There would be no agreement. Gaviria flatly refused to make any concessions, and a Colombian court rejected a formal appeal by Escobar's lawyers to have his escape ruled a legitimate action taken in fear of his life.
His prison lifeline gone, his enemies in government allied with the hated Americans, Escobar was now a full-fledged fugitive. But he was still richer than his friends and more ruthless than his enemies. In this second round of his war against the government, he would rely once again on violence and terror, but also on his countrymen's resentment of the United States.
To many of Colombia's poor, America was the enemy, an oppressive world power propping up the wealthy elite in Bogota. Escobar was expert at playing on this populist theme. He was a hero to many in Medellin's ghettos. If America was allied with the Colombian government against him, that was tantamount to a betrayal of the mother country. Surely the public, his public, would not stand for it. If some Colombians did tolerate such a blasphemy, his bombs would bring them back to reality soon enough. It would take time, but he was sure this alliance against him would buckle.
It had to buckle, because Escobar knew well the consequences of remaining a fugitive, how easy it was in Colombia for a suspect to be killed tying to escape from the police. To anyone with eyes to see, killing Escobar appeared to be the government's plan. Pablo certainly understood. It was a practice so commonplace throughout South America that there was an expression for it: La Ley de Fuga. The Law of Escape.
On Jan. 30, 1993, a car bomb exploded in Bogota, blowing a crater several feet deep in the street and sidewalk and taking a savage bite out of a bookstore.
Bogota was accustomed to car bombs by now, but even by that weary city's standards this was a nightmare. The bookstore bomb was estimated to have contained 220 pounds of dynamite.
Inside the store, children and their parents had been buying school supplies. Torn body parts were strewn about. In all, 21 people were killed, 70 more injured in an attack blamed on Pablo Escobar.
Bill Wagner, the CIA station chief in Colombia, recoiled when he stepped past the police barricades. The first thing he saw was a severed hand in a gutter running with blood. It was the hand of a small child.
He thought: "We are going to kill this son of a bitch if it's the last thing I do on this earth."
Despite the determination of the United States, the expenditure of hundreds of millions of dollars, and the deployment of elite U.S. military and espionage units, six months had passed in the hunt for Escobar and the effort had yielded little but frustration. Their prey was always one step ahead. And even though Escobar was on the run, he was quite capable of ordering terrorist bombings anywhere and at any time.
But his pursuers were growing stronger. Discipline instilled by a new commander, Col. Hugo Martinez, and Delta Force training had vastly improved the speed and efficiency of the Colombian National Police Search Bloc, based at an old police academy in Medellin. The academy now felt almost like home to Delta chief "Col." Santos, Joe Vega and the other Delta soldiers and Navy SEALs who regularly rotated through.
There had been successes, most notably on Oct. 28, 1992, when Brance "Tyson" Munoz, one of Escobar's most notorious sicarios, or assassins, was killed in the proverbial "gun battle with national police," a phrase that drew winks at the U.S. Embassy.
Centra Spike, the top-secret U.S. Army electronic-surveillance unit, had first located Tyson at a house outside Medellin. A killer whose nickname came from his resemblance to the American boxer, Tyson was renowned for his ferocity and loyalty to Escobar, whom he had known since childhood. He had gained weight and grown his hair long in an effort to disguise himself.
Tyson was located when an informant took advantage of reward money offered by the U.S. Embassy. Delta operators in Medellin then watched him for days, determining that every day at noon he played soccer in the yard of his house. A raid was planned for one of these soccer sessions. The Search Bloc wanted to catch him outdoors and unarmed.
On the day of the raid, as Centra Spike operators listened in, they picked up a call tipping off Tyson. The killer at first misunderstood the warning. Assuming that Escobar himself was the target, Tyson quickly called the boss and warned him to move. Predictably better informed, Escobar explained the mistake, and Tyson fled to a new hideout, this time in a ninth-floor apartment in northern Medellin. He shared the apartment with his girlfriend and their small child.
Centra Spike promptly found him again by tracking his wireless phone calls; Escobar and his men had not yet learned how quick and precise the surveillance could be. Again Delta operators watched him through high-powered lenses, studying his routine.
The raid was launched at 1 a.m. with the whispered radio code "The party has begun." Search Bloc officers found Tyson's apartment secured with a heavy steel door, which they blew off its hinges. The breaching charge was a bit overdone. It blasted the door across the apartment and punched it completely through an outer wall, sending it crashing to the street nine stories below.
Tyson was shot, according to the Search Bloc's report, as he climbed out a back window to the fire escape. It was particularly good shooting. He took a bullet between the eyes.
There was always a steep price to pay for these victories. On the day Tyson was killed, four police officers were shot in retaliation, and three died. In the six-month hunt for Escobar, more than 65 police officers had been killed in Medellin, including some Search Bloc members whose identities were supposed to be secret. Often these men were killed in their homes or while traveling to and from the academy, which demonstrated that Escobar knew their identities, work shifts and home addresses.
The officers' funerals were grueling. Colombians were not fastidious embalmers, so the special chapel the National Police had built in Bogota often reeked of death, an odor that in time seemed to hover over this entire enterprise.
The women would wail and the men would gasp and weep and then retire to get staggeringly drunk. After attending one funeral in which a pregnant widow clutching a small child threw herself on her husband's casket and had to be pulled away, the normally stoic DEA country chief, Joe Toft, went back to his secure apartment and cried.
Escobar issued occasional galling communiques. He had given a rambling interview in September to a journalist, in which he portrayed himself as a persecuted national hero with broad popular support. He had donated millions of dollars for soccer fields and housing in urban slums.
"Sixty percent of the people say that the government betrayed me . . . ," Escobar said. "I think all the saints help me, but my mother prays a lot for me to the child Jesus of Atocha." Escobar said he would like to "die standing in the year 2047," and added: "Those who know me know that I have a good sense of humor and I always have a smile on my face, even in difficult moments. And I'll say something else: I always sing in the shower."
Bill Clinton took office in January 1993 with an inclination to reverse the priorities of President Bush's drug war. The new administration planned to attack addiction at least as hard as it went after suppliers. Bush's defeat meant that Ambassador Morris Busby's days in Bogota were numbered, and few in the embassy believed that President Clinton and his new ambassador would share their enthusiasm for the hunt for Escobar.
It felt as if time was running out. The prospect of Escobar slipping away once more was frustrating to the Americans who had devoted so much time, money, effort and emotion to the chase.
It was at precisely this moment that the hunt for Escobar took a dramatic new turn. One day after the bookstore bombing, "La Cristalina," a hacienda owned by Pablo Escobar's mother, was burned to the ground. Two large car bombs exploded in Medellin outside apartment buildings where Pablo's immediate and extended family members were staying. No one was killed - the guards had been warned to flee minutes before the bombs went off - but the message was clear.