organizational mountain that consisted of his family, financial associates, sicarios and lawyers, then perhaps the only way to get him was to first take down the mountain. During the late fall and early winter of 1992-93, the effort against Escobar began targeting more aggressively his worldwide financial empire.
Sickened by the carnage of the January 1993 bookstore bombing, Wagner had personally taken charge of the agency's efforts to undermine Escobar's bombing campaign. Just days before the bombing, his agents by chance had made a connection with a man involved with Escobar's bomb squads. Wagner decided to work the man himself, employing all his spy-craft to protect the source from discovery.
He met with the man just days after the bookstore blast, and about once a week after that. He learned that the bookstore bomb had originally been planned for the Ministry of Justice, but when the car bombers discovered that security was too tight there, they panicked, parked the car nearby, and ran. Wagner also began learning the names of the men running Escobar's bombing campaign.
The bookstore blast had just about erased what was left of Escobar's popularity outside Medellin. Days later, the government, responding to public outrage, declared him Public Enemy No. 1, and offered the unprecedented reward of five billion pesos ($6.5 million) for information leading to his capture.
The forces pursuing Escobar had long been united in their desire to get him before he was able to negotiate another comfortable 'surrender' deal. Search Bloc and government correspondence was always careful to record that the desire was to 'capture' Escobar, but privately they said they did not expect to take him alive.
Inside Search Bloc headquarters in Medellin, DEA agent Pena detected a distinct shift in mood after the bookstore bombing. Just after the blast, Pena encountered a group of Martinez's top men emerging from a meeting with the colonel.
'Things have changed now,' they told Pena.
The hunt for Escobar, already bloody and terrible, was about to take an even darker turn. In the previous months, Los Pepes had operated quietly, but in late January a decision was made - Rubin said he thought it was a mistake - to begin publicizing its actions. Bodies of Escobar's associates began turning up all over Medellin and Bogota, most with signs around their necks advertising the vigilante group.
Sometimes they were victims of Los Pepes; sometimes they were killed by the Search Bloc. Among the dead were some of the names Wagner had uncovered with his mole. Whenever the Search Bloc was publicly responsible, the reports read: 'Killed in a gun battle with Colombian police.'
The hunt for Pablo Escobar grew uglier in 1993. In his desk at the Search Bloc headquarters, Col. Hugo Martinez kept a growing pile of grisly photographs of the dead. Displaying the photos to a Delta Force operator one afternoon, the colonel said of Medellin cartel members his men had not yet found, 'As long as I'm the commander here, they're not going to live.'
Delta soldiers interviewed for this story said they weren't surprised or distressed by the colonel's attitude. Indeed, they supported it. As far as they were concerned, it was a bad idea to bring narcos back alive, because they all had good lawyers and Colombia's legal system was so corrupt there was no real chance for justice.
Of no one was this more true than Escobar himself. While never stated as an official position, none of the men pursuing Escobar, American or Colombian, expected to see him taken alive. The search forces saw themselves in a race with more liberal elements in the Colombian government, particularly Fiscal General (Attorney General) Gustavo de Greiff, who was trying to negotiate another peaceful surrender.
A DEA memo written in September 1993 noted that both the National Police and the U.S. Embassy hoped that somehow Escobar would be 'located' before he was able to strike another deal with the government, 'which could amount to the beginning of a new farce.'
Some key Escobar associates did manage to surrender. On Oct. 8, 1992, his brother Roberto and one of Escobar's sicarios, or assassins, Jhon 'Popeye' Velasquez, turned themselves in. They were promptly locked up at Itagui, a conventional maximum-security prison in Medellin.
It was only a matter of time before Escobar worked out his own terms. The ambassador and other officials at the U.S. Embassy knew that President Cesar Gaviria himself had been drawn into a dialogue with the drug boss' lawyers just days after his escape.
These developments lent urgency to the effort against Escobar, and made welcome the sudden, dark contributions of Los Pepes in 1993. If those who had been hunting Escobar for six months - Martinez for nearly four years - were hunting him down to kill him, who or what would stop them?
Everyone would be careful not to say this aloud, although it did slip out.
When police Col. Gustavo Bermudez (director of the military side of the Medellin task force) told a Colombian TV station in October that he would rather see Escobar killed than captured, it caused a brief furor in the press. Juan Pablo Escobar, the drug boss' teenage son, called the National Police hotline and said that if his father were killed, 'Col. Bermudez will find his whore mother dead.' Bermudez retracted his statement and said it had been taken out of context, but he had accurately reflected the sentiments of many of those involved in the search.
If handled discreetly, who would know except those who had much to lose by revealing the truth? The bureaucrats and politicians in Washington didn't read Colombian newspapers. The embassy was the lens through which the United States viewed the country. And the embassy was guiding the hunt for Escobar.
As for the Medellin cartel associates turning up dead - as many as three or four a day by the summer of 1993 - it wasn't as if the government and the Americans were the only likely suspects. Escobar had been warring with other drug exporters and crooks his entire adult life. His campaigns of intimidation and murder had left hundreds, if not thousands, of mourners, some of them from wealthy families.
Most of the victims of Escobar's violence came from the upper middle class in Bogota. As a class, however, they were unlikely to form bands of hit squads. Many of Bogota's most prominent families had members who invested heavily in the cocaine business.
Right-wing paramilitary squads and leftist guerrillas had long experience with hit squads and were clearly capable of the work attributed to Los Pepes.
But Escobar had never been especially political, and he had formed alliances of convenience over the years.
The paramilitaries had close ties to the Colombian army, with whom Escobar enjoyed cozy relations; he had 'escaped' from prison in July 1992 by strolling through the army's Fourth Brigade. The right-wing death squads had been bankrolled to a large extent by Escobar and other drug kingpins. Some of them were getting rich exporting drugs themselves.
