Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Read online

  Virginia Vallejo

  LOVING PABLO, HATING ESCOBAR

  Virginia Vallejo was the most important Colombian radio anchorwoman and television presenter in the late 1970s and ’80s. In 1982, she met Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel. In 1983, they began a romantic relationship that ended in 1987, six years before his death.

  In July 2006, she offered her testimony against a former justice minister on trial for conspiring with Escobar in the assassination of a presidential candidate. That same month, the DEA took her out of Colombia, on a special flight to save her life, so she could testify in other leading criminal cases.

  Originally published in 2007 by Random House Mondadori, Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar (Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar) became a number one international bestseller in Spanish. Due to brutal attacks and threats from the Colombian government, paramilitary, and media, she received political asylum from the United States in 2010. She continues to live in Miami, where she is writing two more books.

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, MAY 2018

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Megan McDowell

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in Mexico as Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar by Random House Mondadori, S.A., de C.V., Mexico, D.F., in 2007. Copyright © 2007 by Virginia Vallejo.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  All photographs courtesy of the author’s private collection.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525433385

  eBook ISBN 9780525433408

  Cover design by Christopher Gale

  Cover photographs: Virginia Vallejo © Hernán Díaz; Pablo Escobar © Eric Vandeville/ Gamma-Rapho/Getty Images

  www.vintagebooks.com

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  To my Dead,

  to the heroes and the villains.

  We are all one,

  one single nation,

  just one atom

  recycled infinitely

  always and forever.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Part One: Days of Innocence and Reverie

  The Kingdom of White Gold

  Presidential Aspirations

  Ask Me for Anything!

  Death to Kidnappers!

  Part Two: Days of Splendor and Fear

  The Caress of a Revolver

  Two Future Presidents and Twenty Love Poems

  The Lover of El Libertador

  In the Devil’s Arms

  A Lord and a Drug Lord

  The Seventh-Richest Man in the World

  Cocaine Blues

  Not That Pig Who’s Richer Than Me!

  Under the Sky of Nápoles

  That Palace in Flames

  Tarzan Versus Pancho Villa

  How Quickly You Forgot Paris!

  A Diamond and a Farewell

  Part Three: Days of Absence and Silence

  The Cuban Connection

  The King of Terror

  There’s a Party in Hell Today

  Illustrations

  Introduction

  IT IS SIX IN THE MORNING on July 18, 2006. Three bulletproof cars from the American Embassy pick me up from my mother’s apartment in Bogotá to drive me to the airport, where a plane headed to some place in the United States is waiting for me with its engines running. A vehicle with security personnel armed with machine guns precedes us at top speed, and another one is behind us. The night before, the embassy’s head of security had warned me that there were suspicious people at the other end of the park that the building overlooks, and he informed me that his mission was to protect me; I shouldn’t get close to the windows for any reason or open the door to anyone. Another car with my most precious possessions left one hour earlier; it belongs to Antonio Galán Sarmiento, president of the Bogotá City Council and brother of Luis Carlos Galán, the presidential candidate assassinated in August 1989 under orders from Pablo Escobar Gaviria, head of the Medellín Cartel.

  Escobar, my ex-lover, was shot to death on December 2, 1993. To bring him down after a hunt that lasted nearly a year and a half, it was necessary to offer a reward of twenty-five million dollars and to employ a Colombian police commando unit specially trained for the purpose, plus some eight thousand men from the state security organizations; the rival drug cartels and the paramilitary groups; dozens of agents from the DEA, the FBI, the CIA, the Navy SEALs, and U.S. Army Delta Force; and U.S. planes with special radar as well as money from some of the richest men in Colombia.

  Two days earlier, in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald, I had accused the ex-senator, ex–minister of justice, and former presidential candidate Alberto Santofimio Botero of instigating the murder of Luis Carlos Galán and of having built golden bridges between the bosses of the drug cartels and the presidents in Colombia. The Florida newspaper dedicated a fourth of the front page, plus a complete inside page, of Sunday’s paper to my story.

  Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who has just been reelected president of Colombia with more than 70 percent of the vote, is preparing to take his oath on August 7. After my offer to the nation’s attorney general to testify in the open case against Santofimio, which should have lasted for another two months, the judge has abruptly closed it. In protest, Colombia’s ex-president and ambassador to Washington has resigned, Uribe has had to cancel the naming of another ex-president as the new ambassador to France, and a new minister of foreign affairs has been named to replace the former, who went to occupy the embassy in Washington.

  The United States government knows perfectly well that if they deny me their protection, I could well be killed in the coming days, because I am the only witness in the case against Santofimio. They also know that with me, the keys to some of the most horrendous crimes in Colombia’s recent history would also die, along with valuable information about the penetration of narco-trafficking into all the most powerful and untouchable levels of presidential, political, judicial, military, and media power.

