News of a Kidnapping Read online

  "You're not with the ELN; you're being held by the Extraditables," he said. "But don't worry, because you're going to see something you won't forget."

  The disappearance of Diana Turbay's team was still a mystery nineteen days later, when Marina Montoya was abducted. She had been dragged away by three well-dressed men carrying 9mm pistols and Mini-Uzis equipped with silencers, just as she was closing her restaurant, Donde las Tias, in the northern section of Bogota. Her sister Lucrecia, who worked with her, was lucky enough to have her foot in a cast because of a sprained ankle, which kept her from going to the restaurant. Marina had already locked the doors but opened them again because she recognized two of the three men who were knocking. They had come in for lunch several times during the past week and impressed the staff with their amiability and Medellinese humor and the 30 percent tips they left the waiters. That night, however, they were different. As soon as Marina opened the door, they immobilized her with an armlock and forced her out of the restaurant. She managed to clutch at a lamppost and began to scream. One of them kneed her in the spine with so much force she could not catch her breath. She was unconscious when they put her into the trunk of a blue Mercedes 190, which had been prepared to allow her to breathe.

  Luis Guillermo Perez Montoya, one of Marina's seven children, was a forty-eight-year-old executive with the Kodak Company in Colombia. His interpretation of events was the same as everyone else's: His mother had been abducted in retaliation for the government's failure to comply with the agreements reached by her brother German Montoya and the Extraditables. Distrustful by nature of everything having to do with officialdom, he set himself the task of freeing his mother through direct negotiation with Pablo Escobar.

  Without orientation, without prior contact with anyone, without even knowing what he would do when he got there, he left two days later for Medellin. At the airport he took a cab but had no address to give the driver and told him simply to take him into the city. Reality came out to meet him when he saw the body of a girl about fifteen years old lying by the side of the road, wearing an expensive party dress and very heavy makeup. There was a bullet hole and a trickle of dried blood on her forehead. Luis Guillermo, who could not believe his eyes, pointed at the corpse.

  "There's a dead girl over there."

  "Yes," said the driver without looking. "One of the dolls who party with don Pablo's friends."

  This broke the ice. Luis Guillermo told the driver the reason for his visit, and he in turn told him how to meet with a girl who was supposed to be the daughter of one of Pablo Escobar's first cousins.

  "Tonight at eight o'clock go to the church behind the market. A girl named Rosalia will be there."

  And in fact she was there, waiting for him, sitting on a bench in the square. She was almost a child, but her demeanor and the assurance of her words were those of a mature woman who had been instructed with care. To begin negotiations, she said, he would need half a million pesos in cash. She told him the hotel where he should register the following Thursday and wait for a call at either seven in the morning or seven in the evening on Friday.

  "The woman who'll call you is named Pita."

  He waited in vain for two days and part of a third. At last he realized it was all a joke and was thankful Pita had not called to ask for the money. He behaved with so much discretion that not even his wife knew about these trips or their deplorable results until four years later, when he spoke about them for the first time for this report.

  Four hours after the kidnapping of Marina Montoya, on a side street in the Las Ferias district to the west of Bogota, a Jeep and a Renault 18 hemmed in the car of Francisco Santos, nicknamed Pacho, the editor in chief at El Tiempo. His vehicle looked like an ordinary red Jeep, but it had been bulletproofed at the factory, and the four assailants who surrounded it were not only carrying 9mm pistols and Mini-Uzi submachine guns equipped with silencers, but one also held a special mallet for breaking glass. None of that was necessary. Pacho, an incorrigible talker, opened the door to speak to the men. "I preferred to die rather than not know what was going on," he has said. One of his abductors immobilized him with a pistol to the forehead and forced him to get out of the car with his head lowered. Another opened the front door and fired three shots: One hit the windshield, and two shattered the skull of Oromansio Ibanez, the thirty-eight-year-old driver. Pacho was not aware of what had happened. Days later, as he was thinking about the attack, he recalled hearing the whine of three bullets muffled by the silencer.

