Life and Death in the Andes

On the Trail of Bandits, Heroes, and Revolutionaries

Kim MacQuarrie

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781439168929
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

"A thoughtfully observed travel memoir and history as richly detailed as it is deeply felt" ( Kirkus Reviews ) of South America, from Butch Cassidy to Che Guevara to cocaine king Pablo Escobar to Charles Darwin, all set in the Andes Mountains. The Andes Mountains are the world's longest mountain chain, linking most of the countries in South America. Kim MacQuarrie takes us on a historical journey through this unique region, bringing fresh insight and contemporary connections to such fabled characters as Charles Darwin, Che Guevara, Pablo Escobar, Butch Cassidy, Thor Heyerdahl, and others. He describes living on the floating islands of Lake Titcaca. He introduces us to a Patagonian woman who is the last living speaker of her language. We meet the woman who cared for the wounded Che Guevara just before he died, the police officer who captured cocaine king Pablo Escobar, the dancer who hid Shining Path guerrilla Abimael Guzman, and a man whose grandfather witnessed the death of Butch Cassidy.Collectively these stories tell us something about the spirit of South America. What makes South America different from other continents—and what makes the cultures of the Andes different from other cultures found there? How did the capitalism introduced by the Spaniards change South America? Why did Shining Path leader Guzman nearly succeed in his revolutionary quest while Che Guevara in Bolivia was a complete failure in his?"MacQuarrie writes smartly and engagingly and with…enthusiasm about the variety of South America's life and landscape" ( The New York Times Book Review ) in Life and Death in the Andes. Based on the author's own deeply observed travels, "this is a well-written, immersive work that history aficionados, particularly those with an affinity for Latin America, will relish" ( Library Journal ).

1

THE HUNT FOR PABLO ESCOBAR AND THE SEARCH FOR EL DORADO (COLOMBIA)

He stated that [Colombia] was a land rich in emeralds and gold . . . he told of a certain king, unclothed, who went on rafts on a pool to make oblations . . . anointing all [his body] with . . . a quantity of ground gold . . . gleaming like a ray of the sun . . . [and] the [Spanish] soldiers . . . then gave [that king] the name El Dorado [the Golden One].

—Juan de Castellanos, 1589

Sometimes I am God; if I say a man dies, he dies that same day . . . There can only be one king [and that king is me].

—Pablo Escobar, leader of the Medellín cartel, who spent seven years on Forbes magazine’s billionaire list (1987–1993)

Someday, and that day may never come, I’ll call upon you to do a service for me. But until that day, accept this [retribution] . . . as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.

—Don Corleone, The Godfather, 1972

Knock, knock, knock!

The knock on Colonel Hugo Martínez’s door that signaled his possible death came at 11:30 a.m. on a Wednesday morning in the La Castellana neighborhood of Bogotá. The knock came during the height of the Medellín drug wars and, Martínez knew, the only way to access Martínez’s home on the fifth floor of this particular upscale apartment tower was after being screened by the watchman downstairs. It was the latter’s job to confirm whether the apartment dweller was there, to ask for the visitor’s name, and then to announce the visitor’s arrival via the intercom. Only if an occupant granted permission was a visitor allowed to enter the building, which was mostly inhabited by the families of high-ranking Colombian police officers. On this particular morning, however, the intercom had been silent. It must be a neighbor, Colonel Martínez thought—but how had anyone known that he was here? The colonel, whose job was to hunt down the leaders of the Medellín cartel, moved carefully to the door. All about him, on the floor, lay shards of glass from the bomb explosion outside that had shattered the windows and his television set a week before.

Knock knock knock!

The colonel was a lean man, six foot tall and forty-nine years old, with short-cropped brown hair and closely set, coffee-colored eyes. He’d been in the midst of packing up his family’s belongings when the knock caused him to momentarily freeze. The apartment had lain empty for a week, the clock still ticking silently on the wall, clothes strewn about, his children’s toys in their rooms, just as they had left them before his wife and two children fled. No one was supposed to know that he was here, alone in this particular apartment and in Bogotá at this particular time. So who was knocking at the door?

