crooked smile, which leavened the cynicism of his long police career.
When he was handed the first assignment to go after Escobar in 1989, Martinez knew all too well that he had been handed the short straw. The police commander in the district surrounding Medellin had just been murdered after arresting several members of Escobar's Medellin cartel. The magistrate who had signed Escobar's arrest order also had been killed, as had a reporter from one of Bogota's leading daily newspapers, El Espectador, who had written approvingly of the effort.
There was a sense that Escobar could reach anyone, anywhere, at any time. Just days after Martinez had taken over the first hunt, a 220-pound car bomb exploded in Bogota, killing six people. The target of the blast, an outspoken police general, had somehow emerged unscathed from his armored limousine, its tires melted to the pavement.
It didn't help that Medellin, Escobar's home city, was practically owned by the drug boss. The city's police had been so corrupted by Escobar that the new National Police Search Bloc under Martinez's command did not contain a single paisa, or Medellin native, for fear he would secretly be on Escobar's payroll.
But that precaution had its own costs: Martinez's men knew nothing of the area, and had no local sources or informants. Even the unit's plainclothes detectives, members of Colombia's FBI, called Departamento Administrativo de Seguridad (DAS), stood out because none spoke with the distinctive paisa accent. On the unit's first foray into Medellin, 80 men in 10 vehicles got lost.
Not all the local police were corrupt, and some fell to Escobar's assassins during the first hunt. They were killing police in Medellin at a rate of six per day, some of them from the Search Bloc. With so many killings, and so much paralyzing fear, Martinez's men were now emotionally engaged. When the National Police considered moving the unit out of Medellin, the colonel and his men insisted on staying. They would weep and pray at funerals for their dead comrades, then go back to work, their fear warring with a powerful sense of mission. Martinez fought this internal war himself, and there were times when his fear won out.
Once, the colonel rushed back home to Bogota after a bomb was discovered in the basement of his family's apartment building. Nearly all the residents of the building were high-ranking National Police officers, but their response to the bomb was not to rally around their besieged colleague. Instead, they held a meeting and voted to ask Martinez to move his family out.
The colonel flew home from Medellin to help his family pack. It was during this trip that Escobar proved how vulnerable the colonel and his family were - and just how far Escobar's reach extended, even in Bogota.
Martinez remembered the scene well years later. He had told only his boss at police headquarters, Gen. Octavio Vargas, that he was returning that day to Bogota. So only the general, Martinez's pilot, and anyone who saw him land knew he was there. He was stuffing boxes when a retired police officer, someone he had known since his days in the academy, arrived at his door.
The colonel was surprised and alarmed. How had this man known to find him in Bogota?
'I come to talk to you obligated,' the retired officer said with a pained expression.
Martinez asked what he meant.
'If I did not agree to come talk to you, they could easily kill me or my family.'
Then the man offered the colonel $6 million, a bribe from Pablo Escobar to call off the hunt. More specifically, the officer explained: 'Continue the work, but do not do yourself or Pablo Escobar any real damage.'
Escobar also wanted a list of any snitches in his own organization.
Sometimes the fate of an entire nation can hinge on the integrity of one man.
Police Col. Hugo Martinez had been handed a suicide mission in 1989 - hunting down drug kingpin Pablo Escobar. This was during the Colombian government's first war against Escobar, before Martinez was called back in 1992 to rejoin the hunt.
He and his men had worked in an atmosphere of terror throughout 1989 and into 1990, every man expecting to be betrayed by his fellows. The National Police had constructed special chapels in Medellin and in Bogota just to handle the heavy demand for funeral services for officers murdered by Escobar's assassins.
From the first day the colonel believed he would be killed in this war. He accepted the risk. But his greatest fear was for his wife, his daughter and his two sons.
In late 1990, Martinez flew from his headquarters in Medellin to Bogota, where a car bomb had been discovered at his family's apartment building. As he was helping his family pack, he was approached by a retired police officer, an old friend, who offered him a $6 million bribe from Escobar to sabotage the hunt.
This bribe had come after a chilling demonstration of his family's vulnerability. The bomb in their basement made it clear that Escobar could find them. Now he had shown that he could follow Martinez's every move - Martinez had told only his boss about flying to Bogota - and also send the colonel's old friend to do his bidding.
The colonel's colleagues did not want the family in their building if it meant they were likely to be bombed. His own department was shunning him and his family and abandoning them to their fate.
And for what? Martinez could not even see the wisdom of going after Escobar. Cocaine was not Colombia's problem, it was the norteamericanos' problem. And even if they got Escobar, as the United States insisted, it was not going to curb the cocaine industry.
This first effort to get Escobar was being pushed hard by the U.S. Embassy, a fact that Escobar exploited skillfully in his public pronouncements. It resonated with the Colombian public because it was true.
The public believed the violence was provoked by the Americans' desire to extradite Escobar. It was Martinez's own dogged effort on the gringos' behalf that made the drug boss more desperate and determined. If the search effort stopped, he felt, the bloodshed and kidnappings would probably end as well.
There were car bombings in Bogota almost every day. By November 1990, Escobar's men had kidnapped 10 prominent men and women, including the editor-in-chief of the newspaper El Tiempo, and the daughter of a former Colombian president. These carefully chosen kidnappings had rocked Bogota to its social core.
In Medellin there was open war. Escobar still had a bounty on the head of every policeman there, more for members of Martinez's search team. The colonel and his men were being accused of using torture to extract information. Colombia was locked in a nightmare of blood and pain, and the colonel felt sometimes that he alone
