MAP's index for the series: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a251.html

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ESCOBAR'S POWERFUL FOES ALLY AGAINST HIM

Chapter 13 of a continuing serial

The hunt for Pablo Escobar grew uglier in 1993.  In his desk at the Search Bloc headquarters, Col.  Hugo Martinez kept a growing pile of grisly photographs of the dead.  Displaying the photos to a Delta Force operator one afternoon, the colonel said of Medellin cartel members his men had not yet found, "As long as I'm the commander here, they're not going to live."

Delta soldiers interviewed for this story said they weren't surprised or distressed by the colonel's attitude.  Indeed, they supported it.  As far as they were concerned, it was a bad idea to bring narcos back alive, because they all had good lawyers and Colombia's legal system was so corrupt there was no real chance for justice. 

Of no one was this more true than Escobar himself.  While never stated as an official position, none of the men pursuing Escobar, American or Colombian, expected to see him taken alive.  The search forces saw themselves in a race with more liberal elements in the Colombian government, particularly Fiscal General ( Attorney General ) Gustavo de Greiff, who was trying to negotiate another peaceful surrender. 

A DEA memo written in September 1993 noted that both the National Police and the U.S.  Embassy hoped that somehow Escobar would be "located" before he was able to strike another deal with the government, "which could amount to the beginning of a new farce."

Some key Escobar associates did manage to surrender.  On Oct.  8, 1993, his brother Roberto and one of Escobar's sicarios, or assassins, Jhon "Popeye" Velasquez, turned themselves in.  They were promptly locked up at Itagui, a conventional maximum-security prison in Medellin. 

It was only a matter of time before Escobar worked out his own terms.  The ambassador and other officials at the U.S.  Embassy knew that President Cesar Gaviria himself had been drawn into a dialogue with the drug boss' lawyers just days after his escape. 

These developments lent urgency to the effort against Escobar, and made welcome the sudden, dark contributions of Los Pepes in 1993.  If those who had been hunting Escobar for six months - Martinez for nearly four years - were hunting him down to kill him, who or what would stop them?

Everyone would be careful not to say this aloud, although it did slip out. 

When police Col.  Gustavo Bermudez ( director of the military side of the Medellin task force ) told a Colombian TV station in October that he would rather see Escobar killed than captured, it caused a brief furor in the press.  Juan Pablo Escobar, the drug boss' teenage son, called the National Police hotline and said that if his father were killed, "Col.  Bermudez will find his whore mother dead." Bermudez retracted his statement and said it had been taken out of context, but he had accurately reflected the sentiments of many of those involved in the search. 

If handled discreetly, who would know except those who had much to lose by revealing the truth? The bureaucrats and politicians in Washington didn't read Colombian newspapers.  The embassy was the lens through which the United States viewed the country.  And the embassy was guiding the hunt for Escobar. 

As for the Medellin cartel associates turning up dead - as many as three or four a day by the summer of 1993 - it wasn't as if the government and the Americans were the only likely suspects.  Escobar had been warring with other drug exporters and crooks his entire adult life.  His campaigns of intimidation and murder had left hundreds, if not thousands, of mourners, some of them from wealthy families. 

Most of the victims of Escobar's violence came from the upper middle class in Bogota.  As a class, however, they were unlikely to form bands of hit squads.  Many of Bogota's most prominent families had members who invested heavily in the cocaine business. 

Right-wing paramilitary squads and leftist guerrillas had long experience with hit squads and were clearly capable of the work attributed to Los Pepes. 

But Escobar had never been especially political, and he had formed alliances of convenience over the years. 

The paramilitaries had close ties to the Colombian army, with whom Escobar enjoyed cozy relations; he had "escaped" from prison in July 1992 by strolling through the army's Fourth Brigade.  The right-wing death squads had been bankrolled to a large extent by Escobar and other drug kingpins.  Some of them were getting rich exporting drugs themselves. 

Leftist guerrillas had even less reason to go after Escobar.  His dramatic ongoing flight was distracting the United States and tying up Colombia's elite military units. 

The protracted effort to track Escobar was given such high priority by both the Colombian government and the U.S.  Embassy that it began to deeply trouble Joe Toft, the American country chief for the DEA. 

Toft never lost sight of the fact that Escobar was part of a much larger problem.  As the hunt stretched into 1993, Toft could see that the Cali cartel, the main rival to Escobar's Medellin cartel, was growing richer and stronger.  Its cocaine shipments to the U.S.  actually had grown while Escobar was on the run.  The longer the hunt went on, the better it was for its business. 

Given the timing and tactics, the most likely forces behind Los Pepes were the Moncada and Galeano families, against whom Escobar had declared open war, and the National Police, which had lost hundreds of officers to Escobar's sicarios.  Both were receiving American support. 

The execution of the Galeano and Moncada brothers, ordered by Escobar, had fractured the Medellin cartel.  Having been in business with Escobar for years, the widow Dolly Moncada, along with Mireya Galeano and her brother Raphael, knew many of his secrets.  The murder of their loved ones was sufficient motivation to seek Escobar's own death. 

Within weeks of Escobar's escape, a DEA memo written by agent Steve Murphy noted that the two families were trying to recruit sicarios "to battle Escobar," offering 20 million pesos ( $29,000 ).  Another Murphy memo written on Oct.  16, 1992, noted that Marta Moncada, a sister of the slain men, was cooperating with the hunt for Escobar. 

A former drug trafficker and pilot who went by the name "Rubin" said he worked in Medellin with a group headed by a man known as Don Berna, who had been the chief hit man for the Galeano family.  Rubin said Don Berna and the others in the group, which would eventually call themselves Los Pepes, worked closely with the Search Bloc, and with the DEA. 

"At first, Los Pepes would just kill people," said Rubin, who asked that his real name not be used.  "Then the philosophy changed at one point.  .  .  .  Those in charge said: 'Let's not kill them all.' "

Both the Galeano and Moncada families were angry, rich and powerful, but they were not strong enough to go up against Escobar's organization on their own.  They needed a strong push, some organization, some inside intelligence, and cash.  Suspicion has traditionally fallen on the rival Cali cartel, but an equally likely suspect would be the Americans.