Medellin, Colombia, December 1993. In a quiet middle-class suburb of Colombia’s second city there is suddenly a commotion. A police team is raiding a house and two men have exited across the rooftops. They both fight and run at the same time, trying to get away while shooting at the police.
Pablo Escobar - The Drug Lord Who Controlled a Country
Medellin, Colombia, December 1993. In a
quiet middle-class suburb of Colombia’s second city there is
suddenly a commotion.
A police team is raiding a
house and two men have exited across the rooftops. They both fight and
run at the same time, trying to get away while shooting at the police.
It is over in seconds, both men are killed in the
firefight. One of the two dead men lies on his side on a roof. His big stomach
is on show and his round face with its full moustache gives him the look of
a well-to-do Mexican
businessman.
This is Pablo Escobar Gaviria, one of
just a few hundred billionaires in the world and the richest gangster who has
ever lived. At the height of his power, his gang exported fifteen tons of
cocaine to the U.S.A. – every day. He travelled around Colombia in an armoured helicopter
with two other, heavily armed ones as escorts. If he ordered his assassins to kill someone, that
person would usually be dead by the end of the day. And he had given many
orders to kill.
In 1948, Colombia had exploded into
civil war, left
wing against right wing. The country fell into shocking
violence and anarchy for nearly twenty years. People
formed private republics protected by their own armies, groups attacked each
other to protect what they saw as their interests and the government of the
country was weak, too weak to stop these terrible things. Power came from the
gun and only the strong survived. If you wanted something, you took it, killing
all those who stood in your way. You would have life and money
and the respect of those around you. The weak got crushed.
Pablo Escobar, born in 1949, grew up
through these times, learning the hard lessons that Colombia taught. He was
from Envigado, a town about an hour from Medellin, the capital of the province
of Antioquia, Colombia’s biggest, landlocked in the heart of the country.
The people of Antioquia and Medellin
are called ‘Paisas’, the descendants of peasants from the dry hills of
western Spain, most of them from Jewish families who had converted to
Catholicism on the sea passage from Spain.
Proud of their white skin in a land
full of brown and black people, the Paisas have a reputation for trade and retail.
Almost every Paisa wants to make it in business, men and
women alike, and many do. The Paisas believe they have a reputation
for fairness and honesty, although other Colombians may not agree.
Just as Pablo Escobar, the son of poor
Paisa peasants,
was reaching adulthood, Colombia was going into one of its brief periods of
peace and stability,
from 1968 until trouble started again in the early ‘eighties. The country, so
long at war with itself, was now safe to travel again and was open to visitors
and outside influences.
The 1970s was a golden age in many
ways. Both young tourists backpacking in Colombia and Colombians going
to the U.S.A. to study or work soon came to two conclusions. First, that
Colombia produced some of the finest marijuana in the world. And, second, affluent young
North Americans would pay the highest prices for it. All you had to do was
get it to the U.S.A.
Colombians have a long tradition of
gold, coffee and emerald smuggling and of planting
hidden crops deep in the country’s huge interior. In no time, students across
North America were smoking Santa Marta Gold, the Colombian marijuana.
Growers, dealers and
smugglers all made
a fortune. There was something for everyone in the Santa Marta
region and times were good.
Then greed led to disaster: as
demand rose sharply
for the Santa Marta marijuana, the growers and sellers found it hard to satisfy
all their customers. They could have raised the prices, they might have rationed sales.
They didn’t. Instead they stuffed the loads with grass or old newspapers to
get the right weight for the deal. When they saw this, the North American
gangsters never went back. They found other sources and the marijuana boom on
Colombia’s Caribbean coast stopped even more suddenly than it had started. It
was like an omen of the cocaine boom that was just about
to rip across
all of Colombia like a storm.
While the Santa
Marta boom was happening from the late ‘sixties and on into the
‘seventies, Pablo Escobar had started to establish himself as a leader in
organised crime – on a small scale. Still in his early twenties, he
had a gang that operated out of Envigado, his home town, and in the regional
capital, Medellin. They stole cars, repainted them and sold them on. They had
a sideline in forged lottery
tickets; and, once, they had kidnapped a successful local businessman
and received a very attractive $100,000 to let him go again. It was this money
that financed
the first big cocaine deal. The gang was starting to gain a reputation;
they even had a little money.
And it was at this point that the
cocaine boom just
happened. For some reason, cocaine suddenly became very fashionable in the
U.S.A. for the first time since the 1920s and, if you could get the stuff to
them, Americans would pay top prices in hard currency for your product.
