members of the guerrillas. Not the leaders, but important people with power. They helped me survive, doing everything for me from helping me get dressed to even giving me the injections. And also I had my mother, a very remarkable human being.

She would die for me. After we knew about the plot to poison me I wanted to eat only food brought in specially for me from the outside stores. “Oh don’t worry about that,” my mother said. “I already ate the food a half hour ago and nothing happened to me.”

I was angry. It wasn’t only me she had; there was the rest of the family. I told her that was the wrong thing for her to do. And she said to me, “I’m an old woman. I’ve lived a long life. I don’t want to see another of my sons die.” And so to save the life of her son my mother would risk poison.

There were other attempts to kill me. I was outside on the patio with one of the guerrillas when I heard the noise of a bullet hitting a wall. It wasn’t a big sound because the shooter had used a silencer. When we heard the spat against the wall the guerrilla threw me to the ground for protection. The guard who fired the shot was not captured and there was no investigation. I was told later that he had been hired by Pablo’s enemies.

There were nights of terror. Two days after I had been through another surgery I was lying in my bed in a military hospital in Bogotá with many tubes stuck into my arms and legs. At seven o’clock all the visitors were supposed to leave, but with money that easily could be changed. So at about that time a member of my family went out to bring me some food. I lay there by myself, in my own darkness, listening to the radio.

I heard only the shot. A loud snap that echoed through my body. Then I heard a lot of screaming from the guards and I thought they were trying to kill me once again. Without pause I jumped out of my bed and the tubes got pulled out of my body. I pushed myself against the wall and started feeling for the door to the bathroom. I moved along it as quickly as possible, knowing any instant another shot might be made, until I found the door. I put myself inside and locked the door. Then I lay down on the floor. And I waited helpless for whatever was going to come.

In a couple of minutes I heard people coming into my room and crying out. “They killed Roberto too,” someone said. “They killed Roberto.”

I screamed for help and the door to the bathroom opened right away. Thank God, one of the guards said. I found out what had happened. Not too far from my room two young guards were playing gun games. One of them had taken his gun and put it under his chin, saying that “if I take a guerrilla I’m going to kill him like this.” He was just joking with his friend, this kid. And boom, he accidentally killed himself.

There was a lot of running after that. When the tubes ripped out of my arms I started bleeding. There was blood all over the place and when the guards came into the room they guessed I had been shot too.

But these situations were happening too often. There were people who believed that without Pablo’s power behind me there would be no danger to them to assassinate me. Because it had been the government’s fault that a bomb had destroyed my eyes and my ears they eventually agreed to let me live in the hospital clinic. So from 1994 to 2001 I lived inside the clinic.

I also remember when I was being transferred to Bogotá from Medellín for my third cornea transplant. I was traveling in a private plane, and when I arrived to the airport at 7 P.M. there was supposed to be an army unit waiting for me with an ambulance to take me to the hospital. The plane arrived but there was not anybody there waiting for me in the darkness. There were six people, my mother, the pilot, the co-pilot, two guards, and myself. The pilot, co-pilot, and one of the guards got off the plane to get to a phone and find out why nobody had come to pick us