  The operation was so rapid that it attracted no attention in the middle of the busy Tuesday traffic. A police officer discovered the blood-soaked body in the front seat of the abandoned vehicle; he picked up the two-way radio and immediately heard on the other end a voice half-lost among distant galaxies.

  "Hello."

  "Who is this?" asked the officer.

  "El Tiempo."

  The news was on the air in ten minutes. In reality, preparations for his abduction had been going on for close to four months but almost failed because Pacho Santos's movements were so unpredictable and irregular. Fifteen years earlier the same reasons had stopped the M-19 from kidnapping his father, Hernando Santos.

  This time the smallest details had been taken into account. The kidnappers' automobiles, caught in a traffic jam on Avenida Boyaca at Calle 80, drove on the sidewalks to make their escape and disappeared down the winding streets of a working-class neighborhood. Pacho Santos sat between two of the kidnappers, his eyes covered by glasses that had been painted over with nail polish, but in his mind he followed all the car's turns until it screeched to a stop in a garage. By the route and the length of time they had been driving, he formed a tentative idea of the neighborhood they were in.

  One kidnapper led him by the arm--he was still wearing the painted glasses--to the end of a hall. They climbed to the second floor, turned left, walked about five paces, and went into a place that was icy cold. This is where they removed the glasses. Then he saw that he was in a dismal bedroom with boarded-up windows and a single bulb in the ceiling. The only furnishings were a double bed, whose sheets had seen too much use, and a table with a portable radio and a television set.

  Pacho realized that his abductors had been in a hurry not only for reasons of security but in order to get back in time for the soccer game between Santafe and Caldas. To keep everybody happy, they gave him a bottle of aguardiente, left him alone with the radio, and went downstairs to watch the game. He drank half the bottle in ten minutes and felt no effects, though it did put him in the mood to listen to the game on the radio. A devoted Santafe fan since his childhood, the tie--the score was 2-2--made him so angry he could not enjoy the liquor. When it was over, he saw himself on the nine-thirty news on file footage, wearing a dinner jacket and surrounded by beauty queens. That was when he learned his driver was dead.

  At the end of the newscast, a guard wearing a heavy flannel mask came in and had him remove his clothes and put on a gray sweatsuit, which seemed a requirement in the prisons of the Extraditables. He also tried to take the inhaler for asthma that was in his jacket pocket, but Pacho convinced him that keeping it was a matter of life and death. The guard explained the rules of his captivity: He could use the bathroom in the hall, listen to the radio, and watch television with no restrictions, but at normal volume. When he was finished, he made Pacho lie down, then used a heavy rope to tie him to the bed by his ankle.

  The guard laid a mattress on the floor beside the bed, and a few moments later began to snore with an intermittent whistle. The night thickened. In the dark, Pacho became aware that this was the first night of an uncertain future in which anything could happen. He thought about Maria Victoria--her friends called her Mariave--his pretty, intelligent, and strong-willed wife, and about their two sons, twenty-month-old Benjamin and seven-month-old Gabriel. A rooster crowed nearby, and Pacho was surprised at its mistaken timing. "A rooster that crows at ten at night must be crazy," he thought. He is an emotional, impulsive ma
n, easily moved to tears: the image of his father. Andres Escabi, his sister Juanita's husband, had died in a plane that had been blown up in midair by the Extraditables. In the midst of the family upheaval, Pacho said something that made all of them shudder: "One of us will not be alive in December." He did not think, however, that the night of his abduction would be his last. For the first time his nerves were calm, and he felt sure he would survive. Pacho knew the guard lying on the floor was awake by the rhythm of his breathing. He asked him:

  "Who's holding me?"

  "Who do you want to be held by," asked the guard, "the guerrillas or the drug dealers?"

  "I think I'm being held by Pablo Escobar," Pacho replied.

  "That's right," said the guard, and made an immediate correction, "the Extraditables."

