The Accountant's Story (22 page)

This was not the kind of question I would have asked my brother, and if there was not a reason for me knowing the answer he would not have offered it. But I know that it served the purpose of many other people and agencies for Pablo to be blamed for crime. To the world he was already becoming a vicious killer, so putting one more killing on him would make no difference.

But Pablo knew that the killing of Galán would cause a stern reaction, so on the night of the killing he called me and told me the police would be searching for us so my family should meet him at a hotel in Cartegena. By the time we got there Pablo and Gustavo were waiting. He wanted to send our families out of the country.

As he knew would happen, the government of President Virgilio Barco immediately declared a state of siege and smothered the country with police and military, raiding houses and buildings and making thousands of arrests. The government took almost one thousand buildings and ranches, seven hundred cars and trucks, more than 350 airplanes and seventy-three boats—and almost five tons of cocaine. Four farms owned by Gacha, the Mexican, were claimed by the government, in addition to some of Pablo’s buildings and businesses in Medellín. This reaction was a big chance for the police and the army to settle old feuds because no one would dare object when they arrested a person and said he was a suspect in Galán’s assassination. Many people were taken into custody, but none of them were the leaders of the drug operations.

President Barco also put back into effect the extradition treaty with the United States, which the Supreme Court had suspended a few months before. The cartel answered that it would kill ten judges for every person extradited. Right away more than one hundred judges resigned their office. Medellín began fighting even harder than ever before. In the first few days seventeen bombs were exploded against banks, stores, and political party offices. Some of these terrorist attacks were placed there by our enemies to create more confusion, but it was all blamed on Pablo.

The United States offered to send soldiers to Colombia if they were invited to help in the fight against the drug traffickers. The U.S. president, George H. W. Bush, said he would send $150 million in equipment to Colombia, as well as soldiers to help our government solve their drug problems. So now America was in the fight against Pablo too. Pablo had never attacked the U.S.—he only defended himself from the Colombian government.

After ten days of this government crackdown, the leaders of Medellín offered a truce. Gacha called a newspaperman and said he would surrender all his farms and airplanes in return for amnesty. The father of the Ochoas, Fabio Ochoa Restrepo, wrote to President Barco, “No more drug trafficking, no more war, no more assassinations, no more bombs, no more arson . . . Let there be peace, let there be amnesty.”

The mayor of Medellín also wanted the government to negotiate, saying, “This is the position of many people who believe that you have to talk to obtain peace.”

President Barco answered by saying, “We cannot rest until we destroy the organizations dedicated to narcotics trafficking.”

Pablo remembered the same appeals had been made after the death of Lara. He wrote to the newspaper
La Prensa,
“How much blood could have been avoided after the Panama talks. We want peace. We have demanded it shouting, but we cannot beg for it.

“No more the path of legal action,” he finished. “Now it is with blood.”

In September a homemade rocket was fired at the embassy of the United States from ten blocks away. It hit the building but didn’t explode, and did little damage except that it made American diplomats in Colombia send their families home. President Bush answered by changing a presidential order that had prohibited the assassination of citizens of other countries who were terrorists—and drug traffickers were considered terrorists. This rocket was not fired by Pablo. It was all a setup to involve Pablo and have the U.S. retaliate against him.

In your mind part of you is always the person you used to be. For me, that was the bicycle champion. If I had paused to think about the journey I’d taken it would have been impossible; from representing the country I loved in the sport I loved to running through the jungle as police helicopters fired tracer bullets down on me. So I didn’t think about it. I know that it seems difficult to understand, but it is true. Maybe that was my means of dealing with my reality.

