Killing Pablo

Penguin Books

Chapter One

There was no more exciting place in South America to be in April 1948than Bogotá, Colombia. Change was in the air, a static charge awaitingdirection. No one knew exactly what it would be, only that it was at hand.It was a moment in the life of a nation, perhaps even a continent, when allof history seemed a prelude.

    Bogotá was then a city of more than a million that spilled down theside of green mountains into a wide savanna. It was bordered by steep peaksto the north and east, and opened up flat and empty to the south and west.Arriving by air, one would see nothing below for hours but mountains, rowupon row of emerald peaks, the highest of them capped white. Light hitthe flanks of the undulating ranges at different angles, creating shiftingshades of chartreuse, sage, and ivy, all of them cut with red-brown tributariesthat gradually merged and widened as they coursed downhill to rivervalleys so deep in shadow they were almost blue. Then abruptly from thesevirgin ranges emerged a fully modern metropolis, a great blight of concretecovering most of a wide plain. Most of Bogotá was just two or threestories high, with a preponderance of red brick. From the center north, ithad wide landscaped avenues, with museums, classic cathedrals, and gracefulold mansions to rival the most elegant urban neighborhoods in theworld, but to the south and west were the beginnings of shantytowns whererefugees from the ongoing violence in the jungles and mountains soughtrefuge, employment, and hope and instead found only deadening poverty.

    In the north part of the city, far from this squalor, a great meeting wasabout to convene, the Ninth Inter-American Conference. Foreign ministersfrom all countries of the hemisphere were there to sign the charter for theOrganization of American States, a new coalition sponsored by the UnitedStates that was designed to give more voice and prominence to the nationsof Central and South America. The city had been spruced up for the event,with street cleanings and trash removal, fresh coats of paint on public buildings,new signage on roadways, and, along the avenues, colorful flags andplantings. Even the shoe-shine men on the street corners wore new uniforms.The officials who attended meetings and parties in this surprisingly urbanecapital hoped that the new organization would bring order and respectabilityto the struggling republics of the region. But the event had also attractedcritics, leftist agitators, among them a young Cuban student leader namedFidel Castro. To them the fledgling OAS was a sop, a sellout, an alliancewith the gringo imperialists of the north. To idealists who had gathered fromall over the region, the postwar world was still up for grabs, a contest betweencapitalism and communism, or at least socialism, and young rebelslike the twenty-one-year-old Castro anticipated a decade of revolution.They would topple the region's calcified fuedal aristocracies and establishpeace, social justice, and an authentic Pan-American political bloc. Theywere hip, angry, and smart, and they believed with the certainty of youththat they owned the future. They came to Bogotá to denounce the neworganization and had planned a hemispheric conference of their own to coordinatecitywide protests. They looked for guidance from one man in particular,an enormously popular forty-nine-year-old Colombian politiciannamed Jorge Eliécer Gaitán.

    "I am not a man, I am a people!" was Gaitán's slogan, which he wouldpronounce dramatically at the end of speeches to bring his ecstatic admirersto their feet. He was of mixed blood, a man with the education and mannerof the country's white elite but the squat frame, dark skin, broad face,and coarse black hair of Colombia's lower Indian castes. Gaitán's appearancemarked him as an outsider, a man of the masses. He could never fullybelong to the small, select group of the wealthy and fair-skinned whoowned most of the nation's land and natural resources, and who for generationshad dominated its government. These families ran the mines,owned the oil, and grew the fruits, coffee, and vegetables that made up thebulk of Colombia's export economy. With the help of technology and capitaloffered by powerful U.S. corporate investors, they had grown rich sellingthe nation's great natural bounty to America and Europe, and they hadused those riches to import to Bogotá a sophistication that rivaled the greatcapitals of the world. Gaitán's skin color marked him as apart from themjust as it connected him with the excluded, the others, the masses of Colombianpeople who were considered inferior, who were locked out of theriches of this export economy and its privileged islands of urban prosperity.But that connection had given Gaitán power. No matter how educatedand powerful he became, he was irrevocably tied to those others, whoseonly option was work in the mines or the fields at subsistence wages, whohad no chance for education and opportunity for a better life. They constituteda vast electoral majority.