A week earlier, the cartel had exploded a powerful bomb in the street below, spewing jagged shrapnel and creating a cloud of smoke that had risen into the air. A number of people had been wounded, although none had been killed. Martínez had been two hundred miles away in Medellín at the time and had called his wife frantically when he’d heard. He’d then flown back to Bogotá and had arranged for her and their children to go into hiding. The cartel, Martínez realized, could have killed his entire family. Instead, they’d chosen to send the bomb as the sort of message they knew the colonel would understand:

We, the Medellín Cartel, know your family lives here. We can kill them anytime we wish. If you continue to pursue us, your family will cease to exist. This is a warning.

For much of the last three years, Colonel Martínez had been living an almost monastic life in Medellín. There, he was quartered on a police base with the rest of the handpicked members of the special police force that he’d helped to create and currently led—el Bloque de Búsqueda (the Search Bloc). In 1989 the Colombian government had selected Martínez to command what both he and his fellow officers believed to be a suicidal mission: hunting down Colombia’s most powerful and feared drug lord, Pablo Escobar, and dismantling Escobar’s Medellín cartel.

Martínez hadn’t wanted the job. In fact, most of his colleagues felt that he’d be dead within a few months, if not weeks. But an appointment was an appointment, Martínez believed. After all, he’d spent his entire life in the police, ever since becoming a cadet.

Duty was duty. If he didn’t do it, then someone else would be ordered to instead. After years of giving and receiving orders, Martínez wasn’t about to disobey one now. At the same time, the colonel realized, perhaps that’s why he’d been given the mission in the first place. While others might resign or try to pass the assignment on, Martínez’s superiors knew that he was one of the few who never would. He was well known, in fact, as the kind of officer who got things done. His record was clean. He’d not only obtained the rank of colonel but also had graduated from law school at the top of his class. Martínez was now middle-aged, was married with three kids, and was on track to become a general. But only if he could survive his present mission.

Martínez and his family had been living in Bogotá when he’d received his new command. The assignment called for Martínez to move immediately to Medellín. There, he was to conduct operations in a city where the cartel had already paid off most of the local police. Law enforcement in Colombia was a poorly paid profession, after all, while drugs were bringing in billions of dollars. Corruption was at an all-time high. So many Medellín judges, police, and politicians were on the cartel’s payroll, in fact, that Pablo Escobar was considered “untouchable” in his hometown.

The cartel, of course, made the payments to protect its major business—the exportation of cocaine. Bribes were thus one of the cartel’s unavoidable operating expenses. If certain individuals proved troublesome and could not be bought—or if other individuals cheated or betrayed them—then Escobar and the cartel employed a veritable army of thousands of specialized hit men, called sicarios,^I who enabled the cartel to enforce its will. By the late 1980s, some two thousand sicarios—mostly young teenagers—swarmed Medellín’s crowded streets, often riding tandem on the backs of small motorcycles. The one in front was the designated driver; the one behind, the shooter. Escobar, who, according to some, had worked as a sicario himself in his teens, had sent out word to his young killers regarding the kind of assassinations he preferred: two bullets in the forehead, placed just above the eyes. A person might survive one of those bullets, Escobar advised, but never two.

In Medellín, assassination for the cartel was such a lucrative business that an entire cottage industry had sprung up. With an ever-increasing number of targets, delivering death smoothly, rapidly, and anonymously had become a highly sought-after skill. By 1989, the year that the colonel and four hundred members of the Search Bloc arrived in Medellín to take on Escobar, Medellín was already considered the most dangerous city in the world. No other metropolis came close to the rate at which living human beings were so abundantly converted each day into the dead.

That the members of the Search Bloc would be exposed to extreme danger was a given: for that reason, neither the colonel nor his men had brought their families along. To have done so would have immediately transformed their loved ones into targets for the cartel. Instead, the Search Bloc families lived in various homes in other cities and frequently moved for security reasons. Recently, as the Colombian government had turned up the pressure on the cartel and violence had correspondingly increased, Colonel Martínez and his wife had abruptly withdrawn their children from school. Even a police escort could no longer guarantee their safety. No, after the recent bomb explosion outside, the colonel realized, even Bogotá had become too dangerous. For that matter, so had practically every corner of Colombia. To Martínez, the cartel increasingly seemed like an enormous octopus with innumerable tentacles, some thick, some small, with more tentacles constantly sprouting. The cartel could reach whomever it wanted, even outside of Colombia. Anyone who, for any reason, tried to stop or hinder the cartel’s growth automatically became a target for assassination.