  Officials of the American Embassy are posted at the plane’s stairs; they’re there to carry up the suitcases and boxes I managed to pack in a few hours with help from a couple of friends. They look at me curiously, as though wondering why an exhausted-looking, middle-aged woman awakens so much interest in the media, and now also from their government. A DEA special agent six and a half feet tall, who identifies himself as David C. and sports a Hawaiian shirt, informs me that he has been tasked with escorting me to American territory. He also tells me that the bi-engine plane will take six hours to reach Guantánamo, and after an hour-long stop to fill up on fuel, two more to reach Miami.

  I don’t feel at ease until I see, safe in the back of the plane, two boxes containing evidence of the crimes committed in Colombia by the convicted felons Thomas and Dee Mower, owners of Neways International of Springville, Utah, a multinational company that I am facing in a lawsuit from 1998 worth thirty million dollars. Although in only eight days a U.S. judge has found the Mowers guilty of some of the crimes I’ve spent eight years trying to prove before Colombian courts, all my offers to cooperate with Eileen O’Connor’s office in the Justice Department in Washington—plus five IRS attachés in the American Embassy in Bogotá—have blown up. Reacting furiously when they learned about my calls to the DOJ, the IRS, and the FBI, the embassy’s press office has
sworn to block any attempt at communication with the government agencies of the United States.

  The reason for their resistance has nothing to do with the Mowers and everything to do with Pablo Escobar: in the embassy’s Human Rights office works a former collaborator of Francisco Santos, the vice president of the republic, whose family owns the publishing house Casa Editorial El Tiempo. The media conglomerate occupies 25 percent of Álvaro Uribe’s ministerial cabinet, which allows the company access to a gigantic cut of the state publicity budget—the largest Colombian advertiser—on the eve of El Tiempo’s sale to one of the main editorial groups in the Spanish-speaking world. Another member of the family, Juan Manuel Santos, has just been named minister of defense and tasked with renovating the Colombian Air Force fleet. So much State generosity for a single media family serves a purpose far beyond securing the country’s main newspaper’s unconditional support of Uribe’s government. It guarantees the newspaper’s absolute silence on the imperfect past of the president of the republic. It’s a past that the United States government already knows about. I do too, and very well.

  *

  —

  ALMOST NINE HOURS AFTER TAKEOFF, we reach Miami. I am starting to worry about the abdominal pain that has been with me for almost a month. It seems to get worse with every hour that passes. I haven’t seen a doctor in six years, because Thomas Mower has stripped me of my modest estate and the perpetual hereditary income generated by their South American operation, which I led.

  The chain hotel is impersonal and large, as is my room. Minutes later, half a dozen officers of the DEA make their entrance. They look at me with inquisitive eyes while they examine the contents of my seven Gucci and Vuitton suitcases, loaded down with dresses by Valentino, Chanel, Armani, and Saint Laurent, and the small collection of artworks that have been in my possession for almost thirty years. They inform me that, in the coming days, I will meet with several of their superiors and Richard Gregorie, prosecutor in the case against General Manuel Antonio Noriega, so I can talk to them about Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, the top bosses of the Cali Cartel. The criminal case against Pablo Escobar’s archenemies will begin in a matter of weeks in a Florida court, led by the same prosecutor who won the Panamanian dictator’s conviction. If they are found guilty, the U.S. government will be able to not only ask for life in prison or its equivalent, but also reclaim the fortune of the two drug kingpins. In my most polite tone of voice I ask the officials for an aspirin and a toothbrush, but they reply that I’ll have to buy them. When I explain that all my worldly capital consists of two quarters, they find me a tiny toothbrush, the kind given away on planes.

  “Looks like it’s been a while since you’ve stayed in an American hotel….”

  “It’s true. In my suites at the Pierre in New York and the Hotel Bel-Air bungalows in Beverly Hills, there were always aspirin and toothbrushes. And dozens of roses and champagne!” I tell them, sighing with nostalgia. “Now, thanks to a couple of convicts in Utah, I am so poor a simple aspirin is a luxury item.”

  “Well, in this country, the hotels don’t have painkillers anymore: since it is a drug, it must be prescribed by a doctor, and as you surely know, that costs a fortune here. If you have a headache, try to ride out the pain and sleep. You’ll see, it’ll be gone tomorrow. Don’t forget, we just saved your life. For security reasons, you can’t leave the room or communicate with anyone, especially the press; and that includes the journalists from the Miami Herald. The United States government still can’t promise you anything, and starting now, everything will depend on you.”

  I express my gratitude and tell them they don’t have a thing to worry about, since I wouldn’t have anywhere to go. I remind them that I was the one who offered to testify in various cases of exceptional importance, both in Colombia and in the United States.

  David—the DEA agent—and the others withdraw to go over the next day’s agenda.

  “You’ve just arrived, and already you’re asking the American government for things?” reproaches Nguyen, the police chief who stayed in the room.

  “Yes, because I have terrible abdominal pain. And because I know that I can be of double use to your government: those two boxes contain evidence of the Colombian-Mexican part of a fraud against the Internal Revenue Service that I estimate in the hundreds of millions of dollars. In Russia, the class-action suit brought by Russian victims of Neways International was withdrawn after all the witnesses died and twenty-three million dollars were paid out. Imagine the size of the fraud in three dozen countries, against their distributors and against the IRS!”

