Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar Read online

  Clara and I greet Gustavo Gaviria, Jorge Ochoa and his brothers, the Mexican, Pelusa Ocampo, owner of the restaurant where we eat sometimes, Guillo Ángel and his brother Juan Gonzalo, and Evaristo Porras, among others. Porras’s jaw is trembling and at first I have the impression that he’s afraid, but Pablo explains that he has consumed cocaine in industrial quantities. I’d never seen Aníbal Turbay’s teeth chatter like that, and I conclude that Evaristo must have snorted at least a fourth of a kilo. Pablo takes him to another room to reprimand him in private, then takes a videocassette from him and sends him away. He pushes Evaristo gently toward the door as if he were scolding a child and orders him to go back to the hotel to wait for them. Then he tells me we have to watch the video together, because he wants to ask me for a favor he says is urgent. I leave Clara in charge of the guests, and we go up to the study.

  Every time we see each other, Pablo and I spend six, eight, or more hours together, and in all that time he has confided some basics of his business. Tonight he explains that Leticia, capital of the Colombian Amazon, has become key for him in the shipment of cocaine paste from Peru and Bolivia into Colombia, and that Porras is his organization’s man in the southeast of the country. He also tells me that to justify his fortune to the tax man, Evaristo has bought the jackpot-winning lottery ticket three times and has won a reputation as the world’s luckiest man!

  We turn on the TV, and on the screen appears the figure of a young man talking with Porras about what seems to be business of an agricultural nature. The images were filmed at night and are blurry, and the conversation isn’t clear, either. Pablo tells me that it’s Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Luis Carlos Galán’s right-hand man, and, as such, his archenemy. He explains that what Evaristo is taking from a package is a check for a million pesos—some $20,000 then—for a bribe, and he confesses that the setup has been carefully coordinated between him, Porras, and the cameraman. When we finish watching the tape, Pablo asks me to denounce Lara Bonilla on my TV program, ¡Al Ataque! And I refuse. Roundly and categorically.

  “I would also have to denounce Alberto, who’s downstairs, for receiving much larger amounts from you. Plus Jairo Ortega, your principal in Congress, and who knows how many more people! What happens if tomorrow you give me the money for Clara’s Christ, and someone films me so they can say it was a cocaine deal, just because you gave it to me? My whole life I’ve been a victim of slander, and so I never use my microphone to hurt anyone. How do I know Lara isn’t doing some legal business with Porras, other than that planned setup? You have to understand that it’s one thing for me to show that infernal dump and your impressive social projects on my program, and quite another for me to be an accomplice in setups to attack your enemies, whether they’re guilty or innocent. I want to be your guardian angel, my love. Ask someone else to do you this favor—someone who wants to be your viper.”

  He looks at me, stupefied, and lowers his eyes in silence. Since I see that he doesn’t want to fight me, I go on: I tell him that I understand him like no one else, because I am also the sort who never forgives or forgets, but that if we all decided one day to finish off those who have done us harm, the world would be deserted in seconds. I try to make him see that with his luck in business, in family, in politics, and in love, he should consider himself the most fortunate man on earth, and I beg him to forget about that thorn he carries around festering in his heart, because it will end up infecting his soul with gangrene.

  He stands up as if spring-loaded. He takes me in his arms and rocks me a long time. There is nothing, nothing in the world that could make me happier—ever since the day Pablo saved my life, those arms bestow all the security and protection a woman could ever want. He kisses my forehead, breathes in my perfume, runs his hands over my back again and again, and tells me he doesn’t want to lose me, because he needs me at his side for many things. Then, looking me in the eyes and smiling, he tells me, “You’re completely right. I’m sorry! Let’s go back to the living room.” And my soul returns to my body. It seems to me that he and I are growing side by side, like two little bamboo trees.

  Many years later I will wonder if behind Pablo’s long, downcast silences there really lay that thirst for revenge he always talked about, or just a terrifying and unspeakable presentiment. Could he have been seeing, perhaps, visions from a future that was bearing down on us like an out-of-control train, and that we were helpless to avoid?

