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

Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia

SEARCH BLOC LEADER TRIES TO KEEP HIS SON FROM JOINING THE MANHUNT

Chapter 23 of a continuing serial

Col.  Hugo Martinez did not want his son coming to Medellin.  Without telling the young man, the colonel had twice intervened to block his transfer to that dangerous city.  Now he would block him again. 

The younger Hugo Martinez was a lieutenant who worked for a special Colombian electronic surveillance unit that used portable devices to track down the source of a radio signal.  The unit had been successful in recent cases, and was running tests in Bogota.  The colonel believed it might help finally find Pablo Escobar, who was believed to be hiding somewhere in Medellin. 

The Americans in their surveillance planes could tell the Search Bloc what neighborhood and even what block the signal from Escobar's cell phone was coming from, but in a city as densely populated as Medellin, a block wasn't good enough.  The colonel hoped this new team might provide the pinpoint capability they needed. 

"Send the team, but I don't want you to come here," Martinez told his son. 

The team members using the portable electronic gear would have to live and work undercover in the city.  Coming and going from the protected headquarters of the colonel's Search Bloc outside Medellin would blow their cover. 

Given the bounty Escobar had placed on the head of every police officer in Medellin, and the even higher reward for killing a member of the Search Bloc, Martinez feared putting his son in such a position. 

"Send someone else," the colonel said. 

The younger Martinez reminded his father that he, his mother, brother and sister had been living with the threat of Escobar for years.  Once, knowing that his phone conversation was being recorded and would eventually reach Col.  Martinez's ears, Escobar had said: "Colonel, I'm going to kill you.  I'm going to kill all of your family up to the third generation, and then I will dig up your grandparents and shoot them and bury them again."

He had been a target for a long time, Hugo told his father.  "At least this way I have the chance to fight back.  I'm part of the team, and it won't work as well without me.  We need to try to resolve this, so that it is not always going to be hanging over our heads.  We can do it together."

Young Hugo looked nothing like his father.  He was short, stocky and dark where his father was tall, pale and slender.  But father and son shared a stubborn ability to stay focused - a trait that Hugo would demonstrate in the coming months. 

Hugo also shared his father's keen intellect, but in him it was less apparent.  He was a visionary, the kind of man who could persuade other people to follow him even when only he understood where they were going. 

The father led by stern discipline and example; Hugo led with enthusiasm.  When he talked about technical matters that often only he understood, Hugo flushed with pleasure.  He would begin making scratchy diagrams of his ideas, leap to his feet, gesturing, explaining, exhorting.  He believed in technology with evangelical passion. 

During his father's first war against Escobar, Hugo had been a student at the National Police Academy in Bogota.  He was 20 when the threats against his family started. 

Their lives changed dramatically.  No longer a typical, upper-middle-class family, they effectively became fugitives.  They were not allowed to travel, and hardly a month went by without hearing that someone close to them had been killed or kidnapped.  Friends they had known for years shunned them out of fear. 

Hugo escaped some of this when he entered the police academy, where, aside from a few appropriate precautions, he lived as a normal cadet.  He was training to become a police officer, to support the nation's laws and institutions, with a full appreciation of their fragility.  He longed to help his father hunt down Escobar. 

When he graduated, Second Lt.  Hugo Martinez was sent to an investigative arm of the Colombian judiciary.  He was placed with an electronic surveillance unit that had been given portable eavesdropping and direction-finding equipment by the CIA.  The surveillance team had already purchased equipment from France and Germany that was designed to perform a similar function, but they had never been able to get the direction-finding part of it to work. 

Hugo was assigned to work with the CIA kit, which looked like a prop from an early science-fiction movie.  It was a gray metal box about a foot square, with cables snaking out the sides, and a spray of antennae on the top, one at each corner and six more in the center.  It had a screen, no bigger than the palm of his hand, that displayed the strength and direction of a signal. 

The whole contraption fit inside a bulky suitcase, and was used in concert with the much bulkier French and German equipment, which was housed in three gray vans.  The vans would park on the hills just outside Bogota and raise their antennae - to the uninitiated they looked like electric company repair vehicles.  The three vans would go out on trial runs to triangulate a target signal, placing it within a prescribed area. 

Hugo would then cruise through the streets with another officer in an unmarked car, monitoring the directional signal with the screen and headphones.  In theory, Hugo's team would pinpoint the signal to the correct building, even the correct floor and apartment. 

It never worked.  After some wrangling the police bought upgrades that did improve the system slightly, but it fell considerably short of being able to pick one building or floor from another.  Hugo and his unit could find the right two-block area, but picking the right house was beyond them. 

Progress in direction-finding was further stymied because his team's simple eavesdropping capability was in demand.  When President Cesar Gaviria learned that the National Police were able to park outside a building and listen in on conversations inside, Hugo's team was assigned to eavesdrop on guerrilla leaders in Bogota for peace negotiations. 

The unit was able to supply government negotiators with inside information about the guerrillas' negotiating strategies, and alert them to new proposals before they were made.  As a result, the team developed a reputation for surveillance wizardry that overstated the actual case. 

They were not really getting better at radio direction-finding.  For that purpose the equipment was still useless.  But, Hugo said, they didn't let on.  Each small victory brought them a better assignment. 

In 1991 and 1992, they were used against guerrillas in the southern part of the country.  It was only after these missions that Hugo's commander was able to convince police authorities that they really needed more work on their direction-finding skills.  They were allowed to return to Bogota not long after Escobar's escape, where they resumed their tests on city streets. 

As hard as they tried, Hugo knew that his little gray boxes were not yet working well enough to help him find a man like Pablo Escobar.