was out of his control. The generals refused his resignation, and ordered him back to Medellin to straighten things out.
When Martinez returned the following day, Aguilar met him at the helicopter and said they had found the soplon. Just after Martinez had flown away from the base, Aguilar had stormed out to confront the officers he had spoken with. All three angrily denied the betrayal, but as they spoke they noticed that a mechanic who worked at the base was standing close enough to overhear. He had been standing at the same spot when they had spoken earlier.
'That's got to be him,' Aguilar said.
Before accusing the man, they set a trap. With the colonel back in his office the next day, they ran through the same scenario. Aguilar emerged from Martinez's office and consulted with his three officers, standing close enough for the mechanic to overhear. Minutes later, Centra Spike recorded a phone call from the base delivering the false information.
The mechanic was confronted, and confessed. Fearing for his life, he said he had been recruited by a second lieutenant, one of the men Martinez had banished from the base nine days earlier. He said he also had been paid to kill Martinez. He had been given a pistol with a silencer and had actually climbed a tree several nights before outside the window where the colonel often sat reading. The mechanic said he was too far away to fire accurately and, fearing an errant shot would prompt return fire, he had resolved to spend a few days practicing with the pistol. He had planned to try again the night before, but the colonel had not returned from Bogota.
The incident reinforced the pervasiveness of Escobar's influence, even within the Search Bloc compound. The traitor lieutenant had been handpicked for the Search Bloc. Like the other men at Holguin, he had no access to telephones or radios, so he had recruited the worker.
Now more than ever, the colonel realized how dangerous his mission had become, and how hopeless the entire effort sometimes seemed. Not long afterward, the traitor lieutenant was killed, Martinez said, 'fighting against the guerrillas.' Several of Martinez's men said they believed the man was executed.
Even after this soplon had been sniffed out, there was still reason to believe Escobar had sources inside the compound. In November 1992, two raids on targets where Martinez was convinced Escobar had been hiding turned up nothing. Yet during the same period, raids on some of the cartel's midlevel management routinely got results. The experience confirmed Centra Spike's accuracy, yet when it came to Escobar, the raids were always too late.
Over the Christmas holidays in 1992, Escobar made yet another surrender offer, this time in a letter to two sympathetic Colombian senators. He would turn himself in if the government agreed to house him and 60 members of the 'military and financial arms' of his organization at a police academy in Medellin, to be supervised by members of the Colombian army, navy and air force.
He also demanded that all members of the Search Bloc be fired. In the letter, he accused Col. Martinez of routinely torturing those he arrested. Escobar demanded an investigation of these 'human rights abuses,' and then issued a threat:
'What would the government do if a 10,000-kilogram bomb were placed at the Colombian prosecutor general's office?'
He promised a new wave of kidnappings, threatening members of the 'diplomatic community.' He vowed to plant bombs at the government-owned radio and television station, the national tax offices and the newspaper El Tiempo.
Colombian President Cesar Gaviria responded in early January by calling the demands 'ridiculous,' and he dismissed Escobar's charges of human rights abuses as a public-relations ploy. Still, the warnings spread fear throughout official Bogota. Fiscal General Gustavo de Greiff, Colombia's top federal prosecutor, asked U.S. Ambassador Morris Busby to help relocate his family to the United States for safety.
For all the misery Escobar had caused, Martinez could not help but admire the way his enemy never seemed to lose his temper, especially when he was in danger. In the recordings of Escobar talking to his associates, the drug lord seemed to radiate calm. Martinez was impressed by his ability to manage several problems at once, and by the care with which he planned his moves.
Escobar proved to be flexible and creative. During the months when Martinez imposed a blackout on all cellular-phone use in Medellin, hoping to make it more difficult for Escobar to communicate with his organization, the drug boss just switched over to radio or communicated by messenger.
Escobar seemed able to anticipate how others would react, and plan accordingly. He and his friends would speak in elaborate impromptu codes that required remembering specific dates, places and events. Often Escobar's fluency with these facts tripped up his associates, who couldn't keep up with their boss' agile memory.
It was clear that Escobar believed he could stay one step ahead of the colonel for as long as it took for the Gaviria administration, or perhaps the next administration, to capitulate to his demands. Martinez was stubborn, but after six months of futile searching, after the deaths of 65 police and scores of civilians, he was no closer to finding Escobar in January 1993 than when he had started.
The colonel became devoted to his superstitions, bathing stones he carried in goat's milk, watching for omens to supplement the steady stream of intelligence he got from the Americans.
It was in this climate of frustration and fear that Los Pepes suddenly began to produce results.
By January 1993, the Americans directing the search for Pablo Escobar had managed to produce elaborate organizational charts for his Medellin drug cartel. The charts were displayed in the secret vault at the U.S. Embassy in Bogota and inside the Delta Force outpost in Medellin.
Some of the information had been gleaned from months of electronic eavesdropping on Escobar and his associates by Centra Spike, the secret U.S. Army unit. Some had been coerced from people interrogated by Col. Hugo Martinez and his police Search Bloc, and some came from informants recruited by the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Search Bloc to work in Medellin. Of these, according to an informant known as 'Rubin,' some were members of Los Pepes, the death squad that was methodically killing Escobar's hit men, relatives, lawyers and business associates.
The embassy's charts laid out Escobar's financial network, his businesses, his extended family, his legal teams. Many of those on the charts were not known to be criminals, or had not been indicted for crimes, but they were part of the mountain that propped up the drug lord. Such information would have been useful to a group like Los Pepes, and more than one American at the embassy believed it was finding its way to them.
The pattern of Los Pepes' hits corresponded neatly to the charts, and it wasn't just whom they were killing, but whom they were not. Some of the top names on the embassy's organizational charts were now under almost
