rid the business of their competition. Even our prosecutor general once admitted, “The corruption of the Cali cartel is worse than the terrorism of the Medellín cartel.”

So Pablo felt he was fighting everybody—but this was just the beginning. Soon there would be more enemies.

At 7:15 in the morning of November 27, 1989, Avianca Airlines flight HK 1803 from Bogotá to Cali exploded over the mountains outside the capital city, instantly killing 107 people. It was a terrible blow to the country. Even I was a little surprised when Pablo was accused of this crime. Why? The investigation discovered that a small bomb had been put aboard the airplane under a seat in the middle. When it went off it caused the fuel to detonate and destroy the airplane.

Like so many crimes committed in this period there were many possible motives. The first was that the man who had replaced Galán in the election for the presidency, his campaign manager, Cesár Gavíria, was scheduled to be on that plane. That was true, but Gavíria saved his life by changing his flight and taking a private flight instead. So he was supposed to be the first target. But it also was said that the plane was destroyed because there were one or two informants from the Cali cartel who were going to testify against Medellín aboard. Also in September and October more than thirty thousand kilos of Medellín cocaine had been seized in the U.S. and the word was that Cali had given them the information where to find it, so some people believed the plane was destroyed because Marta Lucía Echavarria, the girlfriend of Cali leader Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, was on board in seat 10B and this was to punish him.

I will say this: If I had any knowledge of this plan before it was carried out I would have done everything in my power to stop it.

Many people have told their stories about this disaster and the DAS and American FBI and the police have made their investigations and published their reports. The United States used the excuse that two Americans were killed in the crash to become involved, and two years after it happened Pablo and La Kika were indicted by the United States for this crime. La Kika became the very first person ever to be tried, convicted, and sentenced under the 1986 law against killing Americans anywhere in the world.

All those reports put together say that this is the way the bombing happened: No one will ever know for sure the reasons that this was done, but supposedly it was talked about at a meeting of Pablo, Gacha, Kiko Moncada, Fernando Galeano, and Albeiro Areiza. They had a copy of Gavíria’s schedule so they knew he was going to be on that flight. The bomb was carried to the airport in parts in three different cars. The plan was to put five kilos of dynamite on the plane and have it detonated by a “suizo,” meaning a person who is tricked into doing a job in which they will die. The ticket for the suizo was bought for the fictitious name Mario Santodomingo, who sat in seat 15F and put the package under seat 14F. It seems the suizo was told his job was to record the conversations of Cali people sitting in front of him.

As the plane rose into the air as instructed the suizo turned the knob on the “recorder.” The bomb exploded a hole in the floor and side of the plane, and then blew up the fumes in the empty fuel hold. Everyone on the plane died and three people on the ground also were killed.

Right after the airplane was blown up a man claiming to be of Los Extraditables called a Bogotá radio station and reported that they had planted the bomb. Four years later the man who claimed that he made the bomb told the DAS that Medellín leader Kiko Moncada gave him a million pesos to recover the cost of the operation. So certainly others were involved, but the only name the world heard was Pablo Escobar.

The U.S. sent to Colombia its most secret intelligence unit, Centra Spike. Centra Spike flew small airplanes above the cities and applied the most advanced technology to listen to communications of interest. Their method was to spy on the ten people who Pablo spoke with most often and then the ten people that each of those ten people usually contacted. That’s the way they