  “Overseas evasion isn’t our territory. We are antidrug officers.”

  “If I had information on the location of ten kilos of coke, you all would find me an aspirin, right?”

  “You don’t seem to understand that we aren’t the IRS or the FBI of the state of Utah, but the Florida DEA. And don’t confuse the Drug Enforcement Administration with a drugstore, Virginia!”

  “What I understand, Nguyen, is that USA v. Rodríguez Orejuela is two hundred times bigger than the current USA v. Mower!”

  The DEA officers return and inform me that all the TV channels are talking about my flight from Colombia. I reply that in the past four days I have declined almost two hundred interviews from all over the world and that, really, I’m not interested in whatever they’re saying. I beg them to turn off the TV, because I haven’t slept in eleven days or eaten in two; I am exhausted, and I just want to try to rest a few hours so I can offer all possible cooperation tomorrow.

  When I’m finally alone with all my luggage and that sharp pain as my only company, I mentally prepare myself for something much more serious than possible appendicitis. Over and over I wonder if the United States government has really saved my life or if these DEA officers plan, instead, to squeeze me like an orange before returning me to Colombia. They could argue that the information I had on the Rodríguez Orejuela family turned out to be previous to 1997 and that the state of Utah is another country. I know perfectly well that back in Colombian territory, everyone who has skeletons in their closet will use me as a lesson for any informant or witness who might be tempted to follow my example: members of the security organizations will be waiting for me at the airport with some “arrest warrant” issued by the minister of defense or the state security organizations. They’ll load me into an SUV with tinted windows, and when they’re all finished with me, the media belonging to the presidential families involved with the drug cartels or in the service of the president reelect will blame my torture and death either on the Rodríguez Orejuelas—“the Pepes,” persecuted by Pablo Escobar—or on the capo’s wife.

  I have never felt more alone, sicker, or poorer, perfectly aware that if I am returned to Colombia, I will not be the first or the last to die after offering cooperation to the American Embassy in Bogotá. But my departure from the country in the DEA’s plane seems to be news all over the world, which means that I’m much more visible than a César Villegas, alias “el Bandi,” or a Pedro Juan Moreno, the two people who best know the president’s past. That’s why I decide that I won’t let any government or any criminal turn me into another Carlos Aguilar, alias “El Mugre,” who died after testifying against Santofimio; or Patricia Cardona, who even under maximum protection from the Colombian prosecutor was murdered after her husband—the accountant to the Rodríguez Orejuela family—left for the United States in another DEA plane.

  I know perfectly well that, unlike some of those people, may they all rest in peace, I have never committed a crime. And it is because of thousands of deaths like theirs that I have the obligation to survive. And I say to myself: “I don’t know how I’m going to do it, but I won’t let anyone kill me, nor will I let myself die.”

  PART ONE

  Days of Innocence and Reverie

  True love suffers, and is silent.

  —OSCAR WILDE

  The Kingdom of White Gold

  IT WAS MI
D-1982, and Colombia was plagued by various rebel groups. They were all Marxist or Maoist, and rabid admirers of the Cuban model. They lived off subsidies from the Soviet Union, from the kidnapping of people they considered rich, and from stealing landowners’ livestock. The most important of these groups was the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), born of the violence of the fifties, an era of unlimited cruelty so savage that it is impossible to describe without feeling ashamed to belong to the species of man. Other groups had fewer members: the ELN (National Liberation Army) and the EPL (Popular Liberation Army), which later would lay down arms to become a political party. In 1984, the Quintín Lame Armed Movement would be born, inspired by the brave man of the same name who fought for the cause of protecting indigenous peoples.

  And there was the M-19: the movement characterized by spectacular, cinematic attacks, whose members were an eclectic mix of university students and professionals, intellectuals and artists, children of bourgeois and military parents, and those hard-liner combatants who in the argot of the armed groups were known as troperos. Unlike the other armed groups—which operated in the jungles and countryside that cover almost half the Colombian territory—“the M” was eminently urban and counted several women among its leadership who were just as prominent and publicity-loving as their male counterparts.

  In the years after Operation Condor in South America, the rules of combat in Colombia were written in black and white: when any member of one of these groups fell into the hands of the military or state security services, they were jailed and often tortured to death without trial or mediation. Likewise, when a wealthy person fell into guerrillas’ hands, they were not freed unless the family handed over the ransom, often after years of negotiations; he who didn’t pay died, and his remains were rarely found. With few exceptions, this situation holds as true today as it did then. Any professional Colombian can name more than a dozen people among their friends, relatives, and employees who were kidnapped—some returned safe and sound, others who never came back. These last, in turn, can be subdivided into those whose families did not have the means to satisfy the kidnappers’ demands, those whose ransom was paid but were still never returned, and those whose existence was deemed not to merit the surrender of the wealth accumulated over several generations, or just over one lifetime of honest work.