News of a Kidnapping (21 page)

“Let’s talk straight, no more bullshit,” said Villamizar. “What’s going on?”

“If the police don’t stop the killings and don’t
punish the ones responsible, there’s no chance they’ll let doña Maruja go. That’s it in a nutshell.”

Blind with rage, Villamizar cursed Escobar with a string of oaths and finished by saying:

“And you, you better get lost, because the man who’s going to kill you is me.”

Guido Parra vanished. Not only because of Villamizar’s violent reaction but also because of Pablo Escobar’s, who apparently
did not forgive him for overstepping his authority as a negotiator. Hernando Santos could appreciate this when a terrified Guido Parra called to say that he had such an awful letter for him from Escobar that he did not even have the courage to read it to him.

“The man is crazy,” he said. “Nobody can calm him down, and the only thing I can do is disappear from the face of the earth.”

Hernando
Santos, knowing this would cut off his only channel to Pablo Escobar, tried to convince him to stay on. He failed. The last favor Guido Parra asked was that he get him a visa for Venezuela and arrange for his son to finish his studies at the Gimnasio Moderno in Bogotá. Unconfirmed rumors say that he took refuge in a convent in Venezuela where one of his sisters was a nun. Nothing else was known about
him until April 16, 1993, when he was found dead in Medellín, in the trunk of a car with no license plates, along with his son the secondary school graduate.

Villamizar needed time to recover from a terrible sense of defeat. He was crushed by remorse for having believed in Escobar’s word. Everything seemed lost. During the negotiations he had kept Dr. Turbay and Hernando Santos informed, for
they too had been left with no channels to Escobar. They saw one another almost every day, and little by little he stopped telling them about the setbacks and gave them only encouraging news. He spent long hours in the company of the former president, who endured the death of his daughter with heartrending stoicism; he retreated into himself and refused to make a statement of any kind: He became
invisible. Hernando Santos, whose only hope of freeing his son had been based on Parra’s mediation, slipped into a profound depression.

The murder of Marina, and in particular the brutal way it had been discovered and announced, gave rise to inevitable questions about what to do now. Every possibility for mediation of the kind provided by the Notables had been exhausted, yet no other intermediary
seemed effective. Goodwill and indirect methods made no sense.

Villamizar was clearsighted about the situation, and he unburdened himself to Rafael Pardo. “Imagine how I feel,” he said. “For all these years Escobar has been my family’s cross, and mine. First he threatens me. Then he makes an attempt on my life, and it’s a miracle I escape. He goes on threatening me. He assassinates Galán. He
abducts my wife and my sister, and now he wants me to defend his rights.” There was no consolation to be had, however, because his fate had been decided: The only certain road to freedom for the hostages led straight to the lion in his den. In plain language: The only thing left for him to do—and he was bound to do it—was fly to Medellín and find Pablo Escobar, wherever he might be, and discuss the
situation face-to-face.

The problem was how to find Pablo Escobar in a city martyrized by violence. In the first two months of 1991 there had been twelve hundred murders—twenty a day—and a massacre every four days. An agreement among almost all the armed groups had led to
the bloodiest escalation of guerrilla violence in the history of the country, and Medellín was the center of urban terrorism. A total of 457 police had been killed in only a few months. The DAS had said that two thousand people in the slums were working for Escobar, many of them adolescents who earned their living hunting down police. For each dead officer they received five million pesos, for each
agent a million and a half, and 800,000 for each one wounded. On February 16, 1991, three low-ranking officers and eight agents of the police were killed when a car was blown up with 150 kilos of dynamite outside the bullring in Medellín. Nine passersby were also killed and another 143, who had nothing to do with the war, were injured.

The Elite Corps, the frontline troops in the battle against
drug trafficking, were branded by Pablo Escobar as the incarnation of all evil. The Corps had been created in 1989 by President Virgilio
Barco, when he was driven to despair by his inability to establish precise responsibility in entities as large as the army and the police. Its formation had been entrusted to the National Police in order to distance the military as much as possible from the deadly
contagions of drug trafficking and paramilitarism. It began with only three hundred men, who had a special squadron of helicopters at their disposal and were trained by the Special Air Service (SAS) of the British government.

The new group had begun operations along the midsection of the Magdalena River, in the center of the country, at the time the paramilitary groups created by landowners to
fight the guerrillas were most active. From there a group specializing in urban operations broke off and established itself in Medellín as a freewheeling body of legionnaires answerable only to the National Police Commission in Bogotá, without any intermediate jurisdictions, and, by its very nature, not overly meticulous regarding the limits of its authority. They sowed confusion among the criminals,
and also among the local authorities, who were very reluctant to assimilate an autonomous force over which they had no control. The Extraditables fought them in a bloody war, and accused them of responsibility for every kind of human rights violation.

