Tralala Hostel, Salento, Colombia 26
OCT 12
Currently in Salento, a small, very pleasant town in the coffee producing region, between Cali and Medellin.
The other
day a crowd of us went and did the authentic Pablo Escobar experience, which is
clearly the centrepiece of any visit to the Colombian City of Medellin- pronounced 'Meda-jeen' by the locals. Pablo Escobar, though dead for nearly 20
years, still defines the Western image of Colombia and to an extent the whole
of Latin America, and this was his hometown.
He had immense power and wealth during a life that was defined by both
glamour and brutal violence.
Born in the
late 40’s he began his ‘enterprise’ by stealing cars, then dealing drugs, got
into the habit of killing off the opposition, bribing policemen/ judges etc and
by the 70’s he was head of the Medellin cocaine cartel which was the most
violent and most lucrative in the world.
Significantly, though, the cocaine itself was harvested outside Colombia
in Bolivia and Peru and then processed in labs in the jungle in Colombia before
being transported to the hedonistic consumers in America and the West.
Parallel to
his cocaine export he had various legitimate businesses in Medellin, all ran
from a tower block in the city, known as ‘Dallas’- as a nod to the Ewing family,
etc. He financed Medellin’s Atletico
Nationale football team (who we went to support on Wednesday night as they played Cali) which helped to launder the money, and he helped the
poor in the city by building an entire residential neighbourhood for them. He even managed to get himself elected to
Colombia’s Congress in 1982. The tour
guide for the ‘Escobar Experience’ was trying to convince us all that nobody in
Medellin realised that he was involved in the cocaine trade until he was thrown
out of Congress in 1984- although that seems somewhat unlikely.
The focal
points of Escobar’s subsequent bloody confrontation with the Colombian
authorities were the murder of Colombian Presidential candidate Luis Carlos
Galan, following his expulsion from Congress, and the extradition agreement with the United States, which would have
seen him arrested and taken to face a Federal court. The American government had taken the view
that drugs were the cause of so many socio-economic problems in the States that
they were going to do everything they could to stop the global drugs trade. A naïve but noble policy, I would say, but
clearly a policy that our own dear David Cameron has not always endorsed.
During this
time a bloody terror campaign was carried out by Escobar’s men which saw
bombings in Bogota, an airline being blown out of the sky and thousands of
people being murdered.
A farcical
agreement was eventually reached which saw Escobar and his senior men,
including his brother Roberto, 'El Accountant' being jailed in Colombia in 1991, but in his own personally
designed jail, ‘La Cathedrale’ on the edge of Medellin, with his own hand-picked guards. He pretty much carried on business as usual
from ‘La Cathedrale’, running his empire, throwing parties and even inviting
the Colombian national football team to join him and his boys for a kick
around.
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| Pablo Escobar's luxury 'Cathedrale' prison outside Medellin |
Needless to
say, the Americans were not impressed by this and eventually in July 1992 the
Colombians went to move him from 'El Cathedrale' and extradite him, but by the time
they got there he, Roberto and the various other Medellin Cartel players had
ran off into the jungle. Escobar then spent
the next year and a half on the run in and around Medellin, where he enjoyed
enormous popular support as ‘El Robin Hood’.
President Bush Sr. ordered American Intelligence and Special Forces to
join the hunt. The principal Colombian organisation responsible for hunting down Escobar was a 600 strong unit known as 'Search Bloc', which was trained and mentored by the American Delta Force. This was at the same time as other members of Delta were leading the hunt, on the other side of the world for Somali warlord Mohammed Farrah Aideed.
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| Delta Force (as portrayed in 'Blackhawk Down') |
There’s an
organisation within the American military/ intelligence world referred to as
‘The Activity’, responsible for high-tech intelligence gathering with a view to
supporting Special Forces operations. Among
other tricks up their sleeve, they had the capability back then in the early
90’s to not only locate a specific cell-phone when it was turned on, they could
also remotely turn it on to find out where it was. Obviously, Escobar himself was not aware of
this.
Parallel to
the legitimate hunt for Escobar, there was a move being made against him by
those within Colombia who opposed him for more morally questionable
reasons. These included not only his
main rivals in the Cali cartel, but also various individuals who had a score to
settle, and were known as ‘Los Pepes’.
They set about targeting all of Escobar’s family, associates, businesses
etc and destroyed his headquarters, ‘Dallas’ with a vehicle bomb.
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| Escobar's Medellin HQ, 'Dallas' having been destroyed by a vehicle-bomb in 1992. |
On the 1st
of December 1993 Pablo Escobar was having a meal in a Medellin safe house to
celebrate his 44th birthday with his aunt and his body guard. According to the aunt, at one point the body
guard accidently dropped his wine glass onto the floor, but it didn’t
break. The bodyguard thought this was
bad luck and a sign they should leave, but Escobar reassured him everything was
fine, and in the morning he telephoned his daughter... As the forces of righteousness descended on the house an hour later, and Escobar
and his body guard climbed out of an upper window and attempted to flee across
the rooftop, they may both have had the opportunity to briefly consider the
superstition- before they were cut to pieces in a hail of gunfire.
Today
Medellin is a vast, incredibly wealthy city, which is regarded as the
friendliest in Colombia. The city has its
own subway network and there is a far lower police/ security forces ‘foot
print’ there than in either Bogota or Cartagena. There is no overt evidence of Medellin’s
history as the heart of the global drugs trade beyond the obvious wealth, with
the ‘Escobar Experience’, in its various guises, being the obvious
exception. Apparently the house from
which he was trying to escape is now a privately owned house, and the owners
don’t appreciate tourists, so we didn’t go.
Fair enough, life goes on etc. We
did have the opportunity, though, to visit one of the other safe houses he’d
had on the edge of the city, where we got to meet his brother Roberto- ‘El
Acountant’.
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| Members of 'Search Bloc' posing on the rooftop with Escobar's body. |
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| Roberto 'El Accountant' Escobar, with some kiwi and British tourists. |
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| Modern day Medellin |
Following
Escobar’s death the Cali cartel became the principal supplier of drugs from
Colombia, under the leadership of the Rodriguez brothers. However, it obviously was a short-lived
victory for ‘Los Rodriguez hombres’ as they were arrested in 1995 and extradited in 2006 and are
both currently contemplating the error of their ways in a Federal Penitentiary in
the United States.
Today
Colombia has been eclipsed in terms of drugs-related brutality by the Mexican
cartels, such as the ZETA’s who’s own leader was killed by security forces just
a couple of weeks ago. The official line
here is that what remaining cocaine trade exists in Colombia is done by the
left wing guerrillas ‘FARC’, who kicked off their left wing insurgency at
around the same time as the Viet Cong kicked off theirs in the 60’s.
FARC were hammered under the previous Colombian President Uribe, and I
can’t help thinking that they are the ideal ‘catch all’ excuse for anything
negative in Colombia. No doubt once I
get to Popayan in the South of the country I will get a better idea, although I
don’t particularly want to experience their ‘hospitality’…
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