  When we go downstairs, everyone is happy, and Clara and Santofimio are reciting the most famous verses of Neruda’s Twenty Love Poems in unison.

  Pablo and I interrupt them and ask them to let us choose our own.

  “Dedicate this one to me,” I say, laughing. “I only want your wings, your twenty-four wings, those of the eleven airplanes and the two on the jumbo jet!”

  “So that’s what you want, you rascal, to escape from me? Don’t even dream about it! I want all of you, and this is your real Neruda verse, autographed and everything!”

  After signing his name, he says that now he wants to give me a poem of his own that is exclusively for me. He thinks for a few seconds and writes:

  Virginia:

  Don’t think that if I don’t call you,

  I don’t miss you a lot.

  Don’t think that if I don’t see you,

  I don’t feel your absence.

  Pablo Escobar G.

  I think that so much repetition of “don’t” is a bit strange, but I keep my comments to myself. I praise his mental agility and thank him for the gift with my most radiant smile. Santofimio also dedicates the book to me: “To Virginia: the discreet voice, the majestic figure, the [two illegible words] of our Pablo. AS.”

  Around eight at night, the capi di tutti capi say good-bye because they have to attend a social engagement of a “very, very high level.” Clara is happy because she sold the Christ to Pablo for $10,000, and she writes a dedication in the book of Neruda poems that she can’t wait to see him become president of the republic. When she leaves and his associates have gone downstairs, Pablo tells me that his whole group is now headed to the apartment of ex-president Alfonso López Michelsen and his wife, Cecilia Caballero de López, but he asks me not to tell anyone.

  “Good for you, my love! Why worry about those galanistas when you have access to the most powerful, most intelligent, richest, and, especially, the most pragmatic president? Don’t even think about Galán or Lara. Just keep going with Civic-mindedness in Motion and Medellín Without Slums. As the Bible says: ‘You will know them by their works.’ ”

  He asks me if I’m going to go out campaigning with him, and with a kiss, I tell him he can count on me there. Always.

  “We start this week. I want you to know that I can’t call you every day to tell you all the crazy things that occur to me, because my phones are tapped. But I think about you all the time. Don’t ever forget, Virginia, that ‘You are like nobody else since I love you.’ ”

  The Lover of El Libertador

  IT’S APRIL 28, 1983, and I receive a call from Pablo in my office. He announces that he’s going to give me some historically important news, but he asks me not to report on it or share it with anyone in the media; only with Margot, if I want to. In an excited tone that’s unusual in him, Escobar informs me that the plane of Jaime Bateman Cayón, head of the guerrilla movement M-19, has exploded over the Darién Gap while it was flying between Medellín and Panama City. I ask him how he knows, and he tells me that he’s in the loop about everything that goes on at the Medellín airport. But, he adds, Bateman’s death is the only part of the news that will be on all the international programs in a few hours. The part no one knows is that the rebel leader was carrying a suitcase with $600,000 in cash, and it hasn’t appeared anywhere. I’m disconcerted and I tell him so. How can anyone know, a few hours after a plane accident over one of the densest jungles on the planet, whether a suitcase turned up among the plane’s wreckage or alongside some incinerated bodies? From the other end of the line,
Escobar laughs slyly and says that he knows perfectly well what he’s talking about, for the simple reason that one of his planes already found the wreckage of Bateman’s!

  “Pablo, finding destroyed airplanes in the middle of the jungle takes weeks, if not months. Those pilots of yours are some real marvels, to be sure!”

  “That’s right, my love. And since you are another marvel, I’ll leave you with that information so you can connect the dots! Say hi to Margot and Martita, and I’ll see you on Saturday.”

  *

  —

  THE COLOMBIAN GOVERNMENT would take nine months to recover the bodies. On Bateman’s death it was learned that the M-19’s account in a Panamanian bank was under the name of the founder’s mother, Ernestina Cayón de Bateman, an important fighter in the cause of human rights. She and the group’s leaders would later get tangled up in a bitter conflict over a million dollars her son had deposited in Panama. Years later, an Ecuadorean banker designated as a go-between would end up with nearly all the money.