The people of Medellín knew that not all the Extraditables’ denunciations of murder and abuse by the police were unfounded, because they witnessed
them on the streets, though in most cases there was no official acknowledgment that they had occurred. National and international human rights organizations protested, and the government had no credible response. Months later it was decided that no raids could be made without the presence of a representative of the Prosecutor General’s Office, leading to the inevitable bureaucratization of their
operations.

There was little the judicial system could do. Judges and magistrates, whose low salaries were barely enough to live on, but not enough to pay for the education of their children, faced an insoluble dilemma: Either they sold themselves to the drug traffickers,
or they were killed. The admirable and heartbreaking fact is that many chose death.

Perhaps the most Colombian aspect of
the situation was the astonishing capacity of the people of Medellín to accustom themselves to everything, good and bad, with a resiliency that may be the cruelest form courage can take. Most did not seem aware that they were living in a city that had always been the most beautiful, the liveliest, the most hospitable in the country, and in recent years had become one of the most dangerous in the world.
Until this time, urban terrorism had been a rare element in the centuries-old culture of Colombian violence. The same historical guerrilla groups who now practiced it had once condemned it, and with reason, as an illegitimate form of revolutionary struggle. People had learned to live with the fear of what had happened, but not with uncertainty about what might happen: an explosion that would
blow up one’s children at school, or disintegrate the plane in midair, or pulverize vegetables at the market. Random bombs that killed the innocent and anonymous threats on the telephone had surpassed all other causes of anguished anxiety in daily life. Yet the economy of Medellín was not affected in statistical terms.

Years earlier the drug traffickers had been popular because of their mythic
aura. They enjoyed complete impunity and even a certain prestige because of their charitable works in the marginal neighborhoods where they had spent their impoverished childhoods. If anyone had wanted them arrested, he could have told the policeman on the corner where to find them. But a good part of Colombian society viewed them with a curiosity and interest that bore too close a resemblance to
complacency. Politicians, industrialists, businesspeople, journalists, even ordinary freeloaders, came to the perpetual party at the Hacienda Nápoles, near Medellín, where Pablo Escobar kept a zoo with giraffes and hippos brought over from Africa, and where the entrance displayed, as if it were a national monument, the small plane used to export the first shipment of cocaine.

Luck and a clandestine
life had left Escobar in charge of the henhouse, and he became a legend who controlled everything from the shadows. His communiqués, with their exemplary style and perfect cunning, began to look so much like the truth that one was mistaken for the other. At the height of his splendor, people put up altars with his picture and lit candles to him in the slums of Medellín. It was believed he could
perform miracles. No Colombian in history ever possessed or exercised a talent like his for shaping public opinion. And none had a greater power to corrupt. The most unsettling and dangerous aspect of his personality was his total inability to distinguish between good and evil.

This was the invisible, improbable man Alberto Villamizar proposed to seek out in mid-February so that he could talk
him into returning his wife. He would begin by making contact with the three Ochoa brothers in the high-security Itagüí prison. Rafael Pardo—with the president’s approval—gave him the green light but reminded him of the limitations: This was not an official negotiation but an exploratory move. Pardo told him he could make no agreement in exchange for concessions from the government, but that the
government was interested in the surrender of the Extraditables within the boundaries set by the capitulation policy. This new approach was the springboard for Villamizar’s idea of also changing the thrust of his own efforts, centering them not on the release of the hostages—which had been the focus so far—but on the surrender of Pablo Escobar. One would be a simple consequence of the other.

And so began a second captivity for Maruja and a different kind of battle for Villamizar. Escobar probably intended to release her with Beatriz, but the Diana Turbay tragedy may have upset his plans. Aside from bearing responsibility for a death he had not ordered, the killing of Diana must have been a disaster for him, robbing him of an object of inestimable value and, in the end, complicating his
life. Police activity flared up again with so much intensity that he was forced to submerge all the way to the bottom.

With Marina dead, he had been left with Diana, Pacho, Maruja, and Beatriz. If he had decided at that moment to execute one, perhaps it would have been Beatriz. With Beatriz free and Diana dead, he was left with two: Pacho and Maruja. Perhaps he would have preferred to keep Pacho
for his exchange value, but Maruja had acquired an unforeseen and incalculable worth because of Villamizar’s persistence in keeping contacts alive until the government decided to issue a more explicit decree. For Escobar too, the only lifesaver in the water was Villamizar’s mediation, and the only thing that could guarantee it was holding on to Maruja. The two men were condemned to each other.

