XIII. At Last the Fall
Examining captured weapons at the DIJIN
I must admit that being pulled out of the Search Bloc in Medellin was beneficial to my operation. After all, I was sent to Colombia to help the police and military affect weapons trafficking and not to hunt down Pablo Escobar. There were DEA…..
XII. The Outsider 
With SF pals in the Zona Rosa – Bogota 1993
After my agency pulled me out of Medellin, I settled into my Bogota routine that included spending Saturday evenings with my pals in the Zona Rosa, the entertainment district in Bogota. The Zona Rosa literally translates to the ‘Pink…..
As 1992 began to wind down, so did my time at the Carlos Holguin police school at Medellin. The search for Escobar continued to drag on with no end in sight. In the meantime, the guerrillas had stepped up their activity, acquiring weapons and ordnance from Nicaragua, Ecuador, and Venezuela. The ELN took a page out of the Medellin cartel playbook and started bombing targets in Bogota. The intelligence services from the DAS, DIJIN, Army, and Marines requested my immediate…..
After it became apparent that recapturing Escobar and his henchmen was going to take time, Javier and I settled into a routine. I continued to wake up at three or four in the morning, never looking forward to that ice-cold shower that could bring back the dead. We’d hang out between the U.S com room and the Pablo hotline phone center. We ate our meals at the casino and grew to enjoy what there was of them. (I swear, at…..
Me with portable signal detection apparatus strapped across my chest
People of my generation grew up watching westerns and movies about the greatest generation. I was especially drawn to the old black and white movies made about the allies working behind the lines. Usually these movies involved downed RAF pilots or British spies…..
Almost as soon as Colonel Hugo Martínez’ arrived, the atmosphere at the school changed. He took immediate steps to get the Search Bloc out of the bull pen and into the game. He welcomed the Americans sent to the Carlos Holguin school and readily incorporated us into the operation. An important part of that operation included the use of informants (Human Intel). Some had already been documented by the national police or the DEA and were already hard at work……
When I got to Medellin, it was under siege. A siege perpetrated by a segment of its own citizens. It was literally a self-inflicted wound. Pablo targeted the disenfranchised sector of Medellin’s populace by building low-cost apartments for the homeless and handed out food and money. In short, he bought them at a price that to him had to be insignificant for what he got in return.
His self-serving generosity bought for him an ever-watchful security network that would tip…..
After Escobar’s ‘surrender’ and confinement to ‘La Catedral,’ the luxury prison he built in Envigado, Pablo handed over control of the Medellin cartel to two of his lieutenants, Fernando Galeano and Gerardo Moncada. He demanded that they collect an exorbitant tax from the members of the cartel to compensate him for the terrorist campaign he led to force the Colombian government into abolishing the extradition treaty with the United States. In the weeks leading to his escape, Pablo kidnapped, tortured…..
When I arrived in Bogota to begin my assignment, Pablo Escobar had organized a group of Medellin-based traffickers facing extradition to the United States to press the Colombian government to abolish the extradition treaty. The group called themselves the “Extraditables,” and they initiated a terror campaign to force the government to heed their demands using assassinations and indiscriminate…..
Villavicencio, Colombia
As I had previously mentioned, the purpose of my assignment to Colombia was to assist the Colombian government’s struggle against the Medellin cartel and the subversive elements destabilizing the country. Only an insignificant fraction of the thousands of firearms seized from the drug traffickers and the guerrillas by the Colombian police and military…..