and cash. At its height, with all these forces assembled under Ambassador Morris D. Busby and CIA station chief Bill Wagner, Bogota was the largest CIA station in the world.
The hunt for Escobar took an ugly turn in February 1993, when a vigilante group calling itself Los Pepes (Perseguidos por Pablo Escobar, or People Persecuted by Pablo Escobar) embarked on a campaign of murder and bombings.
The vigilantes burned Escobar's mansions and luxury cars and began methodically killing off lawyers, bankers, money-launderers, assassins and relatives who helped him maintain his cocaine empire. In so doing, the vigilantes made a key contribution - stripping away the infrastructure of Escobar's organization and leaving him isolated and afraid for his family.
In communiques, Los Pepes said it was composed of relatives of people murdered or terrorized by Escobar. The vigilantes hung a sign around the neck of one victim that read: 'For working with the narco-terrorist and baby-killer Pablo Escobar. For Colombia. Los Pepes.'
The Search Bloc's methods were no less brutal. So many of its targets were killed, rather than arrested, that American officials came to regard the phrase 'Killed in a gun battle with the Colombian police' as a euphemism for summary execution.
Busby, then the U.S. ambassador, and Colombian Gen. Hugo Martinez, the Search Bloc commander, both deny that the hunt for Escobar was tainted by cooperation with Los Pepes, who at their busiest were killing as many as five people a day. The group assassinated an estimated 300 people. No one was ever prosecuted for these murders.
Martinez said in interviews that he and his men had no association with Los Pepes, whom he called a 'nuisance.'
'They made more trouble for us than help,' said Martinez, who survived numerous attempts on his life and on his family. He said he turned down a $6 million bribe from Escobar to abandon the chase.
Busby said he had been told of evidence that the Search Bloc and Los Pepes were working together, but never found it convincing. He said that if he had believed the two groups were linked, 'it would have been a show- stopper. We would have pulled everybody out of the country. I communicated that directly to the Colombian president.'
The evidence Busby had seen was detailed in a secret cable he wrote on Aug. 1, 1993. In it, the ambassador said that Colombia's top prosecutor had told him he had 'very good' evidence of a connection. Busby also said that 'our own reporting' suggested a link.
Separate DEA cables from the embassy noted the connection between the Search Bloc and a leader of Los Pepes.
Busby, in an interview, said he had not seen the DEA cables and that DEA agents and Delta Force operatives never informed him of the interactions they witnessed between members of the Search Bloc and Los Pepes.
He said he still does not believe the Search Bloc and the vigilantes were connected.
In a series of interviews, former Colombian President Gaviria, now general secretary of the Organization of American States, said he suspected ties between his police generals and Los Pepes.
'I was very concerned there was a connection,' Gaviria said. 'I spoke out against Los Pepes very strongly from the beginning, but I feared there was a connection with the police. I think the police felt they were very close to getting Escobar, and maybe they went ahead because of that.'
Colombian Fiscal General Gustavo de Greiff, the equivalent of the U.S. attorney general, had more than suspicions. During the summer of 1993, he told U.S. officials in Bogota that he had strong evidence that Martinez and several top officers of the Search Bloc were working with Los Pepes. He said the evidence was sufficient to charge them with bribery, drug trafficking, torture, kidnapping and possibly murder.
Busby relayed this information to Washington in his secret cable of Aug. 1, 1993. The ambassador expressed misgivings about the sources of de Greiff's information. Many of the allegations, he wrote, were made by 'ex-Escobar assassins' trying to discredit the Search Bloc.
Nevertheless, Busby said, he had urged de Greiff and the Colombian defense minister to immediately remove Martinez and the other officers, and had threatened to withdraw American support if they failed to do so. Busby said he wanted to 'remove the taint from the anti-Escobar effort.'
Contrary advice was being offered by Joe Toft, the DEA chief in Bogota. In a cable written two days after Busby's, Toft said he had urged Colombian officials to keep Martinez in place. The message reads in part: 'The BCO' - Bogota Country Office, meaning the U.S. Embassy - 'continues to support Colonel Martinez and his subordinates.'
Martinez remained commander of the Search Bloc. Neither he nor any member of the unit was ever prosecuted, and U.S. support for the Escobar manhunt never wavered.
Colombian Police Col. Oscar Naranjo, then intelligence chief of the National Police and now chief of analysis for the Ministry of Defense, said in an interview that Los Pepes had worked closely with the Search Bloc.
'The Pepes were a desperate option after Pablo Escobar had generated so much violence in Medellin,' Naranjo said. 'Old partners of Escobar's got together to offer their services to the government. For the high- ranking officers of the police and government, their relationship with the Search Bloc was kept deliberately unclear, but people celebrated the actions of Los Pepes at all levels of the government. They and the Search Bloc acted on information gathered by the U.S. Embassy, and the Colombian army and police.'
Toft's Aug. 3, 1993, cable said: 'At this point, according to de Greiff, police officials were probably already too deeply involved with Los Pepes to withdraw. The witnesses' testimony indicates that not only were some members of the Bloque and Los Pepes running joint operations, some of which resulted in kidnappings and possibly killings, but that the leadership of Los Pepes was calling the shots, rather than the police.'
There is other evidence of cooperation between the Search Bloc and Los Pepes.
Fidel Castano, a colorful and ruthless Colombian paramilitary leader known as 'Rambo' who at one time had helped Escobar ship cocaine and who was killed in 1994 fighting against Marxist guerrillas, acknowledged publicly to reporters before his death that he was a founding member of Los Pepes. He and his brothers turned against the drug boss after he murdered their associates, he said.
In a dispatch to DEA headquarters on Feb. 22, 1993, DEA agent Javier Pena in Bogota identified Castano as 'a cooperating individual who was once a trusted Pablo Escobar associate.' Pena noted that Castano had valuable