  The news was in the air. The switchboard operators at El Tiempo had notified his closest relatives, who had notified others, who called others, until everybody knew. Through a series of peculiar circumstances, one of the last in the family to find out was Pacho's wife. A few minutes after the abduction she had received a call from his friend Juan Gabriel Uribe, who still was not sure what had happened and could only ask if Pacho was home yet. She said no, and Juan Gabriel did not have the heart to tell her what was still an unconfirmed report. A few minutes after that she had a call from Enrique Santos Calderon, her husband's double first cousin and the assistant manager at El Tiempo.

  "Have you heard about Pacho?" he asked.

  Maria Victoria thought he was referring to another matter having to do with her husband, which she already knew about.

  "Of course," she said.

  Enrique said a quick goodbye so he could call other family members. (Years later, commenting on the mistake, Maria Victoria said: "That happened to me because I wanted to pass myself off as a genius.") Then Juan Gabriel called back and told her the whole story: They had killed the driver and taken Pacho.

  President Gaviria and his closest advisers were reviewing television ads to promote the election campaign for the Constituent Assembly when his press adviser, Mauricio Vargas, whispered in his ear: "They've kidnapped Pachito Santos." The viewing was not interrupted. The president, who needs glasses to watch movies, took them off and looked at Vargas.

  "Keep me informed," he told him.

  He put on his glasses again and continued to watch the ads. His close friend Alberto Casas Santamaria, the communications minister, was sitting beside him and heard the news, and it was whispered from ear to ear along the row of presidential advisers. A shudder passed through the room. But the president did not blink, following a norm in his life that he expresses in a schoolboy's rule: "I have to finish this assignment." When the tape had ended, he took off his glasses again, put them in his breast pocket, and told Mauricio Vargas:

  "Phone Rafael Pardo and tell him to call a meeting of the Council on Security right away."

  Then he began the planned discussion of the ads. Only when a decision had been reached did he reveal the impact that the news of the abduction had on him. Half an hour later he walked into the room where most of the members of the Council on Security sat waiting for him. They had just started the meeting when Mauricio Vargas tiptoed in and whispered in his ear:

  "They've kidnapped Marina Montoya."

  It had, in reality, occurred at four o'clock, before Pacho's kidnapping, but the news did not reach the president until four hours later.

  Ten thousand kilometers away, in a hotel in Florence, Pacho's father, Hernando Santos Castillo, had been asleep for three hours. His daughter Juanita was in an adjoining room, and his daughter Adriana and her husband were in another. They had been informed by telephone and had decided not to disturb their father. But his nephew Luis Fernando called him direct from Bogota, using the most cautious opening he could think of for waking his uncle, who was seventy-eight years old and had undergone five bypasses.

  "I have some very bad news for you," he said.

  Hernando, of course, imagined the worst, but he put on a good front.

  "What happened?"

  "They kidnapped Pacho."

  News of a kidnapping, no matter how painful, is not as irremediable as news of a murder, and Hernando breathed a sigh of relief. "Thank God," he said, and then changed his tone:

  "Okay. Don't worry. We'll see what we have to do."

  An hour later, in the middle of a fragrant Tuscan autumn night, they began the long trip home to Colombia.

  The Turbay family, distraught at having heard nothing from Diana in the week since her departure, requested the government to make official inquiries through the principal guerrilla organizations. A week after the date on which Diana was due back, her husband, Miguel Uribe, and Alvaro Leyva, a member of parliament, traveled in secret to Casa Verde, the general headquarters of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the eastern mountains. There they were able to contact all the armed groups in an effort to determine if Diana was with any of them. Seven denied it in a joint communique.

  Not knowing what to expect, the presidency alerted the public to a proliferation of false communiques and asked the people not to put more faith in them than in announcements from the government. But the grave and bitter truth was that the public had implicit trust in the Extraditables' communiques, which meant that on October 30--sixty-one days after the abduction of Diana Turbay, forty-two days after the kidnapping of Francisco Santos--everyone gave a sigh of relief when the last remaining doubts were dispelled by a single sentence from the Extraditables: "We acknowledge publicly that we are holding the missing journalists." Eight days later, Maruja Pachon and Beatriz Villamizar were abducted. There were plenty of reasons for assuming that this escalation had even broader implications.

