the police walking with El Negro and the army searching for us. The army in the helicopters started shooting at the police on the ground, because they thought it was Pablo and his crew. The police on the ground started firing back. Everybody was shooting at everybody, and we took advantage of the gunfight and fled to the deepness of the jungle. El Negro also escaped, and made it to a nearby town where no one knew who he was, and the town’s priest hid him in his residence so he wouldn’t get murdered. It was twenty days later that El Negro made it back to Medellín.

Godoy led our escape. Among the forty people who ran with us were our loyal and trusted friend Otto, our cook named Gordo, and a very good soccer player we gave the name of a great Argentine soccer player. We didn’t follow an established path because, as Godoy told us, “The police won’t come this way.” It was tougher, though, climbing up a mountain covered with trees and bushes. We walked for about five hours in the night until we got into guerrilla territory. That first night about twenty of our people got separated and lost, so we arrived at a small house with the remaining twenty fighting people. We believed some of the others would find us there. A few did as the hours went by. This house was lived in by an older woman whose son was a guerrilla. At first they got scared because they thought we were the police, but when they were introduced to Pablo they relaxed. The message was simple: Many Colombians had great reason to fear the police more than drug traffickers.

Our clothes had been ripped badly by the underbrush we’d run through. This woman gave me a uniform from her son, who must have been at least six and a half feet tall. It was so big over me that I had to tie it at the ankles and use rope around the waist to hold it up.

I was carrying with me as much as $500,000 cash. I always carried money, knowing that in many situations it is much more valuable than weapons. As we sat eating the soup made for us a campesino showed up. We paid him $100,000 to lead us out of the jungle. But when we finally got ready to go Pablo realized that Otto, our loyal trusted friend, was still lost. In our escape Otto had been next to Pablo much of the time, ready to protect him, but had disappeared in the night jungle. “I know there are a lot of guys missing,” Pablo said. “But I won’t leave this jungle without Otto.” Pablo didn’t care if the police were coming; he wasn’t going to leave Otto behind. So Pablo and I, one other person, and the campesino agreed to go back and search for him. We took gas lamps with us and walked in a straight line, one behind the other. In the distance we could hear the helicopters shooting blindly into the jungle. The bullets zipping through the leaves made a snapping sound. Every few minutes we would yell for Otto. Finally we heard him answer back, saying he was hurt. I was learning the jungle; I found out that sound travels so well it’s hard to know where it is coming from. The peasant told us to be silent and led the search. It took almost an hour to climb through the vines to find Otto. He’d tripped and fallen into a deep hole. His face was cut up and we thought his arm was broken. It took us all working together another hour to cut him free from the grip of the jungle.

We left the farmhouse the next night. I left the people $50,000. They had never seen American dollars before and I had to explain to them what they were. I warned them to wait a couple of months, then go to town and exchange it a little at a time. I explained that if they exchanged too much they would attract attention, and if the police found out where they got the money they could be killed. Before leaving, we had radioed ahead to one of our people to meet us at a place with the supplies we would need. He told us that the army and the police were everywhere, it was a major search, and it would be better to stay hiding