Knock, knock, knock!

The knocks were harder, louder, more insistent.

“Who’s there?” Martínez called out.

There was silence. Then a muffled voice.

“Who is it?” he called again.

This time, he heard a name. A name he recognized. But it was a name he hadn’t heard in years.

Martínez opened the door. Before him stood a man about forty-five years old, dressed in a suit and tie, with brown skin and a pained expression on his face. It was a man Martínez recognized—a former police officer whom he hadn’t seen in more than four years. The officer had once lived in a house alongside his own in another city, and Martínez had once asked him, because of certain irregularities, to resign.

The man stood there, a look of shame mingling with fear on his face. He had difficulty meeting the colonel’s eyes.

“I come to you with a message, mi colonel,” he finally said. “I come to you obligated.”

Martínez looked at him, frowning. The man then looked up.

“The message is from Pablo Escobar,” he said.

“If I didn’t come—they’d kill me. Or my family. That’s the threat I’m under.”

Martínez stared at his former colleague, still wondering how he’d appeared so easily at his doorway.

“What’s the message?” he finally asked.

“Escobar’s sent me to offer you six million dollars.”

The man looked at Martínez carefully, judging his reaction, before continuing.

“The only thing he asks is that you keep on working, that you continue your job, that you keep carrying out operations. But,” he added, staring hard at the colonel, “if you’re sending an operation to capture him—then you must first make a phone call. To let us know. If you agree, then the money will be delivered to any account you want.

“Six million dollars,” the man repeated.

Colonel Martínez stared at the former officer, who was clearly uncomfortable and sweating, despite the cool air. Two thoughts now entered the colonel’s mind. The first was the realization that Escobar was making him the standard cartel offer of plata o plomo, “silver or lead.” Literally, “money or death.” The bomb explosion a week earlier had been the first part of that offer—the threat of plomo, or death—unless Martínez changed his behavior. Now his former colleague was here with the second part: the plata or, in this case, the $6 million. It was up to Martínez which to accept.

The second thought that entered Martínez’s mind, as he watched the cartel’s messenger shift uneasily before him, was that Escobar wouldn’t be making this offer if he wasn’t feeling pressure. Already, the colonel and his men had captured or killed some of Escobar’s top lieutenants, including Escobar’s cousin Henao, his right-hand man. Escobar, the colonel now realized, must be worried. His offer was thus a sign of weakness, not strength.

“Tell them you couldn’t find me,” Martínez said quietly.

“But, mi colonel, I can’t do that,” the man pleaded.

“We never spoke,” the colonel said firmly.

And then, despite the man’s pleading, the colonel closed the door.

· · ·

When Pablo Escobar was seven years old and his eldest brother, Roberto, was ten, armed mobs, or Chusmeros, arrived in the village of Titiribu where the Escobar family lived, with the intent of slaughtering the inhabitants. The year was 1959 and, as Escobar’s older brother Roberto later recounted,

They came to our town in the middle of the night, dragging people out of their houses and killing them. When they reached our house they started banging on the doors with their machetes and screaming that they were going to kill us.

Most of the inhabitants in Escobar’s village belonged to Colombia’s Liberal Party. The armed mob, by contrast, was made up of Conservatives. Eleven years earlier, in 1948, the internal tensions in Colombia had come to a head with the assassination of a Liberal political candidate, Jorge Gaitán, who was predicted to win the presidency. Gaitán’s death became a trigger point that set off in Colombia a kind of collective nervous breakdown, unleashing a home-brewed explosion of violence that was as brutal as that in Rwanda some forty years later. If, as the Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz said, “War is simply a continuation of policy by other means,” Gaitán’s death motivated Colombians to take their political opinions out of the realm of the ballot box and into the countryside, where ideology was now enforced with machetes, knives, and guns. In a country with only eleven million inhabitants, three hundred thousand Colombians soon lost their lives in the violent mayhem that ensued. Another six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand were injured. To make matters worse, in Colombia the transformation from political discourse to open civil war had a particularly barbarous edge: the goal became not simply to kill one’s opponents but to do so in the most horrific manner possible.

