They all laughed. The man explained to his daughter that Pablo was his uncle who had come to visit him. But she shouldn’t tell anybody.
There were some very close escapes. One time Pablo was staying outside Medellín and the American planes intercepted a phone conversation and sent men to the house to grab him. Pablo and a bodyguard escaped into the forest and hid. While they watched from above the house as the soldiers searched for them, Pablo listened on a small transistor radio to the big game between Medellín and Nacional. Suddenly he whispered urgently to the bodyguard, “Listen, listen.” The bodyguard got very nervous. Then Pablo explained, “Medellín just scored!”
In another situation Pablo was staying for a few days at a farm outside the city. I had warned him many times to never spend more than a few minutes on the mobile phone, but sometimes he couldn’t stop himself. He spoke with his son, Juan Pablo, or myself, almost every day trying to find terms of surrender that would be acceptable. But he had learned not to make calls from the exact place he was staying. This time he had walked up into the woods to make his call and could watch from there as the army raided the main house. As always he was listening to a soccer game between Medellín and Nacional on his small transistor radio. Just as his bodyguard approached Pablo and whispered that the police were close and they had to go, Medellín was awarded a penalty kick. Pablo said, “Let’s just wait for the penalty kick.” When Medellín scored Pablo looked up and said calmly, “Now where did you say the police were?”
Several times Pablo had to run away from his life of only a few minutes earlier, leaving everything he possessed behind him. The newspapers would run stories about how close the Search Bloc had been to catching him, finding hot food or making him leave without shoes. That’s what they claimed, but they couldn’t catch him. More than a year went by since my surrender and still the world was looking for Pablo Escobar.
In prison there was little I could do to help him. I know I was watched carefully, hoping that something I did or said would give away his hiding places. But I had my own difficulties. I was trying to fight my legal case while also caring for the safety of my family.
The hardest part of it all was the feeling that in jail I could have no control over my own life. In the Cathedral we had to stay in that one place, but within the fence we could do what we wanted. In this prison my life was controlled completely.
Those feelings I had about not being able to help Pablo were magnified many times when my son, my beautiful son Nicholas, was kidnapped. Nico was never involved in the business, until later when he risked his life to make peace with Cali and Los Pepes. But on this day in May 1993, he was driving with his wife and son, as well as an employee and a bodyguard, from his farm to Medellín. They stopped at a restaurant on the road called Kachotis. Almost instantly after they sat down police cars surrounded the place, and the police yelled for everybody to get down on the floor. Then they came in with guns and took Nico out. Nobody else. So it was clear this was their plan from the beginning.
While this was happening I knew nothing about it. There was little I could have done anyway, and it made me crazy when I found out.
These police put Nico in the back of a car and drove away. As Nico remembers; “Within a few minutes we reached a police checkpoint. They were stopping cars asking drivers for ID. When our car stopped I started screaming, ‘I’m kidnapped! I’m being kidnapped!’ Nobody paid any attention to me, so obviously they were part of the corrupt police group.
“We kept driving. I didn’t think about what was going to happen to me. They drove me to a farm in Caldas, a town near Medellín, and there they tortured me trying to get information to find out where my uncle Pablo was. They tied me to a chair and started kicking me. That was the beginning. I didn’t have a clue where he was so I couldn’t tell them anything. Honestly I was never afraid. Maybe that’s part of my blood, but I was not afraid of death. They returned me to the same neighborhood where they had caught me. I don’t know why they didn’t kill me. But soon after I got back Pablo called me. He had me picked up and we spent two hours together as he asked me questions.”
Pablo was getting desperate to save the family. This was when we made arrangements for my family to leave the country. Nicholas went with his pregnant wife and children, his mother and his seventy-eight-year-old aunt, all huddled together. They went to Chile, where, as Nicholas remembers, “It was tough because when the police found out who we were from the Colombian government informants there, they didn’t want to let us into the country. Finally I had to pay some money to the police in Santiago to allow us to go through the gate. When we left the airport three cars were following us. I started driving all over the city and they followed me. I went faster they went faster. Just like in the movies. We were scared. We didn’t know if they were going to take us and hand us back to Colombia or kill us. It didn’t matter that we were innocent, that we had nothing to do with the wars between Pablo and the cartels and the government. They wanted to use us to catch Pablo. I turned into a huge parking lot and shut the car and we all hid below the windows. We waited, the cars drove around looking for us for hours and hours. Finally they went away.
