was sentenced to twenty months in prison in Colombia, but the power of the traffickers proved enough and eventually he put up a bond for $11,500 and walked free.
Pablo and I, the Ochoa brothers, Carlos Lehder, Gacha, the Mexican, we had all become wanted men. Now whenever we traveled precautions had to be taken. Bodyguards always were with us. Pablo, and I suppose the others, would not permit any photographs taken. In Medellín, Pablo owned more than twenty taxicabs to move around. In some of the places he stayed he had secret hiding places built into walls just in case he got trapped. When Jorge Ochoa finally got out of jail he also took elaborate steps to hide. One of the people involved in negotiations between the traffickers and the government described to the law how he was taken to meet with him.
“We drove twenty minutes around town,” he said. “We went into the garage of a house. In the garage they asked me to change vehicles. I got into a taxi. The car drove me to what I believed was an industrial area—lots of warehouses, large double-trailer trucks—and the driver asked me to get out of the car. He went over to one of the trucks that were parked on the street. He got into the driver’s seat and opened the door for me. After I was seated in the cabin, he asked me to pick up my feet and get my hands off the door. He activated some mechanism and the seat that I was sitting on moved backward, and at the same time, a door in the body of the truck opened up, and when I realized it I was already inside the body. There was a very nicely appointed office where Jorge Ochoa found himself. He said to me, ‘I would like to know whether I can count on you in order to establish discussions that would be very confidential with the government in the sense of asking the government to cease their attacks on us to let us work.’”
The thought was still that we would be able to make an agreement with the government that would permit us to resume our regular lives. No one believed this could go on for long.
When Pablo failed to get the support he wanted to fight the extradition laws he started building up his own security forces. There were many young people in Medellín who wanted to work for Pablo. It was considered a job of honor. But what was happening now was different from anything ever before. In Colombia the smuggling businesses, the drug business, the emerald business, the coffee business, the flower business, and the mining business had all for many years been an accepted part of our economy. They employed many people, including police, military, and politicians. They brought money into the country. The violence in all these businesses—as I’ve mentioned, in the emeralds it has always been much worse than with drugs—was kept almost completely inside the business. So the government watched them, but didn’t try hard to end them. Now the United States wanted Colombia to solve the Americans’ drug problem—and our government had agreed to do so. This is when the violence that shocked the world began. It was this decision, a decision that would not be of great benefit to our country, that led to the deaths of so many people.
To fight back Pablo established offices in four areas in the city, where the sicarios waited. These offices were in pool halls, barbershops, places where men would hang out together. The sicarios originally were formed to be the police of the cartel. Much of the power of the cartel came from the threat of violence as much as actual violence. People heard stories about what happened to men who cheated or betrayed the drug traffickers, and so they took great care for themselves.
Until the extradition treaties, dealing with informers or thieves was the kind of job done by the sicarios. An airport manager who betrayed the cartel by informing to the government was not an innocent person; he was making his fortune from the business and knew the consequences of his actions. But the government’s decision to change the understanding between the legal system and the traffickers by extraditing to the U.S. was considered a declaration of war on the drug traffickers. To respond Pablo and the others in Medellín formed the secret group, Los Extraditables, to fight the extraditions. At the