News of a Kidnapping (33 page)

The document of voluntary surrender was signed
by the national and regional directors of Criminal Investigation, and the special prosecutor for human rights. Escobar endorsed his signature with his thumbprint and the number of his lost identification card: 8.345.766, Envigado. The secretary, Carlos Alberto Bravo, added at the bottom of the document: “Having affixed his signature to this document, Señor Pablo Emilio Escobar requested that Dr.
Alberto Villamizar Cárdenes also affix his signature to same, said signature appearing below.” Villamizar signed, though he was never told in what capacity.

When this process had been completed, Pablo Escobar took his leave of everyone and walked into the cell where he would live as involved as ever in his business affairs, and also have the power of the state protecting his domestic tranquillity
and security. Starting the next day, however, the very prisonlike prison described by Villamizar began to be transformed into a five-star hacienda with all kinds of luxuries, sports installations, and facilities for parties and pleasures, built with first-class materials brought in gradually in the false bottom of a supply van. When the government learned about the scandal 299 days later, it
decided to transfer Escobar to another prison with no prior announcement. Just as incredible as the government’s needing a year to find out what was going on was the fact that Escobar bribed a sergeant and two terrified soldiers with a plate of food and escaped on foot with his bodyguards through the nearby woods, under the noses of the functionaries and troops responsible for the transfer.

It was his death sentence. According to his subsequent statement, the government’s action had been so strange and precipitous that he did not think they were really going to transfer him but kill him or turn him over to the United States. When he realized the enormity of his error, he undertook two parallel campaigns to have
the government repeat the favor of imprisoning him: the greatest terrorist
bombing offensive in the history of the country, and his offer to surrender without conditions of any kind. The government never acknowledged his proposals, the country did not succumb to the terror of the car bombs, and the police offensive reached unsustainable proportions.

The world had changed for Escobar. Those who could have helped him save his life again had no desire or reason to. Father
García Herreros died of kidney failure on November 24, 1992, and Paulina—with no job and no savings—retired so far into a peaceful autumn with her children and good memories that today no one at “God’s Word” even mentions her. Alberto Villamizar, named ambassador to Holland, received several messages from Escobar, but it was too late now for everything. His immense fortune, estimated at 3 billion
dollars, was for the most part drained by the cost of the war or spent disbanding the cartel. His family found no place in the world where they could sleep without nightmares. Having become the biggest prey in our history, Escobar could not stay more than six hours in one spot, and in his crazed flight he left behind him a trail of dead innocents, and his own bodyguards murdered, captured, or
gone over to the forces of his enemies. His security services, and even his own almost animal instinct for survival, lost the sharp edge of former days.

On December 2, 1993—one day after his forty-fourth birthday—he could not resist the temptation of talking on the phone with his son Juan Pablo who, with his mother and younger sister, had just returned to Bogotá following Germany’s refusal to
admit them. Juan Pablo, who was now more alert than his father, warned him after two minutes not to talk anymore because the police would trace the call. Escobar—whose devotion to his family was proverbial—ignored him. By this time the trace had established the exact phone in the Los Olivos district in Medellín that he was using. At 3:15 in the afternoon, an inconspicuous group of twenty-three special
plainclothes police cordoned off the area, took over
the house, and began to force the door to the second floor. Escobar heard them. “I’m hanging up,” he said to his son on the telephone, “because something fanny’s going on here.” Those were his last words.

Villamizar spent the night of the surrender in the noisiest, most dangerous clubs in the city, drinking man-size glasses of
aguardiente
with
Escobar’s bodyguards. The Monkey, drunk as a lord, told anyone who would listen that Dr. Villamizar was the only person the Chief had ever apologized to. At two in the morning he stood up and with no preliminaries said goodbye with a wave of his hand.

“So long, Dr. Villamizar,” he said. “I have to disappear now, and we may never see each other again. It was a pleasure knowing you.”

Villamizar,
besotted with drink, was dropped off at La Loma at dawn. In the afternoon, the only topic of conversation on the plane to Bogotá was Pablo Escobar’s surrender. Villamizar was one of the best-known men in the country that day, but no one recognized him in the crowded airports. The newspapers had indicated his presence at the prison but had published no photographs, and the real extent of his decisive
participation in the entire capitulation process seemed destined for the shadows of secret glories.

Back home that afternoon, he realized that daily life was returning to normal. Andrés was studying in his room. Maruja was waging a difficult, silent war against her phantoms in order to become herself again. The Tang Dynasty horse was back in its usual place, between her prized mementos of Indonesia
and her antiquities from half the world, rearing its front legs on the sacred table where she wanted it to be, in the corner where she dreamed of seeing it during the interminable nights of her captivity. She had returned to her offices at FOCINE in the same car—the bullet scars on the windows erased—from which she had been abducted, with
a new, grateful driver in the dead chauffeur’s seat. In
less than two years she would be named education minister.