It wasn’t hard for Escobar. The stuff was much easier to smuggle than marijuana,
with a far higher profit margin. You bribed a few people, threatened a
few others, maybe killed one or two and, if your delivery of cocaine got all
the way to the U.S.A., you were rich, enormously rich, from just one export
run. Pablo Escobar soon had a number of smuggling routes operating.
The money simply poured in. Bribery got easier and went higher up the system.
People wanted to be Pablo’s friend.
Escobar soon controlled the trade in
his entire
region and beyond.
He also controlled the Colombian police and much of the national government.
His only real enemies in Colombia were the Rodriguez-Orejuela, a crime family
in Cali, the country’s other big city.
In the meantime, the cocaine boom
had had all sorts of strange social and economic effects in Colombia. Payments for
deliveries of cocaine were in cash, usually dollars, which made it easy to
spend but hard to invest or bank. So, very little of any real worth
was bought or built. Spending in bars and discos and throughout the
entertainment sector was at an all-time high. Luxury cars could be seen
everywhere, some driven by schoolgirls who were popular as girlfriends for
gangsters. If a boy at school annoyed one of these girls, they might ask their
gangster boyfriend to kill him and he would. The murder rate went to shocking
levels and drug use of all kinds increased. All over Colombia the same story
was being repeated. The guerrilla war had also started again.
Escobar and the other drug traffickers thrived
on the confusion and violence. But, there were careful politics
as well. Escobar always kept well in with the Catholic Church and its
senior priests were always happy to accept his generous donations, knowing
very well where the money came from.
He built blocks of homes for the
elderly and sports grounds for the young. He made a lot of friends. They knew
the ugly kind of things he did to make his money but it was an awful lot
of money and he gave so much of it to the poor, after all. Escobar was
beginning to build quite a loyal political following based in Medellin. At
least loyal
while the money lasted. And, while it did, Escobar decided to take advantage
and enter national politics.
He had two strong reasons for doing
this. First, he was ambitious to be ‘somebody’, a congressman or a senator,
maybe, one day, president. He didn’t say it but it was there. Everyone
could sense it.
The other reason was the threat that would shadow Escobar until
it drove him to his death at the age of 44: ‘extradition’. His legal removal to
another country to be tried in court for serious crimes there. The
other country would be the United States of America.
It was his worst nightmare. In
Colombia, he could buy whoever he liked or, if necessary, have them killed. He
would never, could never, be successfully tried, found guilty and kept in
prison to serve his sentence. When he did, on one occasion, agree to
serve time in prison in Colombia he built the prison as he wanted it and
included escape tunnels which he later used.
This would not be the way in America.
There he would face incorruptible police, judges and juries. The
U.S. government would make sure of it. And when they found him guilty,
he would get fifty or a hundred years as his sentence in a hard, cruel
U.S. high security jail where he would probably be killed. He would certainly
be forgotten – except, of course, by the police accountants who would slowly
find and take away all his money. None of that could be allowed to happen.
Escobar would show that he was ready to do anything, anything at all, to
prevent it.
For the time being, he hoped that his
new role as an elected politician would bring him protection from any legal
process. He was happy to let his lawyers argue the point at length in Colombia’s notoriously slow
courts. But the possibility of extradition arose again and Escobar went on the run.
This time it seemed as though he was at war with the Colombian state. He even
paid a bounty of $1,000 to anyone who killed a police officer.
Independent, two-man assassination teams roamed the streets of Medellin looking
for police to murder on the spot. Two or three police were dying every
day.
Pablo Escobar’s carefully constructed popularity
as a ‘Robin Hood’ figure for Colombia started to fade. Then, with one single act of
violence, it disappeared. A flight from the capital, Bogota, to Cali, a
regional centre, blew up in mid-air, killing all aboard. Dozens of men,
women and children had been killed because, on board with them, and protected
by detectives, was a key witness to the extradition case against
Pablo Escobar. His men had made plans to kill just the witness, maybe some of
his guards, but they had all come to nothing because the security was so tight.
In the end, Escobar ordered his men to go ahead and blow up a whole plane full of
people in order to kill just one person. Colombia, a country that has seen the
worst horrors, was shocked by this act.
Any support Escobar had had
disappeared. Members of his organization started to leave or, worse, to talk to
the police. He was spending millions of dollars hiding and making war on the
state, and not making money. All his criminal operations had been suspended.
Slowly, the special police team hunting him had him trapped in the city of
Medellin. Patiently, slowly, they tracked him down with electronic equipment
and informants’ tips.
Then, the day after his birthday, they surprised Escobar and his bodyguard at
one of their many hiding places.
And so it ended. One question remains: did the fatal head-shot through the ears come from Escobar himself? There is evidence that it did and he had always said that he would commit suicide before he surrendered to his enemies.
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