    Times were bad. In the cities it meant inflation and high unemployment,while in the mountain and jungle villages that made up most ofColombia it meant no work, hunger, and starvation. Protests by angrycampesinos, encouraged and led by Marxist agitators, had grown increasinglyviolent. The country's Conservative Party leadership and its sponsors,wealthy landowners and miners, had responded with draconianmethods. There were massacres and summary executions. Many foresawthis cycle of protest and repression leading to another bloody civilwar?the Marxists saw it as the inevitable revolt. But most Colombianswere neither Marxists nor oligarchs; they just wanted peace. They wantedchange, not war. To them, this was Gaitán's promise. It had made himwildly popular.

    In a speech two months earlier before a crowd of one hundred thousandat the Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, Gaitán had pleaded with the governmentto restore order, and had urged the great crowd before him toexpress their outrage and self-control by responding to his oration not withcheers and applause but with silence. He had addressed his remarks directlyto President Mariano Ospina.

    "We ask that the persecution by the authorities stop," he'd said. "Thusasks this immense multitude. We ask a small but great thing: that our politicalstruggles be governed by the constitution.... Señor President, stop theviolence. We want human life to be defended, that is the least a people canask.... Our flag is in mourning, this silent multitude, this mute cry from ourhearts, asks only that you treat us ... as you would have us treat you."

    Against a backdrop of such explosive forces, the silence of this thronghad echoed much more loudly than cheers. Many in the crowd had simplywaved white handkerchiefs. At great rallies like these, Gaitán seemedpoised to lead Colombia to a lawful, just, peaceful future. He tapped thedeepest yearnings of his countrymen.

    A skillful lawyer and a socialist, he was, in the words of a CIA reportprepared years later, "a staunch antagonist of oligarchical rule anda spellbinding orator." He was also a shrewd politician who had turnedhis populist appeal into real political power. When the OAS conferenceconvened in Bogotá in 1948, Gaitán was not only the people's favorite,he was the head of the Liberal Party, one of the country's two major politicalorganizations. His election as president in 1950 was regarded as a virtualcertainty. Yet the Conservative Party government, headed by PresidentOspina, had left Gaitán off the bipartisan delegation appointed to representColombia at the great conference.

    Tensions were high in the city. Colombian historian GermanArciniegas would later write of "a chill wind of terror blowing in from theprovinces." The day before the conference convened, a mob attacked a carcarrying the Ecuadorian delegation, and rumors of terrorist violence seemedconfirmed the same day when police caught a worker attempting to plant abomb in the capital. In the midst of all the hubbub, Gaitán quietly went abouthis law practice. He knew his moment was still a few years off, and he wasprepared to wait. The president's snub had only enhanced his stature amonghis supporters, as well as among the more radical young leftists gathering toprotest, who otherwise might have dismissed Gaitán as a bourgeois liberalwith a vision too timid for their ambition. Castro had made an appointmentto meet with him.

    Gaitán busied himself with defending an army officer accused ofmurder, and on April 8, the day the conference convened, he won an acquittal.Late the next morning, some journalists and friends stopped by hisoffice to offer congratulations. They chatted happily, arguing about whereto go for lunch and who would pay. Shortly before one o'clock, Gaitánwalked down to the street with the small group. He had two hours beforethe scheduled meeting with Castro.

    Leaving the building, the group walked past a fat, dirty, unshavenman who let them pass and then ran to overtake them. The man, Juan Roa,stopped and without a word leveled a handgun. Gaitán briskly turned andstarted back toward the safety of his office building. Roa began shooting.Gaitán fell with wounds to his head, lungs, and liver, and died within thehour as doctors tried desperately to save him.