Villamizar, with no job and no desire to have one, with the bad taste of politics in his mouth, chose to rest for a time in his own way, making small household repairs, taking his leisure sip by sip with old drinking companions, doing the shopping himself so that he and his friends could enjoy the pleasures of the local cuisine. It was
the perfect frame of mind for reading in the afternoon and growing a beard. One Sunday at lunch, when the mists of memory had already begun to rarefy the past, someone knocked at the door. They thought Andrés had forgotten his keys again. The servants had the day off, and Villamizar opened the door. A young man in a sports jacket handed him a small package wrapped in gift paper and tied with a gold
ribbon, and then disappeared down the stairs without saying a word or giving him time to ask any questions. Villamizar thought it might be a bomb. In an instant he was shuddering with the nausea of the abduction, but he untied the bow and unwrapped the package with his fingertips, away from the dining room where Maruja was waiting for him. It was a case made of imitation leather, and inside the
case, nestled in satin, was the ring they had taken from Maruja on the night she was abducted. One diamond chip was missing, but it was the same ring.

Maruja was stunned. She put it on, and realized she was recovering her health faster than she had imagined because now it fit her finger.

“How incredible!” she said with a hopeful sigh. “Somebody ought to write a book.”

In October 1993, Maruja Pachón and her husband, Alberto Villamizar, suggested I write a book about her abduction and six-month captivity, and his persistent efforts to obtain her release. I was already well into the first draft when we realized it was impossible to separate her kidnapping from nine other abductions that occurred at the same time in Colombia. They were not,
in fact, ten distinct abductions—as it had seemed at first—but a single collective abduction of ten carefully chosen individuals, which had been carried out by the same group and for only one purpose.

This belated realization obliged us to begin again with a different structure and spirit so that all the protagonists would have their well-defined identities, their own realities. It was a technical
solution to a labyrinthine narrative that in its original form would have been confused and interminable. But this meant that what had been foreseen as a year’s work extended into almost three, even with the constant, meticulous assistance and collaboration of Maruja and Alberto, whose personal stories are the central axis, the unifying thread, of this book.

I interviewed all the protagonists
I could, and in each of them
I found the same generous willingness to root through their memories and reopen wounds they perhaps preferred to forget. Their pain, their patience, and their rage gave me the courage to persist in this autumnal task, the saddest and most difficult of my life. My only frustration is knowing that none of them will find on paper more than a faded reflection of the horror
they endured in their real lives—above all, the families of Marina Montoya and Diana Turbay, the two hostages who were killed, and in particular Diana Turbay’s mother, doña Nydia Quintero de Balcázar, whose interviews were a heartrending, unforgettable human experience for me.

I share this sense of inadequacy with the two people who suffered along with me through the intimate hammering out of
the book: the journalist Luzángela Arteaga, who tracked down and captured innumerable impossible facts with the tenacity and absolute discretion of a crafty hunter, and Margarita Márquez Caballero, my first cousin and private secretary, who took care of the transcription, verification, and confidentiality of the intricate raw material that we often thought would overwhelm us.

To all the protagonists
and all my collaborators, I offer my eternal gratitude for not allowing this gruesome drama to sink into oblivion. Sadly, it is only one episode in the biblical holocaust that has been consuming Colombia for more than twenty years. I dedicate this book to them, and to all Colombians—innocent and guilty—with the hope that the story it tells will never befall us again.

G. G. M.

Cartagena de Indias,
May 1996

CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD

COLLECTED STORIES

IN EVIL HOUR

INNOCENT ERENDIRA AND OTHER STORIES

LEAF STORM

LIVING TO TELL THE TALE

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA

MEMORIES OF MY MELANCHOLY WHORES

NO ONE WRITES TO THE COLONEL

OF LOVE AND OTHER DEMONS

ONE HUNDRED
YEARS OF SOLITUDE

STRANGE PILGRIMS

THE AUTUMN OF THE PATRIARCH

THE GENERAL IN HIS LABYRINTH

THE STORY OF A SHIPWRECKED SAILOR

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‘My favourite book by one of the world’s greatest authors. You’re in the hands of a master’ Mariella Frostrup

‘On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop
was coming on …’

When newly-wed Ángela Vicario and Bayardo San Román are left to their wedding night, Bayardo discovers that his new wife is no virgin. Disgusted, he returns Ángela to her family home that very night, where her humiliated mother beats her savagely and her two brothers demand to know her violator, whom she names as Santiago Nasar.

As he wakes to thoughts of the previous night’s
revelry, Santiago is unaware of the slurs that have been cast against him. But with Ángela’s brothers set on avenging their family honour, soon the whole town knows who they plan to kill, where, when and why.

‘A masterpiece’
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‘A work of high explosiveness – the proper stuff of Nobel prizes. An exceptional novel’
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