down doors, terrorizing people, and steal their belongings. It was known that even having in your possession a photograph concerning Pablo—even if you weren’t in it—had become a crime. If the soldiers or the police found such a picture in your house or your car, you could be arrested for cooperating with the criminals and your property would be taken. The girl with the beautiful legs remembers that her family burned every picture of Pablo. The searchers came to her house to search at least seven times. This was called ayananie, although they were always accompanied by a judge who made it legal. They stopped her many times in her car at roadblocks and they broke into her car while it was parked. But of course they never found anything to associate her or her family with Pablo. Their searches were so tough that when people wanted to get even with their neighbor for any reason they would call the police from public phones and tell them, “Pablo Escobar is living at this address.”
And sometimes the police killed. Our cousin Hernando Gavíria was at his farm with his family for a vacation when the corrupt police arrived looking for Pablo. Hernando did not know where Pablo was, nor was he in contact with him. But still the police started thrashing him. They hung him upside down, and covered his eyes to torture him with electricity, and they also inserted needles in his testicles, all in front of his children and wife, while threatening the children and wife if they didn’t tell them where Pablo was. He died in front of his family.
Even while this was going on, many of the police continued on our payroll. On Fridays the police would line up, some in uniform, and be given a salary. For that money they performed surveillance services. For example, after the war started between Medellín and Cali in the late 1980s, some police in both of those cities worked for the traffickers who controlled those cities. So that when a car came into Medellín with a license plate from Cali, or when strangers would check into a Medellín hotel, the Medellín police would check them out. If they were from Cali sometimes they would take them into custody and if their intentions were innocent they would be released; but if it was suspected they were in the city for a crime, instead of being taken to the police commanding officer they would be handed over to the cartel.
Pablo’s war against the police started with the murder of Diego Mapas, a friend who was one of our associates. He got the nickname Mapas, map, because he was incredible with directions. If you gave him an address, he would find it better than a map.
One afternoon Diego Mapas and two other bodyguards rented a taxi in Medellín to go to Bogotá to make a drug deal. What they didn’t know was that they had been followed from Medellín. The police pulled them over, and took Mapas, his bodyguards, and the taxi driver to a farm near Bogotá, where they were tortured the same way as our cousin Hernando, and disappeared never to be found again. And all these tortures were in order to find out where Pablo was hiding. The Colombian government offered $10 million for both Pablo and myself—dead or alive, but preferably dead.
Pablo learned what had happened from a member of the police force named Lieutenant Porras who would supply information to Pablo, because Porras did not agree with the way the police were carrying out their corrupt methods. Pablo encouraged him to denounce all the crooked cops, so Porras did go to the district attorney, and surprisingly for Porras the DA put him in jail. After a few weeks he supposedly escaped from the prison and then was killed by the police in a barricade near Boyacá. It’s not correct to think of the police in those days just as people keeping the law. Many of them were corrupt—something we know for sure.
Pablo fought the police hard. They were trying to kill him, so he killed them. They put a price on his head; he put a price on their heads. The total war started about 1988. In Medellín the police had hundreds of small stations for about three or four men called CAIs, for Centro de Atención Inmediata, and they were put in intersections all over the city. They were like guard posts or checkpoints, and they would