reportedly damaged her hearing.
He eventually handed back the passports and the Colombian police informed Ochoa that they would not be allowed to fly.
The U.S. Embassy took out newspaper ads the next day explaining that Juan Pablo and Manuela could obtain visas if both parents, Pablo and Maria Victoria, showed up in person to apply at the embassy.
If Pablo Escobar had ever doubted that the United States was hot on his trail, those doubts vanished after the U.S. Embassy in Bogota refused to issue visas for his wife and children to flee to the United States in February 1993.
Escobar had always tried to avoid picking a fight with America, but now the Americans' latest moves clearly distressed him. Ambassador Morris Busby received by mail a newspaper clipping in an envelope that appeared to have been hand-addressed by the fugitive. The clipping was about the decision to turn back his family, and in a quotation from one of Escobar's defenders, one line was circled: '. . . is it valid to cancel the visas of children because one is persecuting the father?'
On March 2, Busby received a handwritten letter from Escobar, with his signature and thumbprint at the bottom. The letter mentioned a comment by a prosecutor in New York, in reference to the World Trade Center bombing earlier that year, that no enemy of the United States could be ruled out in investigating the attack. Included on the enemies list was Escobar's Medellin cartel.
Escobar wrote that he wasn't at war with the United States 'because in your country the government has not been participating in bombings, kidnappings, torture and massacre of my people and my allies.'
If he had carried out the World Trade Center bombing, he added, 'I would be saying why I did it and what I want.'
The bloodbath continued in Colombia, with Escobar's random car bombs increasingly answered with chilling precision by the vigilantes from Los Pepes. The day after Luis Londono - described by the DEA as one of Escobar's primary money-laundering experts - was killed, his brother Diego Londono, an architect, turned himself in, claiming Los Pepes had also tried to kill him.
The day Londono surrendered, Escobar's brother-in-law, Hernan Henao, known as 'HH,' was killed by Search Bloc members as they raided his apartment in Medellin.
Dolly Moncada had urged her new American allies to go after not just Escobar's gunmen, but his infrastructure, his family and his legal teams. In the spring of 1993, that's what started happening.
For surveillance purposes, the Drug Enforcement Administration had compiled elaborate lists of Escobar's relatives, with many of the names provided by Dolly Moncada. A list given in February by Joe Toft, the DEA country chief, to John Craig, the CIA deputy station chief, listed names and phone numbers for Escobar's father, mother, wife, brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, and children.
On March 4, an attorney who had worked for Escobar, Raul Zapata, was found murdered. The next day another attorney, Maria Munoz, was murdered. After another of Escobar's car bombs exploded in Bogota on April 15, killing 11 and injuring more than 200, Los Pepes exacted swift revenge, blowing up two fincas, or estates, owned by Escobar's key associates.
The same day, two more of Escobar's lawyers, Juan Castano and Guido Parra, were killed. Parra was murdered along with his 18-year-old son, Guido Andres Parra. They had been abducted from their apartment in Medellin by 15 heavily armed men.
Their bodies were found, hands tied with plastic tape and bullet wounds to the head, stuffed in the trunk of a taxi. A hand-lettered sign in the trunk read, 'Through their profession, they initiated abductions for Pablo Escobar.' It was signed, 'Los Pepes,' with a postscript: 'What do you think of the exchange for the bombs in Bogota, Pablo?'
The body of the taxi driver was found about a mile away, with a sign that accused him of working for the Medellin cartel. Any public dismay over the killings was far outweighed by anger over Escobar's deadly car bomb in Bogota.
In a statement issued by Los Pepes to the press, the vigilantes referred to Escobar's 'demented attitude' and concluded, 'We challenge Pablo Escobar and all his people to fight a frontal war which only affects the parties involved and doesn't incur the vile assassination of Colombians, under the false pretense that with these actions he will convince the last hopefuls of the power of his extinct organization; otherwise we will be forced to fight a frontal war against him and his close ones.'
Los Pepes saw themselves as a military organization. They called for the war to be fought without involving 'civilians,' but evidently Escobar's 'close ones' and innocents such as the son of Guido Parra did not qualify. Los Pepes also spread the word that the drug boss had been condemned to death, whether or not he surrendered.
The killings of Escobar's lawyers prompted three of the drug lord's best-known attorneys, Santiago Uribe, Jose Lozano and Reynaldo Suarez, to publicly resign from his service. In June, Lozano, who continued to represent Escobar despite his public resignation, was shot 25 times in downtown Medellin as he walked with his brother, who was badly injured. In July, seven other lawyers who had worked for Escobar or his cartel resigned (Uribe for the second time) after Los Pepes publicly threatened 'potential harm or murder.'
As this lawlessness accelerated through the spring, no one from Washington questioned it or noted America's possible links to it. No one from Colombia was complaining, or explaining.
The only voice of complaint came from Pablo Escobar. On April 29, he wrote a letter to Colombia's chief prosecutor, Gustavo de Greiff, who had recently indicted him for murder and other crimes. Escobar named Fidel Castano, a paramilitary leader who had secretly been providing information to the Americans, as the head of Los Pepes:
'Los Pepes have their headquarters and their torture chambers in Fidel Castano's house, located . . . scarcely 40 yards from an incinerated house which belonged to a relative of mine. There they torture trade unionists and lawyers. No one has searched the house or confiscated their assets.'
Escobar went on to complain that the murders and kidnappings he attributed to Los Pepes were not investigated by the government. The government, he said, offered rewards for information on the leaders of his cartel and leftist guerrilla commanders, but nothing for Los Pepes members.
The letter ended with yet another indication that the killings of his associates, the attacks on the homes of his loved ones, the relentless pursuit by the Search Bloc - all of it - were starting to wear on Escobar. He was ready to surrender.