Also I did not have conversations with Pablo about what was going on. I didn’t try to talk to him about the violence that the police were committing against our family, friends, and employees. I know that wouldn’t have done any good. The decisions Pablo had made in the past had allowed him to become one of the richest men in the world, so there was no reason for him to begin doubting his decisions. I know he felt the government had given him no choice but to fight. He believed that many in the government had made the choice to associate with Cali to try to destroy Medellín so they could take over the business. The proof of that came later, in 1996, when the 8000 Process scandal made it public that Cali was paying bribes to many politicians, even men running for the presidency. And what Cali wanted the government to do was use the legal system to rid the business of their competition. Even our prosecutor general once admitted, “The corruption of the Cali cartel is worse than the terrorism of the Medellín cartel.”

So Pablo felt he was fighting everybody—but this was just the beginning. Soon there would be more enemies.

At 7:15 in the morning of November 27, 1989, Avianca Airlines flight HK 1803 from Bogotá to Cali exploded over the mountains outside the capital city, instantly killing 107 people. It was a terrible blow to the country. Even I was a little surprised when Pablo was accused of this crime. Why? The investigation discovered that a small bomb had been put aboard the airplane under a seat in the middle. When it went off it caused the fuel to detonate and destroy the airplane.

Like so many crimes committed in this period there were many possible motives. The first was that the man who had replaced Galán in the election for the presidency, his campaign manager, Cesár Gavíria, was scheduled to be on that plane. That was true, but Gavíria saved his life by changing his flight and taking a private flight instead. So he was supposed to be the first target. But it also was said that the plane was destroyed because there were one or two informants from the Cali cartel who were going to testify against Medellín aboard. Also in September and October more than thirty thousand kilos of Medellín cocaine had been seized in the U.S. and the word was that Cali had given them the information where to find it, so some people believed the plane was destroyed because Marta Lucía Echavarria, the girlfriend of Cali leader Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, was on board in seat 10B and this was to punish him.

I will say this: If I had any knowledge of this plan before it was carried out I would have done everything in my power to stop it.

Many people have told their stories about this disaster and the DAS and American FBI and the police have made their investigations and published their reports. The United States used the excuse that two Americans were killed in the crash to become involved, and two years after it happened Pablo and La Kika were indicted by the United States for this crime. La Kika became the very first person ever to be tried, convicted, and sentenced under the 1986 law against killing Americans anywhere in the world.

All those reports put together say that this is the way the bombing happened: No one will ever know for sure the reasons that this was done, but supposedly it was talked about at a meeting of Pablo, Gacha, Kiko Moncada, Fernando Galeano, and Albeiro Areiza. They had a copy of Gavíria’s schedule so they knew he was going to be on that flight. The bomb was carried to the airport in parts in three different cars. The plan was to put five kilos of dynamite on the plane and have it detonated by a “suizo,” meaning a person who is tricked into doing a job in which they will die. The ticket for the suizo was bought for the fictitious name Mario Santodomingo, who sat in seat 15F and put the package under seat 14F. It seems the suizo was told his job was to record the conversations of Cali people sitting in front of him.

As the plane rose into the air as instructed the suizo turned the knob on the “recorder.” The bomb exploded a hole in the floor and side of the plane, and then blew up the fumes in the empty fuel hold. Everyone on the plane died and three people on the ground also were killed.

Right after the airplane was blown up a man claiming to be of Los Extraditables called a Bogotá radio station and reported that they had planted the bomb. Four years later the man who claimed that he made the bomb told the DAS that Medellín leader Kiko Moncada gave him a million pesos to recover the cost of the operation. So certainly others were involved, but the only name the world heard was Pablo Escobar.

The U.S. sent to Colombia its most secret intelligence unit, Centra Spike. Centra Spike flew small airplanes above the cities and applied the most advanced technology to listen to communications of interest. Their method was to spy on the ten people who Pablo spoke with most often and then the ten people that each of those ten people usually contacted. That’s the way they built a map of the Medellín organization. They flew in total secrecy. When our contacts told us about this I had warned Pablo that the U.S. was eavesdropping. As an electrical engineer who specialized in communication I knew what was possible. But Pablo wasn’t too concerned about that. He thought that if he had been listened to they couldn’t have located him anyway; he used to say that he could have been anywhere in the world.