    Gaitán's murder is where the modern history of Colombia starts.There would be many theories about Roa?that he had been recruited bythe CIA or by Gaitán's conservative enemies, or even by Communist extremistswho feared that their revolution would be postponed by Gaitán'sascension. In Colombia, murder rarely has a shortage of plausible motives.An independent investigation by officers of Scotland Yard determined thatRoa, a frustrated mystic with grandiose delusions, had nursed a grudgeagainst Gaitán and had acted alone; but since he was beaten to death onthe spot, his motives died with him. Whatever Roa's purpose, the roundshe fired unleashed chaos. All hope for a peaceful future in Colombia ended.All those brooding forces of change exploded into El Bogotazo, a spasm ofrioting so intense it left large parts of the capital city ablaze before spreadingto other cities. Many policemen, devotees of the slain leader, joined theangry mobs in the streets, as did student revolutionaries like Castro. Theleftists donned red armbands and tried to direct the crowds, sensing withexcitement that their moment had arrived, but quickly realized that thesituation was beyond control. The mobs grew larger and larger, and protestevolved into random destruction, drunkenness, and looting. Ospinacalled in the army, which in some places fired into the crowds.

    Everyone's vision of the future died with Gaitán. The official effortto showcase a new era of stability and cooperation was badly tarnished;the visiting foreign delegations signed the charter and fled the country.The leftists' hopes of igniting South America's new communist era wentup in flames. Castro took shelter in the Cuban embassy as the army beganhunting down and arresting leftist agitators, who were blamed forthe uprising, but even a CIA history of the event would conclude thatthe leftists were as much victims as everyone else. For Castro, an agencyhistorian wrote, the episode was profoundly disillusioning: "[It] may haveinfluenced his adoption in Cuba in the 1950s of a guerrilla strategy ratherthan one of revolution through urban disorders."

    El Bogotazo was eventually quieted in Bogotá and the other large cities,but it lived on throughout untamed Colombia for years, metamorphosinginto a nightmarish period of bloodletting so empty of meaning it iscalled simply La Violencia. An estimated two hundred thousand people werekilled. Most of the dead were campesinos, incited to violence by appealsto religious fervor, land rights, and a bewildering assortment of local issues.While Castro carried off his revolution in Cuba and the rest of the worldsquared off in the Cold War, Colombia remained locked in this cabalisticdance with death. Private and public armies terrorized the rural areas. Thegovernment fought paramilitiaries and guerrillas, industrialists foughtunionists, conservative Catholics fought heretical liberals, and bandidos tookadvantage of the free-for-all to plunder. Gaitán's death had unleasheddemons that had less to do with the emerging modern world than withColombia's deeply troubled past.

    Colombia is a land that breeds outlaws. It has always been ungovernable,a nation of wild unsullied beauty, steeped in mystery. From thewhite peaks of the three cordilleras that form its western spine to the triple-canopyequatorial jungle at sea level, it affords many good places to hide.There are corners of Colombia still virtually untouched by man. Some areamong the only places left on this thoroughly trampled planet where botanistsand biologists can discover and attach their names to new species ofplants, insects, birds, reptiles, and even small mammals.

    The ancient cultures that flourished here were isolated and stubborn.With soil so rich and a climate so varied and mild, everything grew, sothere was little need for trade or commerce. The land ensnared one like asweet, tenacious vine. Those who came stayed. It took the Spanish almosttwo hundred years to subdue just one people, the Tairona, who lived in alush pocket of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta foothills. European invaderseventually defeated them the only way they could, by killing themall. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Spanish tried withoutsuccess to rule from neighboring Peru, and in the nineteenth century SimónBolívar tried to join Colombia with Peru and Venezuela to form a greatSouth American state, Gran Colombia. But even the great liberator couldnot hold the pieces together.

