The Accountant's Story (31 page)

I made an agreement with the government in 1995. For my safety they allowed me a whole floor of a clinic in Medellín. They supplied me with twelve security officers, six from the police and six from the army. In addition, I always had six of my personal bodyguards. I had eighteen people next to me every day, seven days a week, for six years. In the clinic I had fourteen bedrooms and I had to pay the state $1,400 a day for every single day. But I was safe there, and I had my operations, one after another after another.

But before I could move there I knew that somehow I had to make peace with our enemies. The war was done, Pablo was dead, Gustavo was dead, Gacha was dead, the Ochoa brothers were in prison, and the Medellín cartel had become fixed in history. But still the enemies threatened to kill our family. There was no reason for all of us to be living in fear. I thought, if they kill me okay, but what about my mother and my children and Pablo’s children? I tried very hard to make contact with the leaders of Cali. I sent letters to the people through my lawyer, Enrique Manceda. I spoke with people who could reach them and asked to be heard. But I got no answer back. It was always silence.

Enrique Manceda was one of the few good lawyers who had survived the Cali attacks. At that time he was living protected from Los Pepes on one of the farms my family still owned. I didn’t trust the telephones, so I sent him a fax asking, “Do you have the guts to go and face the Cali cartel?”

Enrique responded to me, “I have family too. I’ve been at this farm for more than six months. If they want to kill me they are going to have to kill me face-to-face.” This brave man went to Cali only with a very well known sports journalist and there they met in a nice restaurant with an attorney for the Cali cartel. All of those years of fighting, the billions of dollars earned and spent, the way Medellín and Cali changed the world, and here it came to two lawyers sitting opposite each other in a fancy restaurant.

Their lawyer, Vladimir, listened and agreed to speak with the heads of Cali. He believed they would listen to him and said to come back a week later.

To make my point strong, I suggested that Enrique return to Cali, but this time with my son Nicholas. And when my mother learned that Nico was going to go there she insisted she go with him. Living with a death sentence every day was not a real life, she said. Let it end. There was nothing to be done to stop my mother when she was determined. These were two people the cartel wanted to kill, so we were saying that here is your opportunity to stop the killing.

They met with the leaders of Cali, the Rodríguez Orejuela brothers, José Santacruz, and Spatcho. It was a big big surprise to these men when my mother and son showed up. At first the meeting was very cool, except for Spatcho, who most accepted the possibility of peace between the warring groups. My mother was not afraid of them, which made them wary. “Whatever is done is done,” she said to them. “Too many people have been killed. We don’t want that anymore. Roberto is very ill. Somebody sent him a letter bomb and he is only just alive.

“We have only two options. Either you say okay and let’s live in peace or you can kill me now because you want us dead and here I am. You can kill me and my grandson, Roberto’s son, or we can make peace.”

For Cali there were reasons to have peace. The members of the Cali cartel told my mother that the worst thing they had done was collaborate with the government by giving information that helped them kill Pablo, because now there was not anybody to take the blame for the drug trafficking.  

She told them that they had made a big mistake because “Pablo wanted to end the extradition. That was for everybody. He wanted to be part of the government and end that.”

Santacruz then said, “That was not a smart thing for us. Now that Pablo is dead every single thing that happens in this country will be blamed on us. Now the DAS will be after us.”

That was true. With Medellín gone, the government had started looking for Cali. Rewards had been posted. They were on the run and there wasn’t time to worry about revenge. Spatcho spoke for them. “Ma’am, I feel a lot of respect for you. I have a mother also and she worries about me. This is the end of the war. I give you my word.” He told the others that it was time to make peace, that maybe it should have been done sooner.

Then they hugged and kissed, like in the movies. The meeting lasted less than a half hour. And that is how the peace was achieved with the Cali cartel.

Two weeks after this agreement I got a letter from one of the leaders asking me for $2 million to seal it. That had never been part of the discussion. I wrote back telling him, “You’re breaking your word because you said you were going to be in peace and now you’re asking for money. Two things about that: I won’t send you a dime and if you continue with the war you’re going to have to kill all of us because nobody is going to fight back.” I sent a letter to some members of Medellín’s cartel who were in jail, telling them that nobody was going to fight back.

