didn’t kill me. But soon after I got back Pablo called me. He had me picked up and we spent two hours together as he asked me questions.”
Pablo was getting desperate to save the family. This was when we made arrangements for my family to leave the country. Nicholas went with his pregnant wife and children, his mother and his seventy-eight-year-old aunt, all huddled together. They went to Chile, where, as Nicholas remembers, “It was tough because when the police found out who we were from the Colombian government informants there, they didn’t want to let us into the country. Finally I had to pay some money to the police in Santiago to allow us to go through the gate. When we left the airport three cars were following us. I started driving all over the city and they followed me. I went faster they went faster. Just like in the movies. We were scared. We didn’t know if they were going to take us and hand us back to Colombia or kill us. It didn’t matter that we were innocent, that we had nothing to do with the wars between Pablo and the cartels and the government. They wanted to use us to catch Pablo. I turned into a huge parking lot and shut the car and we all hid below the windows. We waited, the cars drove around looking for us for hours and hours. Finally they went away.
“I waited some more, then started the car. Two blocks later they were waiting for us. I raced. On the road I saw a police station and I stopped. It was better to be taken out of the country than killed.”
Eventually from Chile my family went to Brazil. They were not permitted to land in Brazil; instead they were sent to Spain. Again, they were not permitted to leave the plane, because the Colombian government had warned all these different countries and the persecution against my family continued. So from Madrid they went to Frankfurt, Germany. There, Nicholas remembers, “I spoke to an immigration agent since I had studied there and knew German and he told us it was true that everybody in Europe had information from the Colombian government that the Escobar family was trying to hide in Europe so don’t let them in. ‘The president of Colombia gave the order to my superiors,’ he told me.
“Finally we pleaded, ‘Please let us get in, they are going to kill us, we are innocent. It would be better for everybody. We’re not going to do anything bad. Please call your superiors.’ It took some time, but he got permission for us to be there. That agent was so human he saved us.”
Pablo was not so fortunate. María Victoria, Juan Pablo, and Manuela were not permitted to leave the country. There is a story I have heard that Manuela would walk the halls of the security hotel the government had put them in singing little songs that Los Pepes were going to come and kill her.
Through the months I would speak to Pablo almost every day on the mobile phone. He always spoke from a moving taxi. But he was very much alone and lonely. Much of his money was beyond his reach, too many people of the organization were dead or had surrendered, and it was dangerous for him to be in contact with his family. A contact inside the Search Bloc would tell us that their new listening tools allowed them to track every phone call of interest. The government would not negotiate. In the city he only went out in complete disguise and now he stayed away from the most popular areas, instead going outside the city. When possible he liked small places where he could sit and drink black coffee with pastry. For Pablo it seemed that the safest answer was to go into the jungle and work with his new movement that he was forming called Antioquia Rebelde. So in November of 1993 that is what he began planning to do.
He had just moved into an apartment in Medellín in an area near the soccer stadium Atanasio Giradot. With him was our cousin Luzmila, who prepared his meals and did the errands for him, and one of my best men, Limón. Nobody in the family knew Pablo was staying there. Luzmila told her sons that she had a job taking care of an older man and she was going to earn good money. But with the