The bullet scratched the skin of his belly, but the boy wasn't seriously hurt. The colonel gathered up the items and delivered them that night to police headquarters, as though they were a curse.
Martinez says he still feels haunted by the dead drug boss. He says he derived personal satisfaction from Escobar's death, and he finally got his promotion to general, but he paid a heavy price.
'When I think about Pablo Escobar, I think of him as an episode in my life that completely altered the way I was living,' Martinez said in an interview last summer in his home village of Mosquera. 'I don't blame him as a person or anything like that. However, being involved in those operations, I abandoned my family and my sons who needed me in what was a crucial time in their lives.'
Martinez was accused of accepting money from the Cali cartel and of being involved with the illegal activities of Los Pepes - accusations he denies. He said the allegations were first made by Escobar himself, and spread by the Colombian press.
Martinez was never charged with any crime. For a while, for safety reasons, he considered moving with his wife and family to Argentina. But just as he began to inquire about emigrating there, he read news reports that Pablo Escobar's wife and son had been arrested there. Martinez said he felt sympathy for Escobar's family.
'Just as I was trying to go someplace else for security, so were they,' he said. 'I hurt to see they are still suffering for something that happened so long ago. They are also trying to escape from all that.'
Escobar's wife and children are believed to still own a substantial part of his illicit fortune. They live under assumed names in Buenos Aires, where Maria Victoria and Juan Pablo were charged in 1999 with attempting to illegally launder money. A family lawyer says Juan Pablo works for a computer graphics company, and Manuela, who is still a teenager, is a student.
Not long after Escobar's death, Juan Pablo paid an unexpected visit to the U.S. Embassy in Bogota. He asked to see Busby, who called downstairs to Toft.
'Hey, Joe, Pablo Escobar's son is downstairs. I'm not going to see him, OK?'
Toft agreed to meet with Juan Pablo. He stepped into the room to encounter a soft-looking young man. Toft was impressed with the boy's poise under the circumstances.
'He told me that he and his family were in great danger, and they were appealing for visas to save their lives,' Toft remembers.
'What will it take for me to get a visa?' Juan Pablo asked.
'All of the cocaine and cocaine money in the world would not get you a visa,' Toft told him.
Juan Pablo did not appear surprised by the answer.
'Are you sure we can do nothing?' he asked again. 'Is there anything, anything we could do to earn a visa?'
'Even if you helped put the whole Cali cartel in jail we would not give you a visa,' Toft told him.
And Juan Pablo left.
During the celebration at the embassy after Escobar was killed, Toft felt a knot in his stomach. He felt it all the while he was smiling, embracing colleagues, talking to the Colombian press. Toft was troubled by a feeling that somehow, they had sold their souls to the devil.
Even so, he framed a certificate presented by DEA Special Agent Kenny Magee to those directly involved in manhunt. It read, in part: 'Because of your selfless dedication and willing sacrifices, the world's most sought after criminal was located and killed. . . .' At the bottom were the signature and thumbprint of Pablo Escobar.
In his briefings in Washington over the previous year, Toft had soft-pedaled evidence of links between his own agency and the vigilantes of Los Pepes. He knew his agents had seen self-confessed Los Pepes leaders at the headquarters of the Search Bloc, the police team funded and guided by the United States.
He knew that certain murders of Escobar associates by Los Pepes came after the victims had been located by U.S. intelligence, and the information had been passed to the Search Bloc. On the one hand, Los Pepes were dismantling Escobar's Medellin cartel and stripping away the layers of protection around him. On the other hand, their brutal methods troubled Toft's conscience.
Now, with Escobar dead, Toft worried that the effort against Escobar had created a monster. It had opened a bridge between the Colombian government, its top politicians and generals, and the rival Cali drug cartel - what the DEA came to call a 'super cartel.' In the years the Americans had focused on Escobar, Toft feared, the Cali cartel had consolidated its operations, cemented its relationship with the Colombian government, and emerged as a cocaine monopoly.
In 1994, Toft retired from the DEA.
'I don't know what the lesson of the story is,' he said recently. 'I hope it's not that the end justifies the means.'
