Fidel Castano, a paramilitary leader cooperating in the search, told the Americans in Medellin that Escobar was now in bad shape because so many of his men had been killed or jailed. A memo by DEA agent Javier Pena that February quoted Castano:
"Escobar was having trouble getting his hands on cash as he was spending a great deal of money in his present war with the government of Colombia."
The day Ossa's body was found, one of Escobar's most notorious assassins, Carlos Alzate, turned himself in. A day later, a man thought to be one of Escobar's chief money launderers, Luis Londono, was found murdered with a Los Pepes sign around his neck. Two weeks later, Jose Posada, the man Ossa had replaced, also surrendered.
As the pace of killings and surrenders mounted, Los Pepes publicly offered cash rewards for information on Escobar and his key associates and began broadcasting threats against the drug lord's family.
American soldiers and agents in Medellin believed there was a direct connection between the Search Bloc and Los Pepes. They observed men they associated with the death squad meeting with officers at the Search Bloc base. The men carried radios and appeared to maintain communications links with Col. Martinez's men.
DEA agent Pena knew their leader only by the name Don Berna, a stooped, fat man with buck teeth and bad skin who always had pretty girlfriends and wore an expensive watch. Don Berna had been at the compound from the earliest days after Escobar's escape. He presented Pena with a gold watch as a gift of friendship.
Col. Martinez, now a general, denies all this. He calls Los Pepes criminals, former associates of Escobar's who turned against him, originally working as informants, and then as killers.
"They began to employ against Pablo Escobar the same kind of terror he employed," Martinez said recently. "Pablo Escobar would set off a bomb in Bogota, and Los Pepes would set three against Escobar's interests, his family, or the criminal group he headed. It was a black spot on the Search Bloc, because Pablo Escobar manipulated the media very well. Whether writing or speaking, he always publicly claimed that the Search Bloc was in fact Los Pepes. However, Los Pepes and our group did not share any links at all."
In any case, it was clear that the vigilante group had spooked Escobar more than anything the government had been able to do. One sign that the fugitive was feeling the heat came Feb. 19, when Pena learned from the prosecutor's office in Medellin that Escobar intended to send his children to Miami. Escobar's wife, Maria Victoria, had purchased tickets for their son, Juan Pablo; their daughter, Manuela; and a woman friend named Doria Ochoa on an Avianca flight scheduled to leave Medellin at 9:30 a.m.
Ambassador Morris Busby moved fast. He believed that Escobar's most vulnerable pressure point was his family. If they were tucked away in relative safety in the United States, it would ease a tremendous daily psychological burden on the fugitive.
Meeting with Colombian Defense Minister Raphael Pardo at his residence early the next day, Busby explained that he did not want the family to leave.
They had visas to enter the United States, but Busby wanted them stopped. Since they had been issued tourist visas, Pardo and the ambassador discussed turning them back because what they were doing, in fact, was fleeing from danger. This could not be called "tourism."
Then Busby's public affairs officer suggested, "Why don't we poke fun at him?" Why not turn them away on the grounds that children under the age of 18 could not travel to the United States without both parents?
DEA agent Pena was at the airport in Medellin when the children arrived, surrounded by bodyguards and accompanied by Ochoa. Manuela carried a small, fluffy white dog. They were allowed to board the plane before police moved in. Three of the family's bodyguards were arrested, and four others fled. The Escobar children and Ochoa were escorted off the plane.
It created a raucous scene in the airport. Doria Ochoa argued vehemently with Pena, who took their passports. Juan Pablo, a tall, chubby 16-year-old, joined in the commotion.
Manuela sat down on the floor in the terminal and quietly petted and cooed to her dog. Pena felt sorry for her. She had a kerchief around her head, covering her ears, and Pena remembered a bomb blast that had reportedly damaged her hearing.
He eventually handed back the passports and the Colombian police informed Ochoa that they would not be allowed to fly.
The U.S. Embassy took out newspaper ads the next day explaining that Juan Pablo and Manuela could obtain visas if both parents, Pablo and Maria Victoria, showed up in person to apply at the embassy.
If Pablo Escobar had ever doubted that the United States was hot on his trail, those doubts vanished after the U.S. Embassy in Bogota refused to issue visas for his wife and children to flee to the United States in February 1993.
Escobar had always tried to avoid picking a fight with America, but now the Americans' latest moves clearly distressed him. Ambassador Morris Busby received by mail a newspaper clipping in an envelope that appeared to have been hand-addressed by the fugitive. The clipping was about the decision to turn back his family, and in a quotation from one of Escobar's defenders, one line was circled: ". . . is it valid to cancel the visas of children because one is persecuting the father?"
On March 2, Busby received a handwritten letter from Escobar, with his signature and thumbprint at the bottom. The letter mentioned a comment by a prosecutor in New York, in reference to the World Trade Center bombing earlier that year, that no enemy of the United States could be ruled out in investigating the attack. Included on the enemies list was Escobar's Medellin cartel.
Escobar wrote that he wasn't at war with the United States "because in your country the government has not been participating in bombings, kidnappings, torture and massacre of my people and my allies."
If he had carried out the World Trade Center bombing, he added, "I would be saying why I did it and what I want."
The bloodbath continued in Colombia, with Escobar's random car bombs increasingly answered with chilling precision by the vigilantes from Los Pepes. The day after Luis Londono - described by the DEA as one of Escobar's primary money-laundering experts - was killed, his brother Diego Londono, an architect, turned himself in, claiming Los Pepes had also tried to kill him.
The day Londono surrendered, Escobar's brother-in-law, Hernan Henao, known as "HH," was killed by Search Bloc members as they raided his apartment in Medellin.
Dolly Moncada had urged her new American allies to go after not just Escobar's gunmen, but his infrastructure, his family and his legal teams. In the spring of 1993, that's what started happening.
For surveillance purposes, the Drug Enforcement Administration had compiled elaborate lists of Escobar's relatives, with many of the names provided by Dolly Moncada. A list given in February by Joe Toft, the DEA country chief, to John Craig, the CIA deputy station chief, listed names and phone numbers for Escobar's father, mother, wife, brothers, sisters, brothers-in-law, sisters-in-law, mother-in-law, and children.
On March 4, an attorney who had worked for Escobar, Raul Zapata, was found murdered. The next day another attorney, Maria Munoz, was murdered. After another of Escobar's car bombs exploded in Bogota on April 15, killing 11 and injuring more than 200, Los Pepes exacted swift revenge, blowing up two fincas, or estates, owned by Escobar's key associates.
The same day, two more of Escobar's lawyers, Juan Castano and Guido Parra, were killed. Parra was murdered along with his 18-year-old son, Guido Andres Parra. They had been abducted from their apartment in Medellin by 15 heavily armed men.
Their bodies were found, hands tied with plastic tape and bullet wounds to the head, stuffed in the trunk of a taxi. A hand-lettered sign in the trunk read, "Through their profession, they initiated abductions for Pablo Escobar." It was signed, "Los Pepes," with a postscript: "What do you think of the exchange for the bombs in Bogota, Pablo?"