AS THE HUNTERS CLOSE IN, A NARROW ESCAPE

His Empire In Shambles And Short On Cash, Escobar's Options Begin To
Disappear.

Chapter 28 of a continuing serial

By the autumn of 1993, Pablo Escobar was in bad shape. His lifelong,
fabulously wealthy organization had been dismantled and terrorized by
the vigilantes of Los Pepes.

In a single two-week period, five members of his extended family had
been killed, presumably by Los Pepes, and several of his remaining key
business associates had been kidnapped and murdered. Others were in
prison, on the run or in hiding.

In an effort to raise money for his war against the state and to
continue his flight, Escobar's associates were selling off his assets
around the world. A DEA cable dated Oct. 21 noted that an Escobar
family physician was traveling and selling off the family's
properties: a 70,000-acre timber farm in Panama, estates in the
Dominican Republic, and two 20-acre lots in South Florida. Efforts
were also under way to sell his art collection, jewelry and precious
stones, including a collection of uncut emeralds valued at more than
$200,000.

Escobar's primary link with the rest of the world was now his loyal
teenage son. Just as Col. Hugo Martinez now hunted Escobar with his
son at his side, the drug boss and his son conspired daily to evade
them. They were now talking by radio four times daily. So long as the
Search Bloc knew where Juan Pablo was, and could monitor his
communications, the colonel felt he would never completely lose track
of Escobar.

For two days running, the electronic surveillance teams traced
Escobar's radio to the top of a hill in the Medellin suburb of Aguas
Frias in October 1993. It was a spectacular locale, a heavily wooded
small mountain in the vast range of the Occidental Cordillera. There
was only one road up the mountain to the finca, a collection of small
cottages around a main house.

The colonel ordered a surveillance team to load a radio telemetry kit
on a helicopter and fly over the area. As it happened, they were
passing overhead at the moment Escobar made another call. The kit
indicated that the radio call had been initiated directly below.
Alarmed, the Search Bloc major in charge immediately ordered the
helicopter back to the main Search Bloc base, fearing that it had
alerted Escobar to their presence.

When they returned, the major told Col. Martinez that Escobar was
making calls from the hillside, but there was a good chance he had
been spooked by the helicopter. The colonel decided to launch a raid
on the finca if Escobar made another call that afternoon.

Martinez could sense that the ring was closing around Escobar. For
weeks, he had felt they were getting close to finally finishing the
job. When Joe Vega, a Delta sergeant, left Medellin that fall, the
colonel had warned him not to go.

"You will miss it," Martinez said. "We are going to find him
soon."

He daily consulted special stones and other ritual objects, and in
them he saw omens of a resolution. It was a gut feeling, well informed
by the knowledge that Escobar could not hold out much longer. His
ability to run was now limited, and their ability to find him was
improving every day.

Now, on this day, Oct. 11, Martinez believed that the whole effort was
coming together. The electronic surveillance had tracked Escobar to a
likely hideout and had monitored his presence there. All of the
direction-finding equipment now agreed: Escobar was staying at that
finca on top of the hill. This was the day they would get him.

The usual time for his call was 4 o'clock, so with choppers circling
near the hilltop, and with forces poised to move quickly up the hill,
the colonel and his top officers gathered in his operations center
around a radio receiver, waiting for Escobar's voice to crackle on the
air. There was no call at 4. The men waited. Five minutes later there
still was no call.

It was beginning to appear that Escobar had slipped the noose again.
But at seven minutes after the hour, his voice came up. The raid commenced.

Escobar wasn't there.

The colonel then cordoned off the mountain for four days, establishing
an outer perimeter, an inner perimeter, roadblocks and search teams.
Search Bloc helicopters dropped tear gas and raked the forests around
the finca with machine-gun fire. More than 700 police and soldiers
searched the area with dogs, but they did not find Escobar.

He had managed another miraculous escape. The assault teams had hit
the finca, assuming that Escobar would be calling from inside. It
turned out - they learned this listening to Escobar's phone calls in
coming days - that in order to improve the signal, every time he
called his son he would hike into the woods farther up the hill. So
he'd had a ringside seat as the helicopters descended. He'd hidden in
the woods and then fled down in darkness. He later sent his wife a
battery from the flashlight he used to light his way, telling her to
keep it, "because it saved my life."

Despite its failure, the raid gave a boost to the electronic
surveillance teams, because there was ample evidence that Escobar had
indeed been staying at the finca. In the primary house, the base for a
portable radio phone was found, turned on, the handset missing. The
radio was preset to the frequency Escobar had been using for the last
four weeks in his talks with Juan Pablo.

The house was run-down except for a newly installed bathroom, which
always suggested the drug boss' presence. The assault teams found two
women at the house, Monica Victoria Correa-Alzate and Ana Ligui Rueda,
who said Escobar had been staying there for several days.

They explained, quaintly, that Escobar had been "dating" Correa, who
was 18. Rueda had been working as his cook. Both women confirmed that
Escobar had been nearby when the helicopters came down, and they gave
the Search Bloc a description. He had been wearing a red flannel
shirt, black pants and tennis shoes. His hair, they said, was clipped
short but he wore a long black beard with no mustache.

In the house the police found eight marijuana joints, a large quantity
of aspirin ("suggesting a great deal of stress," a DEA cable
describing the raid speculated), a wig, a videocassette of the
Medellin apartment building housing his wife and children, several
music cassettes, two automatic rifles (an AK47 and a CAR15), just over
$7,000 in cash, and photos of the fugitive's two children, Juan Pablo
and Manuela.

They also found false ID documents and a list of license-plate
numbers, evidently compiled by Juan Pablo, of vehicles driven by
officers assigned to the Search Bloc.

The documents confirmed that Escobar's organization was in poor shape,
and that he was very worried about his family. One letter said Maria
Victoria, Escobar's wife, needed money to continue supporting the
Colombian fiscal general's forces and bodyguards hired to protect her
and the children. She complained that it was very expensive to feed 60
people and that she had to purchase beds for them. The letter blamed
Col. Martinez for a recent grenade attack on the family's apartment
building, which had been publicly attributed to Los Pepes.

Found with Maria Victoria's letter were unsent letters Escobar was
preparing for former associates in Medellin, demanding money and
threatening, "We know where your families are."

In a cable to DEA headquarters, American agent Steve Murphy stressed
the positive results of the raid:

"Intelligence obtained at the search site and recent Title III
intercepts indicate that Escobar no longer enjoys the financial
freedom he once had. While he may continue to be a Colombian land
baron, Escobar and his organization are extremely short of cash."