage, the Colombian state was also down for the count. In the early 1990s Escobar and the state were like two heavyweights who had somehow knocked each other out at the same time: both sides were exhausted, and the referee was counting down. Virtually all of Escobar’s enemies working in the government were killed; the 1990 presidential election went down in history as the bloodiest ever after four candidates were assassinated; and with 7000 murders in Medellín in 1991 alone, the government concluded that a wounded terrorist, if cornered, could actually pose more of a threat than a healthy one. No one doubted any longer Escobar’s ability to do whatever it took to keep his business afloat and, especially, to avoid extradition. Negotiations for his surrender were initiated, and Latin American history was about to enter into one of its most bizarre chapters yet.

IN MAY 1991
the enormously popular priest Rafael García, serving as mediator between Escobar and the government, proclaimed on his television show
God’s Minute
that Colombia had a fantastic future in store: ‘With Pablo’s surrender the country is going to start a divine life. This country is going to be wonderful!’

The state had conceded to a number of Escobar’s demands — including that he would not be extradited to the United States, as well as that he would have a ‘prison’ of his own, overlooking Medellín — and, to the despair of many, on 19 June a police helicopter flew him up into the beautiful mountains surrounding his beloved city, where he would be detained on house arrest.