MAP's index for the series: http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v00/n000/a251.html

Bookmark: Reports about Colombia: http://www.mapinc.org/area/Colombia

INCORRUPTIBLE COLONEL REJOINS ESCOBAR PURSUIT

Chapter Seven of a Continuing Serial

Col. Hugo Martinez was delighted when he got the news, in Madrid, that
Pablo Escobar had walked out of jail. No one knew better than the colonel
what a charade that imprisonment had been. Martinez had spent nearly three
years hunting Escobar before his infamous 1991 "surrender" to a luxury
prison cell guarded by his cronies, which Martinez viewed as the evasive
drug lord's most ingenious escape to date.

Martinez had never met Escobar, but his life was inextricably entwined with
the fugitive's. From 1989 to 1991, the colonel had been in charge of the
first police campaign to capture Escobar. His efforts, though ultimately
futile, were rewarded in 1991 with a comfortable post in Madrid, as
military liaison to Spain.

There was another, more urgent reason for his transfer: Escobar had tried
several times to murder the colonel and his family in Colombia. On the very
plane that took Martinez and his family from Bogota to Madrid, a bomb had
been set to explode at a certain altitude. It was discovered, in flight,
after the airline received a last-minute phone tip. The pilots held a very
low altitude to the nearest airfield, where the bomb was found and removed.

Now, in the summer of 1992, the Colombian and American governments had
decided that with Escobar once again a fugitive, the man to lead the new,
expanded hunt for him was Police Col. Hugo Martinez.

It was a good time to leave Spain. Just a few months earlier, a car bomb
had been discovered on the street outside the Colombian Embassy in Madrid,
right where Martinez passed each day to work. The colonel avoided the
street that day only because he had heard a radio report of police activity
blocking the road. The police activity, of course, was the Madrid police
bomb squad. The device was so complicated that they detonated it on the spot.

Everyone knew who the target was. Martinez was asked to stay away from the
embassy for a while. He took his wife and family on an extended camping
trip, feeling impotent, isolated, pursued and angry. So long as Escobar
remained in jail, there was nothing he could do. The drug boss' escape was
a godsend, an opportunity to fight back again.

Martinez was six years older than Escobar at 48, a point in life where a
man feels it is now or never for his life's goals. He was quiet and
bookish, with an aloof manner that seemed ill-suited to leading men in the
field.

Tall and fair-skinned, with a long face, high forehead and prominent nose,
he towered over most of his comrades in the police command, and looked more
European than Colombian. He had a wry sense of humor and a crooked smile,
which leavened the cynicism of his long police career.

When he was handed the first assignment to go after Escobar in 1989,
Martinez knew all too well that he had been handed the short straw. The
police commander in the district surrounding Medellin had just been
murdered after arresting several members of Escobar's Medellin cartel. The
magistrate who had signed Escobar's arrest order also had been killed, as
had a reporter from one of Bogota's leading daily newspapers, El
Espectador, who had written approvingly of the effort.

There was a sense that Escobar could reach anyone, anywhere, at any time.
Just days after Martinez had taken over the first hunt, a 220-pound car
bomb exploded in Bogota, killing six people. The target of the blast, an
outspoken police general, had somehow emerged unscathed from his armored
limousine, its tires melted to the pavement.

It didn't help that Medellin, Escobar's home city, was practically owned by
the drug boss. The city's police had been so corrupted by Escobar that the
new National Police Search Bloc under Martinez's command did not contain a
single paisa, or Medellin native, for fear he would secretly be on
Escobar's payroll.

But that precaution had its own costs: Martinez's men knew nothing of the
area, and had no local sources or informants. Even the unit's plainclothes
detectives, members of Colombia's FBI, called Departamento Administrativo
de Seguridad (DAS), stood out because none spoke with the distinctive paisa
accent. On the unit's first foray into Medellin, 80 men in 10 vehicles got
lost.

Not all the local police were corrupt, and some fell to Escobar's assassins
during the first hunt. They were killing police in Medellin at a rate of
six per day, some of them from the Search Bloc. With so many killings, and
so much paralyzing fear, Martinez's men were now emotionally engaged. When
the National Police considered moving the unit out of Medellin, the colonel
and his men insisted on staying. They would weep and pray at funerals for
their dead comrades, then go back to work, their fear warring with a
powerful sense of mission. Martinez fought this internal war himself, and
there were times when his fear won out.

Once, the colonel rushed back home to Bogota after a bomb was discovered in
the basement of his family's apartment building. Nearly all the residents
of the building were high-ranking National Police officers, but their
response to the bomb was not to rally around their besieged colleague.
Instead, they held a meeting and voted to ask Martinez to move his family out.

The colonel flew home from Medellin to help his family pack. It was during
this trip that Escobar proved how vulnerable the colonel and his family
were - and just how far Escobar's reach extended, even in Bogota.

Martinez remembered the scene well years later. He had told only his boss
at police headquarters, Gen. Octavio Vargas, that he was returning that day
to Bogota. So only the general, Martinez's pilot, and anyone who saw him
land knew he was there. He was stuffing boxes when a retired police
officer, someone he had known since his days in the academy, arrived at his
door.

The colonel was surprised and alarmed. How had this man known to find him
in Bogota?

"I come to talk to you obligated," the retired officer said with a pained
expression.

Martinez asked what he meant.

"If I did not agree to come talk to you, they could easily kill me or my
family."

Then the man offered the colonel $6 million, a bribe from Pablo Escobar to
call off the hunt. More specifically, the officer explained: "Continue the
work, but do not do yourself or Pablo Escobar any real damage."

Escobar also wanted a list of any snitches in his own organization.