“I waited some more, then started the car. Two blocks later they were waiting for us. I raced. On the road I saw a police station and I stopped. It was better to be taken out of the country than killed.”
Eventually from Chile my family went to Brazil. They were not permitted to land in Brazil; instead they were sent to Spain. Again, they were not permitted to leave the plane, because the Colombian government had warned all these different countries and the persecution against my family continued. So from Madrid they went to Frankfurt, Germany. There, Nicholas remembers, “I spoke to an immigration agent since I had studied there and knew German and he told us it was true that everybody in Europe had information from the Colombian government that the Escobar family was trying to hide in Europe so don’t let them in. ‘The president of Colombia gave the order to my superiors,’ he told me.
“Finally we pleaded, ‘Please let us get in, they are going to kill us, we are innocent. It would be better for everybody. We’re not going to do anything bad. Please call your superiors.’ It took some time, but he got permission for us to be there. That agent was so human he saved us.”
Pablo was not so fortunate. María Victoria, Juan Pablo, and Manuela were not permitted to leave the country. There is a story I have heard that Manuela would walk the halls of the security hotel the government had put them in singing little songs that Los Pepes were going to come and kill her.
Through the months I would speak to Pablo almost every day on the mobile phone. He always spoke from a moving taxi. But he was very much alone and lonely. Much of his money was beyond his reach, too many people of the organization were dead or had surrendered, and it was dangerous for him to be in contact with his family. A contact inside the Search Bloc would tell us that their new listening tools allowed them to track every phone call of interest. The government would not negotiate. In the city he only went out in complete disguise and now he stayed away from the most popular areas, instead going outside the city. When possible he liked small places where he could sit and drink black coffee with pastry. For Pablo it seemed that the safest answer was to go into the jungle and work with his new movement that he was forming called Antioquia Rebelde. So in November of 1993 that is what he began planning to do.
He had just moved into an apartment in Medellín in an area near the soccer stadium Atanasio Giradot. With him was our cousin Luzmila, who prepared his meals and did the errands for him, and one of my best men, Limón. Nobody in the family knew Pablo was staying there. Luzmila told her sons that she had a job taking care of an older man and she was going to earn good money. But with the torturers waiting, it was important that nobody knew where Pablo was staying. I personally had sent Limón to work for Pablo and before he went to meet him I had him pick up a different mobile phone. That phone was a terrible danger. On Sunday November 29, a woman who was working for me had smuggled in some secret letters hidden in the soles of her shoes, shoes that had been made for that purpose. One of those letters came from a source who warned that if Pablo continued talking on those phones he would be caught. I wrote immediately to Pablo this letter: “Brother, lovely greetings. I hope that when you get this note you are all right. Next Thursday you will be one year older, and that is a gift of God He can give us. Brother, I’m really worried; I just received some information, which tells me your mobile is being intercepted, they are triangulating the signal, you could get caught if you keep it up. DO NOT SPEAK OVER THE PHONE . . . DO NOT SPEAK OVER THE PHONE . . . DO NOT SPEAK OVER THE PHONE.”
When my mother arrived for her visit I gave this letter to her and gave her instructions where to take it. I told her it must be done very quickly. She knew it was for Pablo, and so she was worried. I did not lie to her, but I did not tell her the complete truth. “Mother,” I said, “they have Pablo’s phone intercepted, and it’s not convenient for them to know who Pablo is talking to, because we are negotiating again with Gavíria’s government.”
