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Saturday, Nov 28, 2009
All along the way, as I was reporting this, I'd ask people -- including some of the guys from Delta Force -- "Isn't it against the law for you to have been involved in this?" And they would say, "Is it a law?" And I'd say, "What do you mean?" To which they'd respond, "Look into it. Is it really illegal? Maybe it's not as illegal as you think it is." I ultimately tracked down the executive order and they were right, it wasn't against the law, nor was it even a violation of the prohibition, according to the Bush legal memorandum that has been the guiding principle for the previous 12 to 13 years.
While it's officially denied that Delta Force had any connection with the vigilantes, Los Pepes, you believe there was a connection, correct?
Without a doubt. It's just my surmise, and I don't go further in the book than the evidence takes me, but in my opinion, which is not that front and center in the book, not just Delta Force, but the CIA created Los Pepes to do exactly what they did. The reason I believe that's true is, first of all, because of the kind of winks and nods I got from the people I interviewed and, second, because Los Pepes were just too perfect. The hunt had gone on for six months, Delta Force had trained Martinez's group of men, known as the Search Bloc, to be extremely fast and efficient, and they still could not get Escobar. Even when they got real fast, going in with helicopters flown by American pilots, they still would miss him, because he had spies within the Search Bloc and he would always be tipped off.
I think there was a point where they realized that it just wasn't going to work the way they were doing it. They had to stop targeting Escobar, they had to start going after the structure, the support mechanisms around him.
At that point Los Pepes started closing in on the circle of people who were close to Escobar, killing as many as six of his associates a day.
Yes. And the interesting thing is that this mission in Colombia and the one I wrote about in my earlier book, "Black Hawk Down," which were done basically by the same people at the same time, were, in a sense, identical missions. In Somalia, they started out trying to get [Somalian war lord Mohamed Farah] Adid himself and realized they couldn't get him because he was just too well protected, so they then started identifying all the people around him. Delta Force was going out and rounding up these people and arresting them. The difference is that in Somalia, Delta Force was doing these raids directly, themselves, and they really were arresting people, but in Colombia the raids were being conducted by Colombians, and they were very often just killing people. That's what they do in Colombia.
The question that the Escobar story raises in my mind is, when the United States conducts an operation like this in a country like Colombia, do we stoop to the level of the Colombians, who have very little respect for human rights, the rule of law or due process? Or do we insist upon operating by our own standards -- respect for the law, respect for human rights and due process?
There is a real difference of opinion within the American military about this issue. You find people who believe that if you want to operate successfully in a Third World environment, you have to stoop to their level; the only way to get Pablo Escobar was to fight him with his own tactics. Then there are those in the military who are appalled by that view, who will say, "We are bound as Americans to operate within our own values and laws, and we have no right to do otherwise." That's why, toward the end of "Killing Pablo" you have this battle shaping up -- literally -- between the White House and the Pentagon. One faction, led by Jack Sheehan of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wanted to pull [all U.S. personnel working on the Escobar case] out of Colombia, because he was so outraged by what was going on down there.
What was the overall effect of wiping out Escobar and his gang? To what degree did it damage the Medellín cartel and the Colombian cocaine business?
The death of Pablo Escobar was the death of the Medellín cartel. But killing off the Medellín cartel was a long process, and through that process the Cali cartel grew more and more powerful. In fact, according to Joe Toft, DEA chief in Colombia during the Escobar period, by the time Escobar was killed, they had turned the Cali cartel into a more insidious force than the Medellín cartel had ever been -- because the Cali cartel had shrewdly allied itself with the Colombian government, and with the Americans, to get Escobar. They had purchased goodwill, and they had made inroads with bribes and had friendships and cooperation with the Colombian government. That's why, when Toft quit in 1994, he revealed that then President Samper of Colombia had taken bribes from the Cali cartel. His point was that what we'd done was successfully corrupted the entire Colombian government.
Then the Cali cartel was destroyed. And the destruction of the Cali cartel created the present situation, which is that the narco-trafficking is now protected and controlled by the leftist guerrillas, FARC and the ELN. Those two guerrilla organizations, who have been in the hills and jungles for more than 50 years, and have never attracted more than 3 or 4 percent popular support in Colombia, have become a force far outweighing their significance because they're rich. The cocaine money has given them the funds to train, outfit and arm soldiers, and to buy the most sophisticated weaponry in the world. They are a formidable force because they are funded with hundreds of millions of dollars that Americans spend buying illegal cocaine.
