"In the dirt?" a Colombian officer asked. "My guys don't crawl in the dirt and mud."
The occupants of the target house easily spotted the slow-moving assault force and escaped. They had fled in such haste that they hadn't completely burned documents, so they had urinated and defecated on them.
When an American from Centra Spike began fishing papers out of the mess, Col. Martinez himself had objected.
"I can't believe you'd do that," he said. "That's human waste!"
"Where I come from, we also low-crawl and get our uniforms dirty," the Centra Spike man said.
After the documents were cleaned and dried, the unit found handwritten notes from Escobar, sealed with his thumbprint. The notes promised financial security for the caretaker of the farmhouse. Copies had been prepared for several other fincas, or estates, indicating that Escobar kept a string of such safe houses. The recovered documents provided valuable insights into how he recruited and nurtured assistance in the hills.
After entering the finca, the assault force settled in front of the television and began drinking Escobar's sodas and cooking his steaks. Two men who had stayed behind in the farmhouse, the caretakers, were bound and gagged. Martinez's men began beating them severely.
"What are your guys doing?" the Centra Spike man asked Martinez.
"We're interrogating them," the colonel said.
"If you want them to talk, why don't you take the gags out of their mouths?"
"No, no," Martinez said. "Leave it alone. You shouldn't be here." He ushered the American away from the farmhouse.
After that, the colonel tried to keep Americans away from the action - not to protect them, but to protect their eyes. Reports drifted back about Martinez's tactics - beatings, electroshock torture, killings - and it was evident to Americans working with the Search Bloc in Medellin that some of these things went on, but always out of sight.
It was a smart move, one that some officials at the U.S. Embassy appreciated. Human rights abuses were problematic. But as long as the Americans didn't see them, they didn't feel obliged to report them.
If the Search Bloc was torturing people, American soldiers in Medellin did not object. The fact that Martinez played rough with his fellow citizens was seen as an advantage. Let the word go out to anyone who cooperated with Escobar.
Another thing the Americans working with the Search Bloc liked about the colonel was that he learned from his mistakes. His men did learn to low-crawl, and to fish documents out of latrines. He was candid about his unit's tactical shortcomings, and took steps to correct them.
Martinez was skeptical of American technology, but he learned fast. When he overheard Escobar's voice on a portable radio monitor carried by one of the Centra Spike men during a raid, the colonel asked for the same equipment the next time out.
Later, when rumors began to circulate that Martinez was eager to nail Escobar because he was secretly on the payroll of the rival Cali cartel - rumors that some of the DEA men took seriously - the group in charge at the U.S. Embassy discounted them. And Martinez himself vigorously denied them.
Ambassador Morris Busby and CIA station chief Bill Wagner were not about to discard the colonel. As far as the embassy was concerned, Hugo Martinez was exactly the kind of man to go up against Escobar. The drug boss had finally met his match.
Four days after Pablo Escobar's escape from prison in July of 1992, a team of American DEA agents took a leisurely tour of La Catedral, the site of Escobar's luxury prison suite.
The mountaintop "prison" was now a hot tourist attraction for top-ranking American and Colombian officials. CIA station chief Bill Wagner would tour it days later with a video camera, accompanied by several members of his staff. The visits confirmed all the worst suspicions about Escobar's supposed imprisonment, but it also gave the Americans a rare glimpse into the life and mind of the world's most famous fugitive.
Although the agents suspected the Colombian army of destroying or carrying off most of the documents left behind, including floppy discs and the hard drives from Escobar's computers, much of interest still remained.
First, there was the sheer opulence of the place. The "cells" were lavishly furnished suites with living rooms, bathrooms, bedrooms, kitchens and balconies that offered a stunning vista of Medellin, the surrounding valley and hills.
Just outside Escobar's suite was a small table with telephones and a metal box mounted on the wall that was the main circuit box for all the communications lines to the prison - leaving little doubt who was in charge. Down a flight of steps from Escobar's balcony was an elaborate dollhouse, large enough for his 7-year-old daughter to play inside.
The tour revealed that Escobar had been raising and using messenger pigeons to thwart electronic surveillance. They found little metal leg-bands for the pigeons neatly labeled: "Pablo Escobar/Maximum Security Prison/Envigado".
There was also evidence of Escobar's fears. Any flat ground on the hillside complex had wires suspended overhead, attached to tall posts around the perimeter to prevent helicopters from landing. One of Escobar's biggest concerns was that airborne American commandos or paid assassins would come for him in the night.
There were secret hiding places built into the walls of the prison suites, and trick doors to afford quick, silent avenues of escape. The gymnasium and kitchen were below, just inside the fence. The living quarters and cabanas were up an incline so steep that the DEA agents were breathing heavily when they reached the top.
Beyond the cabanas, the Colombian police had found a sizable arsenal of automatic weapons and ammunition. Escobar and his men had been prepared to hold off a sustained military assault.
On a shelf over Escobar's desk was a neat library of news clippings, diligently clipped, pasted and sorted in file boxes. His correspondence included fan mail from all over the world, requests for money, notes of thanks for favors bestowed, letters of sympathy after his arrest and imprisonment. One was from a local beauty queen, who referred to Escobar as her lover.
There was a handwritten draft of a letter from Escobar to President Cesar Gaviria, requesting armor-plated cars for his wife and children. One pathetic letter was from a man pleading with Escobar not to kill any more members of his family, as he had already done away with nearly all of them. There was a letter from the wife of a prison guard, thanking him for her husband's recent promotion.
Escobar had kept copies of all his indictments, and had framed a collection of the mug shots taken at each arrest. One showed the lean, tousle-haired young man arrested for stealing cars in Medellin in 1974; another was the fuller-faced, mustachioed shot from his first and only drug bust in 1976.
Escobar kept files on his Cali cartel rivals, complete with photographs, addresses, descriptions of their vehicles and license numbers. He had a framed picture of Ernesto Che Guevara, the Argentine-born Marxist revolutionary. Alongside was an illustration from Hustler magazine, depicting Escobar and his associates cavorting in an orgy behind bars (throwing darts at a picture of President George Bush on a TV screen), and a photograph of himself and his son Juan Pablo posing before the front gate of the White House.
Among his collection of videotapes was, predictably, a complete set of The Godfather films, Chuck Norris' Octagon, Steve McQueen's Bullitt and Burt Reynolds' Rent-a-Cop. There were five Bibles, and collections of prize-winning books. These were not the shelves of an avid reader, but of a self-improver who purchased books in bulk intending to begin a course of reading.
The closet in the bedroom was stacked with identical pairs of Nike sneakers and a neat pile of pressed blue jeans. Over Escobar's huge bed was a golden, ornate portrait of the Virgin Mary painted on inlaid tile. There were photographs of Escobar, his family and his fellow inmates at what appeared to be a lavish Christmas dinner in the prison's disco and bar, and pictures of Escobar posing with Colombian soccer stars.