Villamizar began by visiting doña Nydia Quintero to learn the details of her experience. He found her generous, resolved, serene in her mourning. She recounted her conversations with the Ochoa sisters, with the old patriarch, with Fabio in prison. She gave the impression of having assimilated the awful death of her daughter, and she did not invoke it because of grief or for the sake of vengeance,
but so that it might be useful in achieving peace. In that spirit she gave Villamizar a letter for Pablo Escobar in which she expressed her hope that Diana’s death might help to prevent any other Colombian from ever feeling the sorrow she felt. She began by admitting that the government could not stop raids against criminals, but it could avoid attempts to rescue the hostages, for the families knew,
the government knew, everyone knew that if they happened upon the captives during one of their raids, it could cause an irreparable tragedy, like the one that had befallen her daughter. “For this reason I come to you,” the letter said, “my heart overflowing with pain, forgiveness, and goodwill, to implore you to free Maruja and Francisco.” And she ended with a surprising request: “Give me your
word that you did not want Diana to die.” Months later, from prison, Escobar made public his astonishment at Nydia’s having composed that letter free of recriminations or rancor. “How it grieves me,” Escobar wrote, “that I did not have the courage to answer her.”

Villamizar went to Itagüí to visit the three Ochoa brothers, carrying Nydia’s letter and the government’s unwritten authority. Two
bodyguards from DAS accompanied him, and the Medellín police added six more. He found the Ochoas newly installed in the high-security prison, with three checkpoints that were slow, repetitive, and placed at regular intervals, and bare adobe walls that gave the impression of an unfinished church. The empty corridors, the narrow stairways with yellow pipe railings, the alarms in full view, ended at
a cellblock on the third floor where the three Ochoa brothers whiled away the years of their sentences making fine leather goods: saddles and all kinds of equestrian trappings. The entire family was there: children, in-laws, sisters. Martha Nieves, the most active of them, and María Lía, Jorge Luis’s wife, acted as hostesses with the exemplary hospitality of the Medellinese.

He arrived when it
was time for lunch, which was served at the far end of the courtyard in a large open structure that had posters of movie stars on the walls, professional exercise equipment, and a dining table large enough to seat twelve. Under a security arrangement, the food was prepared at the nearby Hacienda La Loma, the family’s official residence, and on that day it was a succulent display of local cuisine.
While they were eating they followed the unbreakable Antioquian custom of discussing nothing but the food.

After the meal, with all the formality of a family council, the dialogue began. It was not as easy as the harmonious lunch might have led one to suppose. Villamizar started off in his slow, calculated, explanatory way that leaves little room for questions because everything seems to have
been answered ahead of time. He gave a detailed account of his negotiations with Guido Parra and the abruptness with which they were broken off, and concluded with his conviction that only direct contact with Pablo Escobar could save Maruja.

“Let’s try to stop this barbarism,” he said. “Let’s talk, instead of making more mistakes. First, let me assure you there is no possibility
at all that we
will attempt an armed rescue. I prefer to talk, to know what is going on and what people want.”

Jorge Luis, the eldest brother, took the lead. He told about the losses suffered by the family in the turbulence of the dirty war, the reasons for their surrender and the difficulties surrounding it, and the unbearable fear that the Constituent Assembly would not prohibit extradition.

“This has been
a very hard war for us,” he said. “You can’t imagine what we have suffered, what the family and our friends have suffered. Everything has happened to us.”

He gave precise details: his sister, Martha Nieves, abducted; his brother-in-law, Alonso Cárdenes, abducted and murdered in 1986; his uncle, Jorge Iván Ochoa, abducted in 1983; and his cousins, Mario Ochoa and Guillermo León Ochoa, abducted
and murdered.

Villamizar, in turn, tried to show that he was as victimized by the war as they, to make them understand they would all have to pay equally for anything that happened from then on. “It’s been as hard for me as for you,” he said. “The Extraditables tried to assassinate me in ’86, I had to go to the ends of the earth and even there they pursued me, and now they’ve abducted my wife
and my sister.” He was not there to complain, however, but to put himself on an equal footing with them.

“It’s an abuse,” he concluded, “and the time has come for us to begin to understand one another.”

Only the two men spoke. The rest of the family listened in the mournful silence of a funeral, while the women plied the visitor with attentions but did not take part in the conversation.

“We
can’t do anything,” said Jorge Luis. “Doña Nydia was here. We understood her situation but we told her the same thing. We don’t want any problems.”