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

U.S.  SPY DATA, VIGILANTE KILLINGS START TO COINCIDE

Chapter 20 of a continuing serial

In the fifth-floor vault at the U.S.  Embassy in Bogota, Centra Spike analysts were not missing the distinct pattern in the Los Pepes hits.  The death squad was killing off the white-collar infrastructure of Escobar's organization, targeting his money-laundering experts, bankers, lawyers and extended family - names listed on the very charts that Centra Spike's surveillance experts and the CIA had painstakingly assembled over the ious six months. 

Often the hits corresponded with intelligence Centra Spike was turning over to CIA Station Chief Bill Wagner, who was passing it along to Colombian police commanders in charge of the Search Bloc.  More and more of the people identified by Centra Spike's Beechcraft spy planes were turning up dead. 

Despite this, Centra Spike's operators felt they were well within the legal boundaries of their mission.  They gave their information to Wagner, and what happened to it after that was, as far as he was concerned, none of their business.  If Col.  Hugo Martinez and his men were attempting to enforce Colombia's laws and arrest criminals, whatever they did on their own could hardly be the responsibility of the embassy. 

If Los Pepes were working with the Search Bloc, that would explain their apparent access to fresh U.S.  intelligence.  After the vigilante group's murders and bombings on April 15, a Drug Enforcement Administration memo to Washington summed up the official attitude at the embassy:

While not completely unexpected, the attacks by Los Pepes further demonstrates their resolve to violently retaliate against Escobar each and every time Escobar commits a terrorist attack against the GOC and/or the innocent citizens of Colombia.  Although the actions are not condoned nor approved by the CNP nor the BCO, they may persuade Escobar to curb such behavior for fear of losing members of his own family.  Too, these types of attacks will seriously cut into those assets owned by Escobar and his associates. 

As long as any American linkage with Los Pepes remained circumstantial, the embassy had little to fear. 

And as long as the Colombian government did not object, and the new U.S.  administration and Congress did not notice, the pursuit of Escobar could proceed as a war.  The phrase dirty war was redundant.  Innocent people would always get killed in the cross fire, but at least Los Pepes was choosing targets with a great deal more precision than Escobar was. 

After Los Pepes killed one of Escobar's top lawyers, Guido Parra, and Parra's teenage son, the public outcry prompted President Cesar Gaviria to make another public statement denouncing the group.  This time he offered a $1.4 million reward for information leading to the arrest of members of the vigilante squad.  Los Pepes promptly issued a communique announcing that it was disbanding, having "made a contribution" to the effort against Escobar. 

Several months earlier, the secret informant Dolly Moncada had given the Americans the names of six key members of Escobar's organization who she thought should be taken out, one way or another.  By summer, three had surrendered and were in prison and one was dead.  Of the lawyers she had named, all were either dead or had publicly resigned. 

Despite Los Pepes' public pledge, the killings continued.  The death toll now included Escobar's brother-in-law, Carlos Henao, and his cousin, Gonzalo Marin.  Another nephew was kidnapped. 

Fear of Los Pepes had taken root in Escobar's family.  By the end of June 1993, many members of the extended family had fled the country, or had tried.  The United States was using its influence to deny them safe havens.  When Nicholas Escobar, a nephew of Escobar's, and his family were traced to Chile, the embassy ailed on the government there to evict them.  The family appealed through Chile's courts, which bought them a few weeks before the appeal was denied and they fled to Germany. 

In early July, the president of neighboring Peru announced that his country would not allow Escobar's relatives to enter even as tourists.  Meanwhile, Escobar's brother Argemiro, nephew, sister Luz Maria and her husband and three children were discovered in Costa Rica, where they were deported and flown back to Medellin. 

Back in Colombia in mid-July, Escobar's wife filed a legal petition demanding that the Colombian government allow her children to leave the country.  It was denied. 

Escobar made another offer to surrender in March, just before the Search Bloc killed one of his most notorious assassins, a man known as "El Chopo." The offer was delivered by an Escobar lawyer to a Roman Catholic bishop. 

By now the fugitive drug boss, his ranks riddled by deaths and surrenders and increasingly isolated and vulnerable, had dropped many of his former demands for surrender.  He no longer insisted in living in his own prison, surrounded by his own men and guards.  Now he asked that his family be given government protection - earlier he had demanded U.S.  government protection - - that he be given a private cell with his own kitchen ( to prepare his own food to ent poisoning ), and permission to phone his family three times a week. 

President Gaviria reiterated the government's refusal to accept any conditions for Escobar's surrender, but Fiscal General Gustavo de Greiff sounded a dissenting view: "I do not see any difficulty in abiding by these requests, not as a concession but as a solution."

De Greiff was increasingly at odds with the Gaviria administration.  Elected independently, unlike the American system in which the attorney general is a presidential appointee, he felt his role was to uphold the nation's laws and basic human rights.  He viewed the official search for Escobar as a killing mission, and began pressing instead for Escobar's capture or surrender. 

His office assumed responsibility for protecting the drug boss' immediate family, offering bodyguards ( paid for and fed by the Escobars ) for the apartment building where they lived in Medellin.  De Greiff also pushed for investigation and prosecution of Los Pepes. 

By early August 1993, the new Clinton administration overseers had noticed how neatly the dirty work of Los Pepes dovetailed with the U.S.  mission against Escobar, and representatives from the Justice Department and the Pentagon flew to Bogota to demand answers. 

Ambassador Morris Busby was asked directly about Los Pepes in August, when Brian Sheridan, the Clinton-appointed civilian overseer at the Pentagon for covert operations, visited Bogota.  Sheridan left the meeting convinced there was no evidence linking Los Pepes to the Search Bloc. 

Busby had heard about evidence to the contrary, but nothing that he found convincing.  He would later say he had not seen DEA reports suggesting such a connection, including one written by agent Steve Murphy noting that "the police were cooperating with the group at some level, including sharing information."

Busby himself had written about the alleged connection a month earlier. 

In a secret State Department cable titled "Unraveling the Pepes Tangled Web," dated Aug.  1, just days before the meeting with Sheridan ( a cable Sheridan would not see until months later ), the ambassador noted that he had met with President Gaviria on April 13 to "express his strongest reservations about the group." Busby wrote that he had discovered that Fidel Castano, one of the suspected Los Pepes leaders, was in constant contact with the national police. 

The memo said Busby requested that all police contact with Castano cease, and he was assured that it would.