During the mass hysteria that would later become known as La Violencia, methods of murder became so ghastly that a new lexicon emerged; new forms of language had to be invented for acts that had never before been seen, or at least not to such extremes or on such a scale. Colloquialisms soon sprang up, for example, such as picar para tamal, “to cut like a tamale,” which in this case meant to slowly chop a person’s body apart until he or she died. Death through bocachiquiar derived from the manner in which Colombian fishermen cleaned bocachico, a fish so scaly that numerous slits had to be cut into its flesh in order to remove the scales. In the human version, a person was sliced repeatedly until he or she bled to death. Village-wide rampages broke out that included cutting off people’s ears, scalping inhabitants alive, bayoneting children and babies, and, for men, inflicting the signature corte de corbata, or “tie cut”—which meant cutting someone’s throat open and then pulling out his or her tongue through the open wound.

Thus, eleven years after Gaitán’s assassination, when shouts, lights, and torches arrived at the Escobars’ home in the middle of the night, the entire family knew what probably lay in store for them. According to Pablo’s brother, Roberto, as fists and machetes began to bang on their door, and as the screams of neighbors punctuated the night,

My mother was crying and praying to the Baby Jesus of Atocha. She took one of our mattresses and put it under the bed, then told us to lie there silently and covered us with blankets. I heard my father saying “They’re going to kill us, but we can save the kids.” I held on to Pablo and our sister, Gloria, telling them not to cry, that we would be all right . . . The door was very strong and the attackers failed to break through it, so they sprayed it with gasoline and set it on fire.

At the last minute, just before the Escobars were roasted alive, the Colombian army arrived and put the crazed marauders to flight. When shortly afterward soldiers banged on the Escobars’ door, telling them it was safe to come out, at first the family didn’t believe them. Eventually, forced out by the intense heat, the family stumbled into what was now a ravaged village, the soldiers leading the Escobars and other survivors to the local schoolhouse. Recalled Roberto,

Our road was illuminated by our burning house. In that strange light I saw bodies lying in the gutters and hanging from the lampposts. The Chusmeros had poured gasoline on the bodies and set them on fire, and I will remember forever the smell of burning flesh. I carried [seven-year-old] Pablo. Pablo held on to me so tightly, as if he would never let go.

The sudden and savage outbreak of violence made it obvious to the rest of the world that Colombia, for whatever reason, had been a country coiled like a spring, a spring to which had been fastened hand grenades. The assassination of Gaitán had in fact cracked the country’s normally polite exterior and had allowed its inner tensions to explode, much as lava occasionally bursts forth through sudden cracks in the Andes. It wasn’t the first time, however, that Colombia had suffered such a fiery eruption. Fifty years earlier, between 1899 and 1902, another civil war had broken out, one equally as savage and during which eigh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Map of the South American Plate
• Map of the Central Andes
• Map of Tierra del Fuego
• Preface
• 1. The Hunt for Pablo Escobar and the Search for El Dorado (Colombia)
• 2. Evolution and Denial in the Galápagos (Ecuador)
• 3. Death in the Andes: The Capture of Shining Path Leader Abimael Guzmán (Peru)
• 4. The Rise and Fall of Hiram Bingham, “Discoverer” of Machu Picchu (Peru)
• 5. Ice Maidens, Volcanoes, and Incas (Peru)
• 6. The Kon-Tiki Voyage, White Gods, and the Floating Islands of Lake Titicaca (Peru and Bolivia)
• 7. The End of Che Guevara (Bolivia)
• 8. The Final Days of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Bolivia)
• 9. Darwin, the Last Yámana, and the Uttermost Part of the Earth (Chile and Argentina)
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About Kim MacQuarrie
• Notes
• Index
• Copyright