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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Escobar had Robin Hood pretensions and political aspirations. He built community soccer fields and so forth. Was there any sincerity to his altruistic streak or was it just a public relations effort?
I think there was some sincerity there. There was a mix of both -- people are complex. I have no doubt that he took a certain amount of satisfaction from being held in warm regard by people, and he did things to sustain that. So, in that sense maybe it wasn't purely selfless, but he enjoyed being philanthropic to an extent. Whether that was a selfish enjoyment or a selfless one is anyone's guess. He really wanted to be Don Pablo, the patrsn. And I suspect, had he lived and worked things out more intelligently, he'd still be living pretty much the kind of life he wanted to live -- in Colombia.
One of the points you make in "Killing Pablo" is that Escobar's move into politics -- he became an alternate member of Colombia's congress -- contributed to his downfall by increasing his visibility.
He overreached. And it wasn't just that he was an alternate member of congress. In the year that he got elected, his money helped to fund the entire liberal party slate all over Colombia. My reading of what happened is that the leaders of the young Turks in the liberal party realized that Escobar's ambition to hold office himself was a threat to them politically. I think when they spoke out against him it wasn't just because they were outraged that a narco-trafficker had gotten elected, it was because they were concerned about him rivaling them for control of the liberal party down the road.
Colombia, like many other countries, has a tradition of seeing its more colorful criminals as sort of noble scalawags. Escobar consciously played on that image to gain sympathy from his countrymen, to be seen as locked in a battle against a corrupt power elite. But finally that image came crashing down.
Yes, it did. In the end the only people who were devoted to him and who respected him were the hardcore in Medellín, who either worked for him or were living in homes that he built; those who had a direct debt of loyalty to him. The rest of the country was outraged by him at a certain point. By the late 1980s or early '90s, the vast number of Colombians were fed up with Pablo Escobar.
Hugo Martinez was the Colombian colonel who headed up the hunt for Escobar. It seems that he became almost obsessed.
I see him as someone who got trapped into the role. He didn't want the job, but once he got stuck with it, he knew that he had to kill Escobar or Escobar was going to kill him and his family.
I respect Martinez a great deal because I think he is a man of genuine courage and integrity. It's hard to imagine what Colombia was like in the mid-1980s. It was a place where anyone who spoke out against Escobar or came after him was killed. Escobar was assassinating politicians, judges, police, lawyers and journalists. And the person who took the greatest risk was Hugo Martinez, though, again, I think it was thrust upon him. But he rose to the challenge. He had no idea if he was going to be successful, and yet when Escobar offered him a way out, a $6 million bribe, he wouldn't take it -- in part because his heart rebelled against it, and in part because he was smart enough to see that Escobar would then own him.
I really think Martinez is one of the heroes of modern times. What he did took an extraordinary amount of bravery. He's very, very smart and has a dry sense of humor; he's an intellectual. He's also been wounded by all this, because he's been accused of having accepted money from the Cali cartel. He denies that vehemently. He also denies -- I think fatuously -- that he was involved with Los Pepes. I believe he was involved with Los Pepes, and I've told him this. He's angry with me for believing it, but I do believe it. I don't think there's any way that Los Pepes could have operated the way they did unless they were working closely with Martinez's group. I think whether it was tacit or whether it was aggressive and conscious, he was involved with this vigilante death squad.
What is Delta Force?
Delta Force is a United States Army super soldiers unit. It was created after the failed mission to rescue the U.S. Embassy hostages in Iran during Jimmy Carter's administration. Once that failed, they realized that they needed to develop a stealthy force that could operate covertly. Originally, it was going to be used for hostage rescue, or if a plane had been hijacked -- to undertake the type of mission that was done at Entebbe.
Delta Force went into Colombia by invitation of the Colombian government?
Right.
There's an executive order, issued by President Ford in 1974, that forbids employees of the U.S. government to target foreign citizens for assassination. How was this legally circumvented in the Escobar case?
This came as an interesting surprise to me. In 1988, when George Bush became president, he had a legal memorandum prepared, interpreting the prohibition to mean that the president could, at his discretion, order the assassination of foreign citizens if he felt that they were a threat to national security or to American citizens. In Escobar's case, Reagan had declared narco-trafficking to be a threat to national security. And Escobar had also shot down a commercial airliner, killing two American citizens, so he qualified on both counts [for exclusion from the prohibition].
