QUIETLY, SEARCH BLOC PINS ESCOBAR DOWN

Surveillance Had Pinpointed His Location.  This Time, No Dragnet Would Tip Him Off. 

Chapter 33 of a continuing serial

Hugo Martinez got an incorrect fix on the source of the first call Pablo Escobar made to his family at the Tequendama Hotel in Bogota on a Tuesday in late November 1993. 

But by the next day, the American surveillance experts at Centra Spike and the Search Bloc's own fixed surveillance teams in the hills over Medellin had pinpointed Escobar's location in the neighborhood called Los Olivos. 

Hugo's father, Col.  Hugo Martinez, knew they were very close.  At first, he asked permission to cordon off the entire 15-block neighborhood and begin going door-to-door, but that was rejected - in part because a Delta Force commander and others at the U.S.  Embassy in Bogota advised against it. 

Escobar was an expert at escaping such dragnets.  Closing down the neighborhood would just let him know they were on to him.  Instead, the colonel began quietly infiltrating hundreds of his men into Los Olivos.  His son, Hugo, stayed with a group of 35 in a parking lot enclosed by high walls, where the men and vehicles could not be seen from the street. 

Similar squads of men were sequestered at other lots in the neighborhood.  They stayed through Tuesday night until Wednesday, the first day of December.  Food was brought in.  There was only one portable toilet for all the men. 

Hugo spent virtually all this time in his car, waiting for Escobar's voice to come up on his mobile surveillance equipment.  He ate and slept in the car. 

Later on Wednesday, Escobar spoke on the phone with his son, wife and daughter as they wished him a happy birthday.  He was 44 years old that day.  He celebrated with marijuana, a birthday cake and some wine. 

Hugo raced out of the lot in pursuit of this signal, tracing it to a spot in the middle of the street near a traffic circle just after the conversation ended.  No one was there.  Hugo was convinced his scanner was right.  Escobar evidently had been speaking from a moving car.  Hugo returned to the parking lot discouraged, and the men camped out there were again disappointed. 

Hugo waited until about 8 on Thursday morning before Col.  Martinez gave the men permission to come back to base, clean up and rest.  Hugo drove back to his apartment in Medellin, took a shower, and then fell asleep. 

On this day, Thursday, Dec.  2, 1992, Pablo Escobar awakened shortly before noon, as was his habit, and ate a plate of spaghetti before easing his widening bulk back into bed with his wireless phone.  Always a heavy man, he had put on about 20 pounds while living on the run, most of it in his belly. 

"On the run" was a misnomer, for Escobar did not do much running.  He spent most of his time lying low, eating, sleeping, talking on the radio.  He hired prostitutes, mostly teenage girls, to help him while away the hours.  It wasn't the same as the lavish orgies he had arranged in years past, but his money and notoriety still allowed for some indulgences. 

Escobar had trouble finding jeans that would fit.  To get a waist size to accommodate his girth, he had to wear pants that were a good six inches too long.  The light blue pair he wore on this day were turned up twice in a wide cuff.  He wore flip-flops and had pulled on a loose blue polo shirt. 

Prone to intestinal discomfort, he may have been feeling the effects of his birthday revelry the night before.  On this afternoon, the only other person in the house was Alvero de Jesus Agudelo, known as Limon, who served as Escobar's valet, driver and bodyguard.  The two others staying with them, his courier, Jaime Alberto Rua-Restrepo, and his aunt and cook, Luz Mila Restrepo, had gone out after fixing breakfast. 

At 1 o'clock, Escobar tried several times to phone his family, posing as a radio journalist, but the switchboard operator at the Tequendama Hotel told him the staff had been instructed to block all calls from journalists.  He was put on hold, then asked to call back, but finally he got through on the third attempt, speaking briefly to his daughter, Manuela, and then to his wife, Maria Victoria, and his son, Juan Pablo. 

Maria Victoria sobbed on the phone.  She was depressed and fatalistic. 

"Honey, what a hangover," Pablo said sympathetically.  She continued crying.  "These things are a drag.  So, what are you going to do?"

"I don't know."

"What does your mother say?"

"It was as if my mother fainted," she said, explaining they had last seen her as they left the airport Friday in Medellin during the family's failed attempt to flee Colombia for Frankfurt, Germany.  "I did not call her.  She told me bye, and then- "

"And you have not spoken to her?"

"No.  My mother is so nervous.  My mother will die because she made me crazy," Maria Victoria said, explaining how all the family deaths in the previous year - most at the hands of the vigilantes from Los Pepes - - had just about killed her with sorrow. 

At his apartment, Hugo was awakened by a phone call from his father. 

"Pablo's talking!" the colonel said.  Hugo dressed quickly and hurried back out to the parking lot, where the other officers were assembling. 

Escobar was still on the phone. 

"So, what are you going to do?" he asked his wife gently. 

"I don't know.  I mean, wait and see where we are going to go and I believe that will be the end of us."

"No!"

"So?" Maria Victoria asked flatly. 

"Don't you give me this coldness! Holy Mary!"

"And you?"

"Ahhh."

"And you?"

"What about me?"

"What are you going to do?"

"Nothing.  .  .  .  What do you need?" Pablo asked.  He did not want to talk about himself. 

"Nothing," his wife said. 

"What do you want?"

"What would I want?" she asked glumly. 

"If you need something, call me, OK?"

"OK."

"You call me now, quickly.  There is nothing more I can tell you.  What else can I say? I have remained right on track, right?"

"But how are you? Oh, my God, I don't know!"

"We must go on.  Think about it.  Now that I am so close, right?" Pablo said, in what appears to be a suggestion that he was about to surrender. 

"Yes," his wife said, with no enthusiasm. 

"Think about your boy, too, and everything else, and don't make any decisions too quickly, OK?"

"Yes."

"Call your mother again and ask her if she wants you to go there or what."

"OK."

"Remember that you can reach me by beeper."

"OK."

"OK."

"Ciao," said Maria Victoria. 

"So long," her husband said.