“Doña Virginia—” an older man who seems to be listening to the others with displeasure addresses me. “My son was kidnapped by the FARC over three years ago, and they still have him. May God bless Escobar and Lehder and all these men who are so brave and determined. People like them are what this country needs, because our army is too poor to fight alone against the guerrillas who’ve gotten rich off kidnapping. Now that we’re joining forces, I know that I can dream of seeing my son again before I die. And that he will be able to hug his wife again and finally meet my grandson!”
Pablo introduces me to Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, “the Mexican,” who is accompanied by some of the Boyacá emerald dealers. He receives warm congratulations from almost all the participants, and we stay chatting for a while with his friends and associates. When we return to the hotel, I don’t say anything about what I heard. I only comment that some of the people—like the right-wingers they clearly are—seem to feel a deep distrust for someone as liberal as Santofimio, Pablo’s candidate.
“Wait till someone kidnaps their sons, and the first one of our colleagues is extradited, and you’ll see how they run to vote for whoever we tell them to!”
After he was expelled from Luis Carlos Galán’s movement, Pablo Escobar had joined that of Senator Alberto Santofimio, the liberal leader from the Tolima Department. Santofimio is very close to ex-president Alfonso López Michelsen, whose son’s mother-in-law is his cousin. Gloria Valencia de Castaño, “the First Lady of Colombian TV,” is the unrecognized daughter of an uncle of Santofimio’s, and her only daughter, Pilar Castaño, is married to Felipe López Caballero, the editor of the magazine Semana.
In every Colombian presidential and senate election, the flow of santofimista votes constitutes a substantial part of the total obtained by the Liberal Party, which exceeds the Conservative Party in number of votes and presidents elected. Santofimio is charismatic and has a reputation for being an excellent public speaker, as well as the most able, ambitious, and astute politician in the country. He is around forty years old and is figured to be a presidential hopeful. A short and chubby man, he has a satisfied face and is almost always smiling. We have never been friends, but I like him and I’ve always called him Alberto. (In 1983, everyone calls me Virginia socially, and I call other well-known personalities by their first names; I only use the term “Doctor” with those I want to keep at a distance, and “Mr. President” with heads of state. In 2006, after twenty years of ostracism, people will call me “señora” and I’ll call them “Doctor” and “Doctora,” while former presidents, when they see me coming, will take off at a run.)
A few months before Escobar and I met, he and Santofimio, along with other Colombian congresspeople, had attended the inauguration of the socialist Felipe González as prime minister of Spain. González’s trusted adviser, Enrique Sarasola, is married to a Colombian woman. I had interviewed González for TV in 1981, and I’d met Sarasola in Madrid during my first honeymoon. With a terribly serious expression, Pablo has described for me the scene in which the other politicians in the retinue asked him for cocaine in a Madrid nightclub, and how offended he was. And thus I confirmed what I already knew: the King of Coke seems to detest, almost as much as I do, the export product on which he is building a tax-free empire. The only person Pablo has given coke rocks to without even being asked is his girlfriend’s previous boyfriend, and he didn’t exactly do it for humanitarian or philanthropic reasons.
Since in 1983 the liberal senators Galán and Santofimio are the two surest options for a generational changing of the guard in the 1986–1990 presidential term, Pablo and Alberto have become fierce allies against the presidential campaign of Luis Carlos Galán. Escobar has admitted to me that for the midterm elections in 1984, he is investing millions into Santofimio’s political movement. I try to convince him that it’s time for him to call the recipient of his donations by his first name, as Julio Mario Santo Domingo does with Alfonso López, but Pablo will always call his candidate “Doctor.” In the following years, “El Santo” will be the constant link between Escobar’s operation and the political class, the bureaucracy, the Liberal Party, and, above all, President López. El Santo even connects him to parts of the Armed Forces. In fact, his cousin is the son of a well-known army general and is married to the daughter of Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, one of the heads of the Cali Cartel.
TODAY I AM RADIANT WITH HAPPINESS. Pablo is coming to the congressional sessions in Bogotá, and he’s finally going to come to my apartment. And he says he’s bringing another surprise! Every petal on every rose is perfect, and so is everything else: my bossa nova music on the stereo, the rosé champagne in the refrigerator, my favorite perfume, the dress from Paris, and the copy of Twenty Love Poems by Pablo Neruda on the coffee table. Clara, my best friend at the time, has come from Cali. She sells antiques, and she wants to offer Pablo a Christ from the seventeenth century for Father Elías Lopera. For the moment, only she, Margot, Martita, and Pablo’s partners know about our relationship.
The doorbell rings. I dash down the steps that separate the study and the three bedrooms from the social part of my apartment, which is more than two thousand square feet. When I reach the living room, I find myself face-to-face not only with the candidate and his patron but also with more than half a dozen bodyguards. They insolently look me over from head to toe and then take the elevator down to wait for their boss in the garages or the lobby. The elevator comes up again with another dozen men and goes back down with half a dozen. The scene is repeated three times, and three times Pablo reads the displeasure on my face. Everything in my reproachful expression warns him that this will be the first and last time in his life that I allow him to enter the place where I’m waiting for him—especially my own house!—accompanied by bodyguards or strangers.
Over the years I will see Pablo some 220 times, around 80 of them surrounded by an army of friends, followers, employees, or bodyguards. But starting after that day, he will arrive at either of our apartments or my hotel suite completely alone, and when we meet in his country houses, he will order his men to vanish before they see me. He has understood in seconds that when a married man visits the woman he loves—and who, by the way, is a diva—he cannot act like a general but must behave like any other man in love. Also, that the first honor one lover owes another is an almost blind trust. For the rest of our days together, I will always thank him—with gestures, never words—for his tacit acceptance of the conditions I imposed that night with only those three looks.
Clara and I greet Gustavo Gaviria, Jorge Ochoa and his brothers, the Mexican, Pelusa Ocampo, owner of the restaurant where we eat sometimes, Guillo Ángel and his brother Juan Gonzalo, and Evaristo Porras, among others. Porras’s jaw is trembling and at first I have the impression that he’s afraid, but Pablo explains that he has consumed cocaine in industrial quantities. I’d never seen Aníbal Turbay’s teeth chatter like that, and I conclude that Evaristo must have snorted at least a fourth of a kilo. Pablo takes him to another room to reprimand him in private, then takes a videocassette from him and sends him away. He pushes Evaristo gently toward the door as if he were scolding a child and orders him to go back to the hotel to wait for them. Then he tells me we have to watch the video together, because he wants to ask me for a favor he says is urgent. I leave Clara in charge of the guests, and we go up to the study.
Every time we see each other, Pablo and I spend six, eight, or more hours together, and in all that time he has confided some basics of his business. Tonight he explains that Leticia, capital of the Colombian Amazon, has become key for him in the shipment of cocaine paste from Peru and Bolivia into Colombia, and that Porras is his organization’s man in the southeast of the country. He also tells me that to justify his fortune to the tax man, Evaristo has bought the jackpot-winning lottery ticket three times and has won a reputation as the world’s luckiest man!
We turn on the TV, and on the screen appears the figure of a young man talking with Porras about what seems to be business of an agricultural nature. The images were filmed at night and are blurry, and the conversation isn’t clear, either. Pablo tells me that it’s Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Luis Carlos Galán’s right-hand man, and, as such, his archenemy. He explains that what Evaristo is taking from a package is a check for a million pesos—some $20,000 then—for a bribe, and he confesses that the setup has been carefully coordinated between him, Porras,