    Ever since Bolívar's death in 1830, Colombia has been proudly democratic,but it has never quite got the hang of peaceful political evolution.Its government is weak, by design and tradition. In vast regions to the southand west, and even in the mountain villages outside the major cities, livecommunities only lightly touched by nation, government, or law. The solecivilizing influence ever to reach the whole country was the CatholicChurch, and that was accomplished only because clever Jesuits grafted theirRoman mysteries to ancient rituals and beliefs. Their hope was to grow ahybrid faith, nursing Christianity from pagan roots to a locally flavoredversion of the One True Faith, but in stubborn Colombia, it was Catholicismthat took a detour. It grew into something else, a faith rich with ancestralconnection, fatalism, superstition, magic, mystery ... and violence.

    Violence stalks Colombia like a biblical plague. The nation's twomajor political factions, the Liberals and Conservatives, fought eight civilwars in the nineteenth century alone over the roles of church and state.Both groups were overwhelmingly Catholic, but the Liberals wanted tokeep the priests off the public stage. The worst of these conflicts, whichbegan in 1899 and was called the War of a Thousand Days, left more thanone hundred thousand dead and utterly ruined whatever national governmentand economy existed.

    Caught between these two violent forces, the Colombian peasantrylearned to fear and distrust both. They found heroes in the outlaws whoroamed the Colombian wilderness as violent free agents, defying everyone.During the War of a Thousand Days the most famous was José delCarmen Tejeiro, who played upon popular hatred of the warring powers.Tejeiro would not just steal from wealthy landowning enemies; he wouldpunish and humiliate them, forcing them to sign declarations such as "I waswhipped fifty times by José del Carmen Tejeiro as retribution for persecutinghim." His fame earned him supporters beyond Colombia's borders.Venezuelan dictator Juan Vicente Gómez, sowing a little neighborhood instability,presented Tejeiro with a gold-studded carbine.

    A half century later, La Violencia bred a new colorful menagerie ofoutlaws, men who went by names like Tarzan, Desquite (Revenge), Tirofijo(Sureshot), Sangrenegra (Blackblood), and Chispas (Sparks). They roamedthe countryside, robbing, pillaging, raping, and killing, but because theywere allied with none of the major factions, their crimes were seen by manycommon people as blows struck against power.

    La Violencia eased only when General Gustavo Rojas Pinilla seizedpower in 1953 and established a military dictatorship. He lasted five yearsbefore being ousted by more democratic military officers. A national planwas put in place for Liberals and Conservatives to share the government,alternating the presidency every four years. It was a system guaranteed toprevent any real reforms or government-initiated social progress, becauseany steps taken during one administration could be undone in the next.The famous bandidos went on raiding and stealing in the hills, and occasionallymade halfhearted attempts to band together. In the end they werenot idealists or revolutionaries, just outlaws. Still, a generation of Colombiansgrew up on their exploits. The bandidos were heroes despite themselvesto many of the powerless, terrorized, and oppressed poor. The nationboth thrilled and mourned as the army of the oligarchs in Bogotá huntedthem down, one by one. By the 1960s Colombia had settled into an enforcedstasis, with Marxist guerrillas in the hills and jungles (modern successorsto the bandido tradition) and a central government increasinglydominated by a small group of rich, elite Bogotá families, powerless to effectchange and, anyway, disinclined. The violence, already deeply rooted inthe culture, continued, deepened, twisted.

    Terror became art, a form of psychological warfare with a quasi-religiousaesthetic. In Colombia it wasn't enough to hurt or even kill yourenemy; there was ritual to be observed. Rape had to be performed in public,before fathers, mothers, husbands, sisters, brothers, sons, and daughters.And before you killed a man, you first made him beg, scream, and gag... or first you killed those he most loved before his eyes. To amplify revulsionand fear, victims were horribly mutilated and left on display. Malevictims had their genitals stuffed in their mouths; women had their breastscut off and their wombs stretched over their heads. Children were killednot by accident but slowly, with pleasure. Severed heads were left on pikesalong public roadways. Colombian killers perfected signature cuts, distinctiveways of mutilating victims. One gang left its mark by slicing the neckof a victim and then pulling his tongue down his throat and out throughthe slice, leaving a grotesque "necktie." These horrors seldom directlytouched the educated urbanites of Colombia's ruling classes, but the wavesof fear widened and reached everywhere. No child raised in Colombia atmidcentury was immune to it. Blood flowed like the muddy red watersthat rushed down from the mountains. The joke Colombians told was thatGod had made their land so beautiful, so rich in every natural way, that itwas unfair to the rest of the world; He had evened the score by populatingit with the most evil race of men.