To use the information provided by Centra Spike, in 1990 Colombia organized an elite military unit named the Search Bloc. This consisted of seven hundred of the most trusted policemen, trained by the United States Army Delta Force, who had only one objective: catching Pablo and the other leaders of Medellín. To fight back, a bombing campaign was begun against the Search Bloc. The whole situation was completely out of control. The government thought about stopping the Search Bloc, but instead they added more soldiers.

There were more than a hundred bombings. This was all-out war. Judges were bombed. Newspapers who wrote in favor of extradition were bombed. Every policeman had become a target. The police of Medellín had stopped living in their own homes to protect their families and stayed together in secure places. Everyone in the city, probably in the country, were touched somehow by the bombing campaign. For example our cousin, “the girl with the pretty hair,” was a student at college. She was registered there under a new name and only her best friend knew of her family. During the war against the police a bomb was placed in a police car near a stadium and when it exploded hundreds of people were killed and wounded. It was horrible. Even now I can’t really understand or accept how it came to this. But there was nothing anyone could do to stop it. In that bombing the grandparents of another student were killed. When it was reported a few days later that Pablo’s men had planted the bomb this student approached our cousin in the cafeteria filled with people. “Your cousin killed my grandparents,” she screamed and started hitting her. She grabbed her by the hair and pulled her down.

The girl with the pretty hair started crying too, not for herself, but for the grandparents, for everything that was happening in our country. She grabbed the girl by the arm and put her into a corner. “Stop screaming,” she said. “I want you to understand this has nothing to with me. I have the same last name, but I had nothing to do with this incident. I’m not like that. I can’t go to Pablo and tell him ‘Stop doing this.’ I can’t.”

But later she did go to Pablo and ask him why he did such terrible things. And he told her, “You don’t even know how many people that I care about are gone because of this war. This is what I have to do.”

She said to him that he had two personalities. Sometimes he could be so nice and kind, but on the other hand, “You can be so ruthless.”

“They made me like this,” he said. “I have to be strong. I have to fight back because people turned their backs on me. I know I’m not going to die like a regular drug dealer.”

If there was one personal enemy Pablo had it was General Miguel Maza Márquez, the head of the DAS, a man who had made a vow to defeat the cartels. In an American trial a drug pilot testified that Maza had been involved in the cocaine business, that he had been told by a major connection that Maza was shipping between twenty and twenty-five kilos a flight. I have no personal knowledge of this; it could be another situation of someone trying to make a good deal for himself at the sake of an innocent man. But is it possible? In Colombia in those days anything was possible. Until the government focused on Medellín the money was so easy to make and the big people were not touched at all. The only people taking the risks were those on the lower levels who were actually doing the moving. It was well known that many famous people in politics in Colombia had been involved in small ways in the business. If Pablo or his high associates agreed to include your drugs in their shipments you were almost guaranteed to make a profit.

There was also the possibility that some agents were on the payroll of the drug organizations. A lot of poor people feared the DAS in that period just like the police for all the atrocities done in the city much more than they respected it. To them DAS wasn’t the Colombian FBI, it was the police who came in the night.

Maza has said that Pablo offered him money through a lawyer to work with the cartel and that he turned him down. That I had not heard. But it makes good sense. So many politicians and policemen were happy to take money from the traffickers that there would be no reason not to make such an offer.

Pablo despised Maza, due to the crimes committed by him and his agency. Numerous times Pablo had denounced these illegal acts to the Colombian government but everything was overlooked. Maza has claimed that Pablo made seven attempts to kill him. Maybe. There were many bombings at this time. In one car bombing Maza lived but seven of his bodyguards were killed. Maza proved to be a very lucky man. In December of 1989 the plan was to blow up the entire DAS building to kill him. This would be just like bombing the FBI Building in Washington, D.C.