  Pablo and I would never speak again about the mysterious suitcase. But I’d learned a valuable lesson from the only gravestone thief and auto mechanic with an aerial fleet I’ve ever met: helicopters and small planes belonging to controversial people who have many enemies rarely crash because of technical failures of divine origin; they almost always crash because of human intervention. Thus, the importance of tracking. About that $600,000—a figure from twenty-five years ago—today I can only cite that famous gringo saying: “If it walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and talks like a duck…it’s a duck!”

  *

  —

  COUNTLESS SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVES have been joining Santofimio’s movement, including many of my acquaintances from Bogotá, like María Elena de Crovo, one of ex-president López’s best friends; Ernesto Lucena Quevedo; Consuelo Salgar de Montejo, my father’s first cousin; and Jorge Durán Silva, “the People’s Mayor” and my fifth-floor neighbor. We spend many weekends out campaigning, and in every region we visit, liberal leaders and lopistas are added to our group of santofimistas.

  One day, I hear loud laughter behind me, and I ask Lucena what’s so funny. Reluctantly, he tells me that Durán Silva has been mocking me in public, saying that Escobar sends his plane for me every time he wants to take me to bed. Unfazed and without turning around, I say at the top of my lungs so that everyone can hear:

  “These guys today don’t know anything about women! I am the one who requests the biggest of the eleven airplanes every time I want to sleep with their owner!”

  A tomb-like silence follows. After a brief pause, I add, “How naive, poor guys!” and I withdraw.

  What my neighbor is ignoring is that all men in love listen to the woman who sleeps with them more than to anyone else. And Escobar is no exception. Pablo and I are well aware that because of the nature of the business feeding Santofimio’s campaign and my fame, we are exposed to all kinds of mockery and criticism, so we protect ourselves fiercely. Since he has an empire to manage and can’t be present for all the rallies and political meetings, we almost always see each other afterward or the following day, when I give him a detailed report on everything that’s happened. When I tell him about the People’s Mayor, he reacts like a lion.

  “And why else would I send a jet that uses thousands of dollars in fuel for the woman I adore, who lives in another city? Am I going to take catechism lessons from a beauty like you? Are you Saint Maria Goretti, or what? That bum’s been asking me for money for weeks….Now he won’t get a cent from me as long as he lives! And if he comes within a thousand feet of me, I’ll send a dozen men to kick his ass and I’ll order them to castrate him! For being a marica! And stupid!”

  As the campaign advances, I start to realize the impressive influence Santofimio exercises over Pablo. On the night of Twenty Love Poems, I’d heard them say several times that Luis Carlos Galán was the only thing standing between them and power. By now it’s absolutely clear to me that not only is Santofimio determined to be the next president, but Pablo plans to be his successor on Bolívar’s throne. They don’t make the slightest effort to hide their intentions to end galanismo, whatever the price.

  More than any policy content, his furious speeches involve virulent attacks against Galán “for having divided the Liberal Party, which had always come to elections united, and for having cost the presidency of Doctor Alfonso López Michelsen, the most qualified man in the country and one of the most illustrious on the continent!” They characterize Galán as a “traitor to the nation for defending an extradition treaty that will hand over the sons of Colombian mothers to an imperialist power, to none other than the very gringos who took Panama from us, because another traitor sold it to Teddy Roosevelt for a handful of coins!” And Santofimio’s followers shout things like:

  “Down with Yankee imperialism, and long live the glorious Liberal Party! Santofimio for president in ’86, Escobar in ’90! Pablito is a patriot who won’t give in to the gringos or the oligarchy, because he has more money than all those parasites put together! Hear our cries, Pablo Escobar Gaviria, who came from the entrails of this long-suffering people, and who the Lord and the Virgin protect! And you, too, Virginia, so the next time you bring all the TV actors, who are of the people, too! And long live Colombia, carajo!”

  I give speeches, too. I almost always speak before the candidate, and I launch guns blazing into a tirade against the oligarchy.