  On the day following the disappearance of Diana and her crew, when there was still no suspicion in anyone's mind that they had been kidnapped, Yami Amat, the distinguished news director at Caracol Radio, was intercepted on a street in downtown Bogota by a group of thugs who had been following him for several days. Amat slipped out of their hands with an athletic maneuver that caught them off guard, and somehow survived a bullet in the back. Just a few hours later, Maria Clara, the daughter of former president Belisario Betancur, and her twelve-year-old daughter Natalia, managed to escape in her car when another armed gang blocked her way in a residential neighborhood in Bogota. The only explanation for these two failures is that the kidnappers must have had strict orders not to kill their victims.

  The first people to have definite knowledge of who was holding Maruja Pachon and Beatriz Villamizar were Hernando Santos and former president Julio Cesar Turbay, because forty-eight hours after their abduction, Escobar himself informed them in writing through one of his lawyers: "You can tell them that the group is holding Pachon." On November 12, there was another oblique confirmation in a letter written on the Extraditables' stationery to Juan Gomez Martinez, director of the Medellin newspaper El Colombiano, who had mediated on several occasions with Escobar on behalf of the Notables. "The detention of the journalist Maruja Pachon," said the letter from the Extraditables, "is our response to the recent tortures and abductions perpetrated in the city of Medellin by the same state security forces mentioned so often in our previous communiques." And once again they expressed their determination not to free any of the hostages as long as that situation continued.

  Dr. Pedro Guerrero, Beatriz's husband, overwhelmed by his utter powerlessness in the face of these crushing events, decided to close his psychiatric practice. "How could I see patients when I was in worse shape than they were," he has said. He suffered attacks of anxiety that he did not want to impart to his children. He did not have a moment's peace, at nightfall he consoled himself with whiskey, and his insomnia was spent listening to tearful boleros of lost love on "Radio Recuerdo." "My love," someone sang, "if you're listening, answer me."

  Alberto Villamizar, who had always known that the abduction of his wife and sister was one more link in a sinister chain, closed ranks with the fa
milies of the other victims. But his first visit to Hernando Santos was disheartening. He was accompanied by Gloria Pachon de Galan, his sister-in-law, and they found Hernando sprawled on a sofa in a state of total demoralization. "What I'm doing is getting ready to suffer as little as possible when they kill Francisco," he said when they came in. Villamizar attempted to outline a plan to negotiate with the kidnappers, but Hernando cut him off with irreparable despair.

  "Don't be naive, my boy," he said, "you have no idea what those men are like. There's nothing we can do."

  Former president Turbay was no more encouraging. He knew from a variety of sources that his daughter was in the hands of the Extraditables, but he had decided not to acknowledge this in public until he knew for certain what they were after. A group of journalists had asked the question the week before, and he had eluded them with a daring swirl of the cape.

  "My heart tells me," he said, "that Diana and her colleagues have been delayed because of their work as reporters, but that it isn't a question of their being detained."

  Their disillusionment was understandable after three months of fruitless efforts. This was Villamizar's interpretation, and instead of being infected by their pessimism, he brought a new spirit to their common struggle.

  During this time a friend was asked what kind of man Villamizar was, and he defined him in a single stroke: "He's a great drinking companion." Villamizar had acknowledged this with good humor as an enviable and uncommon virtue. But on the day his wife was abducted, he realized it was also dangerous in his situation, and decided not to have another drink in public until she and his sister were free. Like any good social drinker, he knew that alcohol lowers your guard, loosens your tongue, and somehow alters your sense of reality. It is a hazard for someone who has to measure his actions and words in millimeters. And so the strict rule he imposed on himself was not a penitential act but a security measure. He attended no more gatherings, he said goodbye to his light-hearted bohemianism, his jovial drinking sessions with other politicians. On the nights when his emotional tension was at its height, Andres listened as he vented his feelings, holding a glass of mineral water while his father found comfort in drinking alone.