    It was here, in the second year of La Violencia, that the greatest outlawin history, Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria, was born, on December 1, 1949.He grew up with the cruelty and terror alive in the hills around his nativeMedellín, and absorbed the stories of Desquite, Sangrenegra, and Tirofijo,all of them full-blown legends by the time he was old enough to listen andunderstand, most of them still alive and on the run. Pablo would outstripthem all by far.

    Anyone can be a criminal, but to be an outlaw demands a following.The outlaw stands for something, usually through no effort of his own. Nomatter how base the actual motives of criminals like those in the Colombianhills, or like the American ones immortalized by Hollywood?AlCapone, Bonnie and Clyde, Jesse James?large numbers of average peoplerooted for them and followed their bloody exploits with some measure ofdelight. Their acts, however selfish or senseless, were invested with socialmeaning. Their crimes and violence were blows struck against distant,oppressive power. Their stealth and cunning in avoiding soldiers and policewere celebrated, these being the time-honored tactics of the powerless.

    Pablo Escobar would build on these myths. While the other outlawsremained strictly local heroes, meaningful only as symbols, his powerwould become both international and real. At his peak, he would threatento usurp the Colombian state. Forbes magazine would list him as the seventh-richestman in the world in 1989. His violent reach would make himthe most feared terrorist in the world.

    His success would owe much to his nation's unique culture and history,indeed to its very soil and climate, with its bountiful harvests of cocaand marijuana. But an equal part of it was Pablo himself. Unlike any otheroutlaw before, he understood the potency of legend. He crafted his andnurtured it. He was a vicious thug, but he had a social conscience. He wasa brutal crime boss but also a politician with a genuinely winning personalstyle that, at least for some, transcended the ugliness of his deeds. He wasshrewd and arrogant and rich enough to milk that popularity. He had, inthe words of former Colombian president César Gaviria, "a kind of nativegenius for public relations." At his death, Pablo was mourned by thousands.Crowds rioted when his casket was carried into the streets of his home cityof Medellín. People pushed the bearers aside and pried open the lid totouch his cold, stiff face. His gravesite is tended lovingly to this day andremains one of the most popular tourist spots in the city. He stood forsomething.

    For what, exactly, isn't easy to understand without knowing Colombiaand his life and times. Pablo, too, was a creature of his time and place.He was a complex, contradictory, and ultimately very dangerous man, inlarge part because of his genius for manipulating public opinion. But thissame crowd-pleasing quality was also his weakness, the thing that eventuallybrought him down. A man of lesser ambition might still be alive,rich, powerful, and living well and openly in Medellín. But Pablo wasn'tcontent to be just rich and powerful. He wanted to be admired. He wantedto be respected. He wanted to be loved.

    When he was a small boy, his mother, Hermilda, the real shaping influencein his life, made a vow before a statue in her home village of Frontino,in the rural northwest part of the Colombian departamento, or state, ofAntioquia. The statue, an icon, was of the child Jesus of Atocha. HermildaGaviria was a schoolteacher, an ambitious, educated, and unusually capablewoman for that time and place, who had married Abel de Jesús Escobar, aself-sufficient cattle farmer. Pablo was their second son, and she had alreadyborne Abel a daughter. They would eventually have four more children. ButHermilda was cursed with powerlessness. For all her learning and drive, sheknew that the fates of her ambition and her family were out of her hands.She knew this not just in some abstract, spiritual way, the way religious menand women accept the final authority of God. This was Colombia in the1950s. The horror of La Violencia was everywhere. Unlike the relatively securecities, in villages like Frontino and the one where Hermilda and Abelnow lived, Rionegro, violent and terrible death was commonplace. TheEscobars were not revolutionaries; they were staunchly middle class. Tothe extent that they had political leanings, they were allied with localConservative landowners, which made them targets for the Liberal armiesand insurrectionists who roamed the hills. Hermilda sought protectionand solace from the child Jesus of Atocha with the urgency of a youngwife and mother adrift in a sea of terror. In her prayers she vowed somethingconcrete and grand. Someday, she said, she would build a chapelfor Jesus of Atocha if God spared her family from the Liberals. Pablowould build that chapel.

