Pérez agreed he would operate, but he did not offer me much hope for recuperation.
Two or three days later I was taken to Bogotá from Medellín for the first of my twenty-two operations. That was the beginning of the most terrible time of my life.
It was never discovered who had sent the bomb. But this jail was maximum security. In that prison there were five different control posts to get through; it was guarded by the army, the police, the DAS, the correctional officers, all equipped with cameras, metal detectors, and X-ray machines. When you passed all that there were still many steel bulletproof doors. Nonetheless, they were able to introduce the bomb without any suspects ever being apprehended. The government was so corrupt it could have been sent to me by anyone. Many of our enemies would have wanted my death.
I had no future. I was in prison where my enemies could reach me. My brother, who might have forced protection, was dead. I couldn’t see to help myself. I recall that the former president Cesár Gavíria had guaranteed my life but still that happened without any corresponding consequences. In 1994, the former president of the United States, George H. W. Bush, was coming to visit Colombia and to impress him with how strong our justice system was, my sentence was made fifty-eight years, although by Colombian law the maximum was thirty years. That difference didn’t matter at all, for me it was longer than life. I kept fighting and after time they reduced my sentence to twenty-two years and finally after much negotiation, to fourteen years and eight months.
So many of these years are buried deeply in my memory, where I don’t want to find them. Two months after my first failed operation the doctor tried a cornea transplant. At that time the doctor didn’t give me just a new eye, he gave me hope. The transplant failed, mainly because I was immediately transferred back to the prison when I desperately needed thirty days of bed rest and care in the hospital. In the jail the prison officials failed to give me the required eyedrops for the new cornea. But the hope survived. I knew that I needed to live, not for me, but for my family. They had depended on Pablo and Pablo was dead. It was my responsibility.
There was unbearable pain. After the first operation on my cornea one of the nurses, I don’t know if by mistake or on purpose, put alcohol in my eye. I don’t have the words to describe my pain. There were days then I felt certain I would die, and it was not an unwelcome thought. On the way back from the second operation on my cornea one of the guards let the stretcher fall onto the floor. On the ground I couldn’t move, afraid I would destroy the cornea. In addition to destroying my body, the government tried to destroy my hope. My sentence had been reduced to fourteen years, eight months, but that had been challenged. I remember one day before Bush had arrived in Colombia, I had gotten a letter from the government. A guard had to read it to me. It said that the government was never going to give me a reduced sentence, execute me in the electric chair, or release me. There was no hope for me, this letter said. No matter how long I lived, it would be in prison.
I had nothing left but hope so how could I give that up? I was moving back and forth too often between the prison in Medellín and the hospital in Bogotá. It was a perilous time for me. Although I was blinded and wounded badly, that was not enough for our enemies. I was being protected at that time by the Colombian army, not by the police. It didn’t make a difference, no one would be sorry if Roberto Escobar was dead. My enemies made several efforts to make that happen. Once a cook in the hospital said he had been offered $100,000 to put poison in my food.
There are three things I fear the most: surgeries, prison, and glasses for vision (as I had been so proud of my athlete’s good sight), and I was suffering from the three. I am grateful to two plastic surgeons, Dr. Juan Bernardo and Dr. Lulu, because they reconstructed my hands, fingers, nails, and face almost to perfection.