His big worry always was his family. Pablo was trying hard to get them out of the country, away from Los Pepes. In April he had tried to send them to the United States but the American DEA stopped them from leaving in Bogotá, keeping them under the death sentence from Los Pepes. In November Pablo called my son Nico, who was living in Spain with his family, and requested that he go to Frankfurt to meet María Victoria, Juan Pablo, and the rest of his family. “Uncle,” Nico told him, “I don’t know if this is safe. We had so much trouble getting into Europe.”
Pablo replied, “I have no other choice right now. I want my family to be away and I want you to please help me out and take care of my family while I fix this situation here in Colombia.”
Of course Nico would do that. He returned to Germany, to the same airport he had arrived at months earlier. María Victoria, sixteen-year old Juan Pablo, and five-year-old Manuela flew to Germany, but they were not permitted to get off the plane. There was no legal reason for this, not one person on the plane had done anything illegal. None of them had sold or transported drugs. As I have said, their crime was their Escobar blood. So they were told they had to return to Colombia. They were told that being allowed into any country in Europe was only possible “upon the immediate surrender” of Pablo.
For Pablo surrender was sure death. According to his sources he was going to be murdered once in custody.
When Pablo’s family was deported from Germany the government ordered that they be put into a famous hotel in Bogotá owned by the national police. This was incredible; the government was holding the entire family hostage. The government of El Salvador had offered to protect them, but the Colombian government wouldn’t talk to them. Worse, they were being protected by the police, which was known to be working with Los Pepes. Then the government threatened that it was going to take away the protection from the family.
Pablo made phone calls telling people what would happen if his family was harmed, but besides that there wasn’t much he could do. He would still go out of the apartment; in the last days of November he took the risk of attending a soccer game. But now the Search Bloc, Centra Spike, Delta Force, the police, Los Pepes, and Cali were getting closer to him. They had set up the family and they knew that Pablo would do anything, even give his own life, for them. So the planes continued to fly overhead listening for his conversations, the experts with phone-tapping equipment drove through the city, soldiers roamed through the streets, all of them searching day and night for Pablo.
Limón, the person staying with Pablo, was superstitious. He believed in witches and fairies, the luck of the four-leaf clover, even the power of spells. Pablo didn’t take any of it seriously, but he enjoyed Limón’s predictions. On the last day of November he was reading the newspaper when a big, ugly fly started bothering him. He rolled up the paper and tried to kill it, but failed. When he sat down again to read the fly landed on his right ear. Limón said nervously, “Patrón, this is not good. This means bad luck. Something is going to happen.” Pablo tried to kill it again, but again the fly escaped.
Pablo told Limón to kill it, which he tried to do, but again it landed on Pablo’s leg, and Limón just let it out the window. I’m sure Pablo laughed.
At night Pablo sent our cousin Luzmila to the store to buy a present for me, a copy of the new
Guinness Book of Sports Records
. Pablo was an expert on our sports, particularly soccer; he knew the details of every World Cup final ever played and would always quiz me to make sure my knowledge kept even with him—and I would not lose any sports bet. When Luzmila returned he wrote a note to me in this book and asked our cousin to send it to me in prison.
The next day, December 1, was his forty-fourth birthday. Writing this, it is difficult not to think of the great celebrations we had enjoyed in years earlier, from when he was a boy to the parties at Napoles with hundreds of people. Now he was almost alone. Luzmila made his favorite breakfast and he read the notes that had arrived the night before from his family. Manuela had written, perhaps with some collaboration with María Victoria, “Even though you are not here, we have you hidden in a corner of our heart. Happy Birthday, I love you Dad.”
María signed her letter of good wishes and long life with the mark of her lips.
My card to him expressed my love for him and my hopes for his long life. After reading them all he put them in a paper bag and for security asked Luzmila to burn them. She does not remember if she burned them or not.
For dinner that evening the three of them enjoyed seafood from one of the best sea food restaurants in Medellín, Frutos del Mar, with a bottle of Viuda de Clicoff champagne. Limón failed to open the champagne so Pablo tapped it gently against the wall. The cork shot out, hitting Limón on the chest. They laughed and Limón said, “Thank God it wasn’t a bullet, patrón.”