    Pablo did not grow up poor, as he and his hired publicists wouldsometimes later claim. Rionegro was not yet a suburb of Medellín, but acollection of relatively prosperous cattle farms in the outlying districts. Abelowned a house, twelve hectares, and six cows when Pablo was born, andhe tended adjacent land that he had sold to a well-known local Conservativepolitician. The house had no electricity but did have running water.For rural Colombia, this would qualify as upper middle class, and conditionsimproved when they moved to Envigado, a village on the outskirtsof Medellín, a thriving city that was rapidly creeping up the green slopesof the mountains around it. Hermilda was not just a schoolteacher but afounder of Envigado's elementary school. When they moved there, Abelgave up his farming to work as a neighborhood watchman. Hermilda wasan important person in the community, someone well-known to parentsand children alike. So even as schoolchildren, Pablo and his brothers andsisters were special. Pablo did well in his classes, as his mother no doubtexpected, and he loved to play soccer. He was well dressed and, as hischubby frame attested, well fed. Escobar liked fast food, movies, and popularmusic?American, Mexican, and Brazilian.

    While there was still violence in Colombia, even as he entered his teens,the raging terror of La Violencia gradually eased. Abel and Hermilda Escobaremerged from it all to create a comfortable life for themselves and their sevenchildren. But just as the prosperity of the fifties in the United States bred arestless, rebellious generation of children, so Pablo and his contemporariesin Medellín had their own way of tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. Ahippielike, nihilistic, countrywide youth movement called Nadaismo had itsorigins right in Envigado, where its founder, the intellectual FernandoGonzáles, had written his manifesto "The Right to Disobey." Banned by thechurch, barely tolerated by authorities, the Nadaistas? the "nothingists"?lampoonedtheir elders in song, dressed and behaved outrageously, andexpressed their disdain for the established order in the established way ofthe sixties: they smoked dope.

    Colombian dope was, of course, plentiful and highly potent, a fact thatthe world's marijuana-toking millions quickly discovered. It was soon theworldwide gold standard for pot. Pablo became a heavy doper early on andstayed that way throughout his life, sleeping until one or two in the afternoon,lighting up not long after waking up, and staying stoned for the restof the day and night. He was plump and short, standing just under five feet,six inches, with a large, round face and thick, black, curly hair that he worelong, combing it left to right in a big mound that sloped across his foreheadand covered his ears. He grew a wispy mustache. He looked out at the worldthrough big, heavy-lidded hazel eyes and cultivated the bemused boredomof the chronic doper. Rebellion evidently took hold not long after he reachedpuberty. He dropped out of Lyceum Lucrecio Jaramillo several months beforehis seventeenth birthday, three years shy of graduation. His turn to crimeappears to have been motivated as much by ennui as ambition.

    With his cousin and constant companion Gustavo Gaviria, he had takento hanging out nights at a bar in a tough neighborhood, the Jesús de Nazarenodistrict. He told Hermilda that he wasn't cut out for school or a normal job."I want to be big," he said. It was a testament to Hermilda's persistence, orpossibly Pablo's broader plans, that he never fully abandoned the idea ofeducation. He briefly returned to the lyceum two years later with Gustavo,but the two, older than their classmates and accustomed now to the freedomand rough-and-tumble of the Medellín streets, were considered bulliesand were soon fighting with their teachers. Neither lasted the schoolyear, although Pablo apparently tried several times, without success, to passthe tests needed to earn a diploma. He eventually just bought one. In laterlife he would fill shelves in his homes with stacks of unread classics and wouldtalk sometimes of wanting to earn a higher degree. At one point, enteringprison, he said he intended to study law. No doubt this lack of formal educationcontinued to feed his insecurities and disappoint Hermilda, but noone who knew him doubted his natural cunning.

