“Fame, good or bad, is forever, my love. Why don’t you keep a low profile, at least for now, and wield power from the shadows, like capi di tutti capi all over the world? Why do you need to be well known, when it’s far better to be a quadruple-millionaire? And in Colombia, fame only brings you mountains of envy. Just look at me.”
“At you? But all the women in this country would love to be in your shoes!”
I tell him we’ll talk about that another day, not now. To change the subject, I tell him I find it very hard to believe that the rescue of Martha Nieves Ochoa was done only through exhaustive tracking. He seems surprised at my frankness, and he replies that it’s also a matter for another day.
I ask him to explain to me what MAS is. Lowering his eyes, and in a voice full of determination, he tells me that “Muerte a Secuestradores!” (Death to Kidnappers!) was founded at the end of 1981 by the big drug traffickers, and that it already has many supporters among the rich landowners and some state organizations: the DAS (Administrative Department of Security), the B-2 unit of the army (military intelligence), the GOES (Grupo Operativo Antiextorsión y Secuestro, or Operative Group Against Extortion and Kidnapping), and the F2 unit of the police. MAS wants to keep rich people’s money from going to Miami, and their partners’ and associates’ money from having to stay out of the country. To that end, they were determined to end a plague that exists only in Colombia.
“We all want to invest our money in the country, but with that sword of Damocles hanging over us it’s impossible! That’s why we’re not going to let a single kidnapper go free: every time we catch one, we’ll hand him over to the army to deal with. No drug trafficker wants to go through what I did with my father’s kidnapping, or what happened with the Ochoas’ sister, or the torture my friend Carlos Lehder del Quindío had to endure in the flesh. Everyone is joining together around MAS and Lehder and making large contributions: we already have an army of almost twenty-five hundred men.”
I suggest that starting now, and given that his associates are also farmers, businessmen, exporters, or industrialists, he should try to always refer to them as his “professional colleagues.” I express my horror about what happened to his father and ask if Pablo also managed to free him in record time.
“Yes, yes. We got him back safe and sound, thank God. Some other time I’ll tell you how.”
I’m learning to leave for another day any question about what seems to be rescue methods of exceptional force and effectiveness. But I express my skepticism about the MAS’s ability to achieve the same results in every one of the three thousand kidnappings that happen each year in Colombia. I tell him that to end all the abductions he would first have to get rid of several guerrilla groups that total more than thirty thousand men. In a third of a century of trying, the army hasn’t been able to eradicate them. Rather, their numbers seem to grow with every day that passes. I tell him that the rich establishment is going to be happy with MAS—because they won’t have to provide a single peso, or a bullet, or a life—while he will have to bear the costs, the enemies, and the deaths.
He shrugs and replies he doesn’t care. The only thing he’s interested in is being the leader of his profession and having his colleagues’ support in backing a government that would end the extradition treaty with the United States.
“In my line of work, everyone’s rich. And now, I want you to rest so you’ll be very beautiful tonight. I invited two of my partners—my cousin Gustavo Gaviria and my brother-in-law Mario Henao—and a small group of friends. I’m going to go check on the work they’re finishing up with on the soccer field we’re donating next Friday. You’ll meet my whole family there. Gustavo is like a brother to me. He’s very intelligent, and he’s the one who practically runs the business. That way I have time to dedicate myself to the things that really interest me: my causes, my social work, and . . . your lessons, my love.”
“What’s your next goal . . . after the Senate?”
“I’ve told you enough for today. If I’m going to give you all of those million kisses I owe you, we’re going to need about a thousand and one nights. See you later, Virginia.”
A while later I hear a helicopter’s propeller as it moves off over the vast expanse of his little republic, and I wonder how this man with the heart of a lion is going to manage to balance all those contradictory interests and achieve such out-sized goals in just one lifetime.
Well, at his age he has all the time in the world ahead of him. . . . I sigh, observing a flock of birds that also disappears over a limitless horizon.
I know that I am attending the birth of a series of events that is going to split the history of my country in two, that the man I love is going to be the protagonist of many of them, and that almost no one seems to be aware of it. I don’t know if this man that God or Fate has placed in my path—so utterly sure of himself, so ambitious, so passionate about every one of his causes and about everything—one day will make me cry oceans the same way he makes me laugh now. But he certainly has all of the elements to become a formidable leader. Luckily for me, he isn’t beautiful or educated, and he’s not a man of the world: Pablo is, simply and completely, fascinating. And I think to myself, He has the most masculine personality I have ever known. He’s a diamond in the rough, and I think he’s never had a woman like me. I am going to try to polish him and teach him everything I’ve learned. And I’m going to make him need me like water in the desert.
MY FIRST ENCOUNTER with Pablo’s partners and family members takes place that night on the terrace of Hacienda Nápoles.
Gustavo Gaviria Rivero is inscrutable, silent, secretive, distant. Every bit as sure of himself as his cousin Pablo Escobar is, this race-car champion rarely smiles. Though he’s the same age as us, he is, without a doubt, more mature than Pablo. From the first moment my eyes meet those of that small, thin man with straight hair and a fine mustache, everything about him warns me that he doesn’t touch the subject of his business with “civilians.” He seems to be a great observer, and I know he’s there to evaluate me. My intuition quickly tells me that not only is he uninterested in Pablo’s aspiration to fame, but he’s also beginning to worry about his partner’s exorbitant spending on social projects. Unlike his cousin, who is a liberal, Gustavo is affiliated with the Conservative Party. Both of them consume alcohol in minimal quantities, and I notice that they are not interested in music or dancing, either. They are alert: all business, politics, power, and control.
They are capos recently arrived in the world of the very rich and the even more ambitious, and they have just acquired a new connection: an exquisite diva who by profession is an insider of the most select ranks of political and economic power and who is related to the Holguines, Mosqueras, Sanz de Santamarías, Valenzuelas, Zuletas, Arangos, Caros, Pastranas, Marroquines. And so, as if hypnotized, for the next six hours, none of the three men will glance at another table, another woman, a man, or anything else, not even for an instant.
Mario Henao, brother of Pablo’s wife, Victoria, has an exhaustive knowledge of and furious adoration for the opera. I realize that he wants to impress me and maybe even instruct me on the subject that would least interest Pablo or Gustavo. And since I know he’s the last ally someone in my position could aspire to, without the slightest consideration for Caruso or Toscanini or La Divina—or for the Capones’ and Gambinos’ legendary passion for those three gods—I steer the conversation directly to Pablo’s and Gustavo’s competencies.
It takes me hours to get that ice king Gustavo to lower his guard, but my effort bears fruit. I spend nearly two and a half hours interviewing him, and almost as long listening to an enthusiastic lesson about the discipline and precision needed to control a car going 150 miles per hour—the life-or-death, split-second decisions that must