Spatcho spoke to this man and fixed the situation. He called me in the clinic to tell me it was done.

But Spatcho was correct that with Pablo dead the government would move after Cali. Within two years, on July 4, 1995, José “Chepe” Santacruz Londoño, one of the three leaders of Cali, would be arrested. In January 1996 he escaped his prison in Bogotá and in March he was killed in Medellín.

At the beginning the police blamed the killing on Medellín, which was not true. But that talk was very dangerous for us, as the peace was very thin. One of the very first people to know about Chepe’s death was my son, who was told by a friend and confirmed it with the newspaper. Nico called people in Cali to tell them and even broke the news to Santacruz’s wife. The problem for Cali was that it was still too dangerous for anyone to come to Medellín to bring home the body. So Nico and I decided that this was a big opportunity for us to show our good faith. Nico was going to bring Chepe’s body home to Cali. There was still a great hatred in the air because of the war, many Cali people had died too, so this was a very brave thing to do.

There was a woman in Medellín who was in charge of the funerals of each person in the cartel. She had made hundreds of thousands of dollars burying our people. Nico asked her to do the same honors for Santacruz. “We don’t want to make a big deal,” he told her. “We don’t want the media to know.”

She didn’t want to do it. “Why are you bringing him here? This is the worst enemy you ever had.” She was afraid the Cali people were going to show up and start shooting.

Nico told her it was safe. He had conferred with the wife and it was agreed that he was going to bring the body home. But the first problem was finding a coffin. Chepe was a huge man, tall and big. The woman had one coffin big enough but it was very expensive. Nico told her he would buy it, choosing it as if it was for himself.

I knew this war had to end and this was the best way. “It was a weird feeling,” Nico told me. When Pablo had been killed he was out of Colombia, “but when I saw the body of Chepe, even after all the terrible things that had happened, I felt very sad. I saw this person who had been so powerful, so rich, who had always been surrounded by people, so all alone. I had tears.”

The second problem at the funeral home became clothes for the body. Nico recounted, “The man from the funeral home told me, ‘We cannot do the service with these clothes. Everything is destroyed.’ There was blood all over. He was wearing blue jeans and a T-shirt all covered with blood. He didn’t even have shoes on. It was three o’clock in the morning, and where could I buy clothes for a man that big at that moment?

“I’m also a big man and I was thinking maybe some of my clothes would fit him. At first I thought jeans and a shirt but then I had an idea. The only time I wore a tie was on my wedding day. As I looked through my closet I took out the tuxedo I had worn that day. I ironed it myself. I brought it to the funeral home and it fit perfectly. So he would go home in my tuxedo.

“At 4:30 in the morning a very gorgeous young woman arrived at the place. She was crying and screaming that she needed to see Chepe. She was devastated and couldn’t believe that Chepe was dead. He had given her everything, paying for her education and helping her family. When I allowed her inside she became even more hysterical. She started kissing his body and pleading with him to not leave her alone. She climbed into the coffin and was hugging and kissing and wouldn’t let him go.

“There was always a question why he was hiding in Medellín. I think he made the decision to spend his last days with this beautiful girl.”

It was difficult finding a way to move the body to Cali. Nobody in Medellín wanted to rent us their airplane, for fear of retribution from Cali. It finally cost a lot of money, but we had given our word that Nico would go to Cali and return the body of Santacruz to his wife.

It was almost dawn. The journalists had begun showing up at the funeral home but still nobody knew that Pablo Escobar’s nephew was caring for the body of his once hated enemy. Nicholas was careful to stay away from the TV cameras and the journalists. To bring the body home without incident he rented four funeral cars and put coffins in each one. Two cars left the place and the journalists went after them. While they were driving around the city Nico lay down in the back next to the coffin and the car went directly to the airport. At the airport the police stopped the black car for inspection. And when they opened the back they were shocked to almost heart attacks to find Nicholas Escobar hiding there. The police told the journalists, who came quickly. It became a mess at the airport as the officials did not want to let Nico go, but he paid a lot of money and everything was approved.

