What credibility can Colonel Martinez have . . . if he himself planted a revolver and dynamite in my lawyer's car so he would appear to be a terrorist? The same colonel who tortured and murdered lawyers is now promoted to brigadier. What can be expected of people like you, who don't even show respect for honor and truth?
Regards Pepes.
Pablo Escobar
Copy to national and foreign media, the President, Minister of Defense, Prosecutor . . .
The Colombian police finally had members of Escobar's family exactly where they wanted them. Now that they were out from under the official protection of Fiscal General de Greiff, Escobar's wife and children were in the hands of Los Pepes as far as the fugitive was concerned. The police knew Escobar would be frantic.
Police at the hotel reported hearing Escobar's little girl, Manuela, singing a Christmas carol to herself as she wandered the empty complex. She had substituted the traditional chorus with one of her own that went, in part, 'Los Pepes want to kill my father, my family, and me.'
After Hugo Martinez's success in tracking down a Medellin drug dealer with his police unit's high-tech gear, his father gave him a few days off to visit his wife and children in Bogota. But on Hugo's first night back, in late November 1993, Pablo Escobar started issuing phone threats, which were traced to a neighborhood in Medellin.
It was bad luck and good luck. Hugo was disappointed at having to cut short his vacation - he flew back to Medellin early the next morning - but he was also excited. He had full confidence again in his unit's special direction-finding equipment, and he knew that with the Escobar family being held at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota, Pablo would be worried and on the phone often.
The hotel was owned by the Colombian armed forces. While Escobar's wife, Maria Victoria, and their children had been under the protection of Colombia's top federal prosecutor, it had been unlikely that the Search Bloc or Los Pepes (which Escobar considered one and the same) would harm them. It was the fear that the prosecutor was going to drop his protection that had prompted the family's futile flight to Frankfurt, Germany, earlier in November.
Now Escobar's wife and children were in the hands of the police, which meant their safety depended on nothing more than the goodwill of the men who were hunting him down.
Col. Hugo Martinez, commander of the Search Bloc and father to Hugo, took steps of his own to make the most of this moment. Unsure of his own colleagues in Bogota, the colonel had someone he trusted assigned to the hotel complex switchboard - an officer who had been a friend of Hugo's in the intelligence branch and had lived for a time at the Tequendama.
They devised a system to tip off Hugo immediately each time Escobar phoned. All calls to the hotel came through the switchboard, so if a call sounded like Escobar, they would delay making the connection to the family's apartment upstairs until Hugo had been alerted. That way, his unit's monitors in the air and on the ground could start tracing the call before the conversation even started.
Escobar gave them plenty of chances. Over the next four days, he would call six times. Even though the first few conversations were very short - Escobar checking to see how the family was holding up and urging his son to continue doing everything possible to get out of Colombia - Centra Spike was able to get a precise fix on his location. It was a middle-class neighborhood in Medellin called Los Olivos, a sector that included blocks of two- story rowhouses and some office buildings.
For his part, Escobar tried to confuse his pursuers, who he knew were listening, by speaking from the backseat of a moving taxi, using a high-powered radio phone that was linked to a larger transmitter that his men constantly moved from place to place. Escobar himself had moved into a rowhouse on street 79-A, house number 45D-94, in the third week of November 1993, more than a month after he had narrowly escaped a Search Bloc raid of his hideout in Aguas Frias, a Medellin suburb.
He was constantly moving, buying houses throughout the city and surrounding area he knew so well, for Medellin was his hometown. He carried dozens of newspaper ads for real estate with his notebooks, and was always buying and selling hideouts. That way, he was always home, even though he had no home.
He moved with his collection of wireless phones. It didn't trouble him to know that the authorities listened whenever he spoke on the phone. It had been that way for years. He used the knowledge to feed disinformation, to keep his pursuers running in every direction but the right one. The game wasn't to avoid being overheard, which was impossible, but to avoid being targeted.
It was evident from Escobar's phone conversations and letters he had written over the previous months how infuriated he was with his reduced circumstances, but clearly he also felt some pride. The same man who had posed dressed as Pancho Villa and Al Capone had been the most wanted fugitive in the world for 15 months - for more than three years if you counted his first war with the government.
After so much carnage, so many millions spent to hunt him down, he was still alive, and still at large. Many people wanted him dead: the Americans, his rivals in the Cali cocaine cartel and their government lackeys, the Search Bloc and Los Pepes, whom he was convinced were really just Search Bloc forces in league with his other enemies.
As he moved from place to place in Medellin, he took comfort in all the simple people of his home city who still believed in him, who still called him El Doctor or El Patron. They remembered the housing projects he had bankrolled, the soccer pitches, the donations to church and charity, and they had little affection for the government forces closing in on him.
And even though Escobar's organization had been taken apart, so many of his friends killed or in jail, he believed he could still right things. Then there would be many, many scores to settle. As his son, Juan Pablo, had sneered to a representative from the prosecutor's office a few months before: 'My dad is also searching for everyone who is after him, and destiny will say who finds who first.'
But Maria Victoria (he called her 'Tata') and the children had to be moved out of the way. Escobar believed his family was in terrible danger. Any harm that came to his family would cause him great pain, but would also be the greatest insult. If he could not protect his own family, his enemies and his friends would know he was finished.
Escobar hadn't seen his wife and children in more than a year and a half. He clearly admired the way Juan Pablo had stepped forward in this crisis, and he was relying on his son more and more to protect Maria Victoria and Manuela.
He had to get his family out of Colombia, not just for their protection, but to free his hands. With Maria
