When we reached the home of my employee he first tried to get us to go away. Then he realized who I was and brought us inside. We took showers there, one of the nicest showers of my life, and put on loose clothes that we borrowed. For the first time in my life I was running from the police. It was a strange feeling, but in the years to come I would get used to it.
The question was what we were going to do at that moment. I didn’t know what the police had learned about Lara’s killing. But I knew they had created evidence against me and could assume they wanted to connect me to it. I was innocent, but at that moment I didn’t know exactly what Pablo’s involvement had been. When we got in contact with Pablo, he told us that he decided the whole family had to leave the country quickly and go into hiding. Some of Pablo’s partners who were being pursued had made the same decision and would go with us. Even some leaders of the Cali cartel were making plans to leave the country. We would go to Panama, Pablo said. He had worked out an arrangement with an important general to give us his protection. Each group in the organization agreed to pay him $1 million to stay there, a total of $5 million.
Pablo went to Panama first to get our situation established. We stayed hidden, the lawyers working to get our wives out of jail. My wife was locked up for fifteen days and was treated badly. They didn’t want to give her food or clean clothing and made her time there as difficult as possible. There was no reason for that. She had done nothing against the law.
Pablo made all the arrangements for us to join him in Panama. I was in charge of bringing his wife, María Victoria, who was pregnant, as well as my family. The helicopter that was coming to pick us up was late and we began to get afraid something had happened to it. I watched the area around us carefully, wondering if the police would suddenly show up. María Victoria was having a bad time. Finally, though, it arrived and we all scrambled aboard. For the first time I was able to relax.
And then the helicopter started making strange sounds. “We have a problem,” the pilot said. “Hold on.” We went spinning down too quickly. We thought we were going to die, but we landed safely near a small town in Chocó. We were surprised to still be alive. Within hours a second helicopter picked us up and took us to safety in Panama.
Life as we had enjoyed it was over. The existence of the Medellín cartel was now known all over Colombia. Pablo and the other leaders of the cartel were being blamed for Lara’s assassination. The United States was putting great pressure on our government to stop the flow of drugs and in the States the face they put on cocaine was Pablo’s. So instead of just being a fugitive from Colombian authorities, Pablo became known in America and Europe as the man behind the cocaine epidemic. They wrote as if all of the drugs reaching those places were because of Pablo.
We settled into Panama. We had no idea how long we would stay or what we would do next, where we would go. Obviously money was not a big problem. Pablo began meeting with Colombian government representatives to try to agree how we could return home safely without being extradited.
We were on the run and we wouldn’t stop for another seven years. And Pablo, my brother, who I loved, was becoming the legendary great desperado of the world.
Five
IN PANAMA, OUR FUGITIVE LIFE WAS VERY NICE. We were there with the acceptance of Panama’s dictator, General Manuel Noriega. We stayed at a house owned by a high government official near a golf club, but it was like being in a hotel. They gave us cars and provided what we needed. There was not much we could do there but wait while we tried to negotiate some change in the extradition policy in Colombia, so we spent our time playing soccer, going to the gym, sitting at the pool, using all the facilities. We went often to the club for meals and the people there looked at us like we were rich Colombian businessmen. They had no idea