    He became a gangster. There was a long tradition of shady businesspractices in Medellín. The stereotypical paisa was a hustler, someone skilledin turning a profit no matter what the enterprise. The region was famousfor contrabandistas, local heads of organized-crime syndicates, practitionersof the centuries-old paisa tradition of smuggling?originally gold and emeralds,now marijuana, and soon cocaine. By the time Pablo dropped out ofschool, in 1966, drug smuggling was already serious business, well over theheads of seventeen-year-old hoodlums. Pablo got his start conning peopleout of money on the streets of Medellín. But he had plans. When he toldhis mother that he wanted to be big, he most likely had in mind two kindsof success. Just as the contrabandistas dominated the illicit street life ofMedellín, its legitimate society was ruled politically and socially by a smallnumber of rich textile and mining industrialists and landowners. These werethe dons, the men of culture and education whose money bankrolled thechurches and charities and country clubs, who were feared and respectedby their employees and those who rented their land. Catholic, traditional, andelitist, these men held high public office and went off to Bogotá to representMedellín in the national government. Pablo's ambition encompassed bothworlds, licit and illicit, and this marks the central contradiction of his career.

    The standing legend of Pablo Escobar has it that he and his gang gottheir start by stealing headstones from cemeteries, sandblasting them clean,and then reselling them. He did have an uncle who sold tombstones, andPablo evidently worked for him briefly as a teenager. In later life he wasalways amused when the sandblasting stories were told, and he deniedthem?but then there was always much that Pablo denied. Hermilda hasalso called the story a lie, and, indeed, it doesn't seem likely. For one thing,sandblasting sounds too much like honest labor, and there is little to suggestthat Pablo ever had an appetite for that. And he was deeply superstitious.He subscribed to that peculiarly pagan brand of Catholicism commonin rural Antioquia, one that prays to idols?like Hermilda's child Jesus ofAtocha?and communes with dead spirits. Stealing headstones would bean unlikely vocation for anyone who feared the spirit world. What soundsmore likely are stories he later admitted to, of running petty street scamswith his friends, selling contraband cigarettes and fake lottery tickets, andconning people out of their cash with a mixture of bluff and charm as theyemerged from the local bank. Pablo would not have been the first street-smartkid to discover that it was easier and more exciting to take moneyfrom others than to earn it. He was exceptionally daring. Maybe it was thedope, but Pablo discovered in himself an ability to remain calm, deliberate,even cheerful when others grew frightened and unsteady. He used itto impress his friends, and to frighten them. On several occasions as a youth,Pablo later boasted, he had held up Medillín banks by himself with anautomatic rifle, bantering cheerfully with the clerks as they emptied theircash drawers. That kind of recklessness and poise is what distinguishedPablo from his criminal peers and made him their leader. Before long hiscrimes would grow more sophisticated, and more dangerous.

    The record shows that Pablo was an accomplished car thief beforehe was twenty. He and his gang took the crude business of pinching carsand turned it into a mini-industry, boldly taking vehicles (drivers wouldjust be pulled from behind the steering wheel in broad daylight) and choppingthem down to a collection of valuable parts within hours. There wasplenty of money to be made in parts, and no direct evidence of the theftremained. Once he'd amassed sufficient capital, Pablo began simply bribingmunicipal officials to issue new papers for stolen vehicles, eliminatingthe need to disassemble the cars. He seems to have had few significant run-inswith the law during this period. The arrest records have vanished, butPablo did spend several months in a Medellín jail before his twentiethbirthday, no doubt making connections with a more violent class of criminals,who would later serve him well. Clearly the stint behind bars didnothing to dissuade him from a life of crime.