Even the short flight to Cali was difficult. A large airplane came too close to their small plane and it started shaking. Nico almost laughed at the thought of dying right next to Chepe Santacruz’s body. Finally they landed and a crowd of journalists was waiting. Nicholas was looking for the wife but she was nowhere. After a moment a cab driver approached him and said, “Nicholas, a lady sent me. Please get in my cab.”

The body of Chepe had been returned, and the peace between Medellín and Cali was now solid.

It was also Nico and my mother who ended the fighting with Los Pepes. Even after Pablo was dead they continued to exist, becoming an army. Nico was living in a beautiful apartment in Medellín, an apartment that now belongs to the Colombian government, who seized it even though Nico was never involved in anything illegal. In that apartment Nico got a phone call from a friend who told him the son of his neighbor was scheduled to be kidnapped. Nico went to the neighbor and told him this information. This neighbor then told another person what Nico had told him, and that person went to Carlos Castaño and said by mistake, “Nico was going to kidnap this person.” A few days later Nico received a telephone call from Carlos Castaño, who had worked for Medellín before founding Los Pepes. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

Nico and Carlos had known each other for years. They agreed to meet to talk about this problem. When my mother heard this plan, again she insisted on going with him. Also going with them was the man Nico had warned.

They met at Carlos Castaño’s farm in Montería. “I’m not kidnapping,” Nico said. “I don’t believe in that. My uncle is dead and we just want to live in peace.” To prove that, Nico introduced Carlos to the neighbor, who was sitting right next to him.

Everything got cleared up and my mother told Carlos she wanted to talk to him. Carlos agreed, but only after a game of pool with Nico. He had heard that Nico was the pool master of Medellín and wanted to challenge him. They played; Nico won two games. Then the conversation began with Hermilda. She started talking to him like a son, never raising her voice. “You don’t know how much I’ve suffered in this war,” she said. She was crying but she kept her composure. “And I cannot imagine the pain your mother is feeling. Please, can’t we go back to a normal life?”

Carlos agreed and they prayed together. Then she kissed him on the cheek, the man who had been a leader in killing her son. But she accepted that, she understood the reasons, and wanted it to end. All of it. And after this meeting, it did. She had forgiven Carlos.

The Medellín cartel was done. Pablo was dead. Our enemies had moved to other wars. And I was alone in prison, blind and wounded.

It was difficult in prison filling all the empty hours. In the clinic-prison my life was basically talking to lawyers and having operations. After one of the many efforts to fix my eyes I opened them and, for the first time, I could see light. It wasn’t much, it wasn’t total sight, but it was amazing. It felt like someone had opened a window on life. I could see shapes and movement. It was very dim, but it was there. It was beautiful. But strangely I didn’t feel that excited. I had been through so many unbelievable experiences that I no longer could get excited or feel very sad. I had learned to be calm no matter what happened in my life. I was happy, but not like most people would imagine.

That same day the strange priest appeared again in my dreams. Why I have never known. He has been there for me for the good and the bad, but he stays with me.

I did different tasks in prison. I learned braille. I renewed my knowledge of electronics and fixed the radios and televisions and CD players for the police guards. Once I even built a traffic signal that worked by battery; just like a normal one with green, yellow, and red. (Truthfully I did need some help from my bodyguards to put the right connections together.) In the prison they had an exhibition and this traffic light won first prize.

I also made candles. In Colombia you can take years from your prison sentence if you study or do good works. I sent my bodyguards, Sander and Germán, who were like my guardian angels, who helped me do everything in the hospital, to buy all the materials I needed to make candles. Making candles is easy. Soon my bodyguards were so bored they were making them too. It was funny, all the people sitting there making candles. And then the nurses saw that and they started making them also. Most of the candles we would give to the church and they would give them to the poor people to sell for milk or bread. The poor people did not know that the brother of Pablo Escobar had made the candles, although the priests kept some of them as souvenirs.