  “I know it from the inside! I know firsthand how four families are bleeding this country dry, families who only care about acquiring the embassies and the state’s publicity budget for themselves! There’s a reason so many guerrillas exist, but thank God, Santofimio and Pablito are democrats, and they’re going to take power through the ballot boxes and win Simón Bolívar El Libertador’s throne, and to make true his dream of a united, strong, and dignified Latin America! And long live the mothers of Colombia, long live the motherland that will weep tears of blood the day the first of her sons is extradited!”

  “You sound like Evita Perón,” Lucena tells me. “Congratulations!” The others congratulate me as well, and since I know everything I’m saying is true, I go along with it. One night, as we’re sitting by the fire at my apartment, I tell Pablo what they’d said. He smiles proudly and is silent for a moment. Then, he asks me to name the South American personage I love most. Without a second’s hesitation, I say El Libertador. More seriously, he tells me, “Now, that’s better. Because you and I don’t truly like Perón, do we? And I’m already married, my love. But since you’re so brave, you have a different fate in my life: you will be my Manuelita. And I’ll whisper it in your ear now, nice and slow, so you won’t ever forget this: You…Virginia…will…be…my…Manuelita.”

  Next thing I know, that son of a schoolteacher will start recounting the details of the September conspiracy, when Manuela Sáenz, Simón Bolívar’s Ecuadorean lover, saved his life. I admit that I hadn’t thought about that brave and beautiful woman since I was in high school. I know that Pablo is no Libertador, and that no one in her right mind could do anything but laugh at the image he has of himself, his outsized dreams and ambitions. But, absurd as it seems now in light of the horrors that came later, I have always been grateful for that homage, the deep love implicit in his idealization of the two of us as a couple. As long as I live, I will carry in my heart the sound of Pablo Escobar’s voice uttering those six words and remember the enormity of a minuscule moment of tenderness.

  *

  —

  IN COLOMBIA, everyone who is anyone in a given part of the country is a first, second, fourth, or eighth cousin of everyone else. That’s why I’m not surprised when one night, after one of his sports field openings, Pablo introduces me to the former mayor of Medellín, whose mother is a cousin of the Ochoas’ father. Pablo calls him “Doptor Varito,” and I like him immediately. He seems to be one of a very few of Pablo’s friends with a decent face and, as far as I can remember, the only one w
ith the look of a scholar. He was director of the Civil Aviation Agency from 1980 to 1982, and now, at thirty-one years old, everyone is predicting a brilliant political career ahead of him; more than one person has ventured to say that he could even make it to the Senate one day. His name is Álvaro Uribe Vélez, and Pablo idolizes him.

  “My business and that of my associates is transportation, for $5,000 per kilo, insured,” Pablo explains to me later. “And it’s built on a single foundation: landing strips, planes, and helicopters. That blessed kid, with help from subdirector César Villegas, got us dozens of licenses for the first and hundreds for the second. Without landing strips and planes of our own, we would still be bringing cocaine paste in tires from Bolivia and swimming to Miami to get merchandise to the gringos. It’s thanks to him that I’m informed about everything that happens in Civil Aviation in Bogotá and at the Medellín airport, because his successor was trained to collaborate with us. That’s why Santo and I demanded from both electoral candidates a favorable appointment of the head of aviation. Álvaro’s father, Alberto, is one of ours, and if one day something keeps Santofimio and me from the presidency, that boy would be my candidate. He may look like a church boy, but he’s a fierce fighter.”

  In June of that year, Alvarito’s father dies in an attempted kidnapping by the FARC, and his brother Santiago is wounded. The Uribe family’s helicopter is damaged, and Pablo lends him one to bring the body from their hacienda to Medellín. For several days, Pablo is deeply sad. One night, when his spirits are low, he admits, “It’s true that drug-trafficking is a gold mine, and that’s why they say there’s no such thing as an ex-marica or an ex-narco. But it’s a business for tough guys, my love, because it’s a parade of bodies and bodies and more bodies. Those who call the money you earn from coke ‘easy’ don’t know anything about our world. They don’t know it from inside the way you’re starting to. If something were to happen to me, I want you to tell my story. But first I have to know if you’re up to the task of really conveying what I think and feel.”