    By all accounts, Pablo was enjoying himself. With their wide inventoryof stolen engines and parts, he and Gustavo built race cars andcompeted in local and national car rallies. His business evolved. In time,car theft in Medellín was practiced with such impunity that Pablo realizedhe had created an even more lucrative market. He started sellingprotection. People paid him to prevent their vehicles from being pinched?so Pablo began making money on cars he didn't steal as well as fromthose he did. Generous with his friends, he would give them new carsstolen right from the factory. Pablo would draw up false bills of sale andinstruct the recipients to take out fake newspaper ads offering the carsfor sale, creating a paper trail to make it appear as though the cars hadbeen obtained legitimately.

    It was during this period, as a young crime boss on the make, thatPablo developed a reputation for casual, lethal violence. In what may havebegun as simply a method of debt collection, he would recruit thugs tokidnap people who owed him money and then ransom them for whateverwas owed. If the family couldn't come up with the money or refused topay, the victim would be killed. Sometimes the victim was killed after theransom was paid, just to make a point. It was murder, but a kind of murderthat can be rationalized. A man had to protect his interests. Pablo lived ina world where accumulation of wealth required the capacity to defend it.Even for legitimate businessmen in Medellín there was little effective orhonest law enforcement. If someone cheated you, you either accepted yourlosses or took steps yourself to settle the score. If you grew successfulenough, you had to contend with corrupt police and government officialswho wanted a piece of your profits. This was especially true in Pablo's newillicit business. As the amounts of money and contraband grew, so did theneed to enforce discipline, punish enemies, collect debts, and bribe officials.Kidnapping or even killing someone who had cheated him not onlykept the books balanced; it sent a message.

    Pablo became expert at taking credit for crimes that could not belinked to him directly. From the start, he made sure that those he recruitedto commit violent acts were never certain who had hired them. In time,Pablo grew accustomed to ordering people killed. It fed his growing megalomaniaand bred fear?which was akin to the respect he seemed to cravemore and more.

    Kidnapping for debt collection evolved soon enough into kidnappingfor its own sake. The most famous case attributed to young Pablo wasthat of Envigado industrialist Diego Echavarria, in the summer of 1971.Echavarria was a proud Conservative factory owner, widely respected inhigher social circles but disliked by many of the poor workers in Medellín,who were being laid off in droves from local textile mills. At the time,wealthy Antioquia landowners were expanding their country holdings bysimply evicting whole villages of farmers from the Magdalena River Valley,leaving them no alternative but to move to the slums of the growingcity. The unpopular factory owner's body was found in a hole not far fromthe place where Pablo was born. He had been kidnapped six weeks earlierand had been beaten and strangled, even though his family had paid a$50,000 ransom. The killing of Diego Echavarria worked on two levels. Itturned a profit and it doubled as a blow for social justice. There is no wayto prove that Pablo orchestrated this crime, and he was never officiallycharged with it, but it was so widely attributed to him that in the slums peoplebegan referring to Pablo admiringly as Doctor Echavarria, or simply El Doctor.The killing had all the hallmarks of the young crime boss's emerging style:cruel, deadly, smart, and with an eye toward public relations.

    In one stroke, the Echavarria kidnapping elevated Pablo to the statusof local legend. It also advertised his ruthlessness and ambition, whichdidn't hurt either. In coming years, he would become even more of a heroto many in Medellín's slums with well-publicized acts of charity. He hada social conscience, but his aspirations were strictly middle class. Whenhe told his mother he wanted to be "big," he wasn't dreaming of revolutionor remaking his country; he had in mind living in a mansion as spectacularas the mock medieval castle Echavarria had built for himself. Hewould live in a castle like that, not as someone who exploited the massesbut as a people's don, a man of power and wealth who had not lost touchwith the common man. His deepest anger was always reserved for thosewho interfered with that fantasy.

Continues...

---

Excerpted from Killing Pabloby Mark Bowden Copyright ©2002 by Mark Bowden. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---