78. The Hunt for Pablo Escobar: Death Squads & Delta Force (Ep 5)

16:42Gordon:I think the Colombians, Hugo Martinez, his search block, understand that Pablo could not be captured alive. I think that in a slightly more delicate way, Jerry Boykin's memoir from the Delta side makes it clear that it would have been better if Pablo were to be killed than captured. And I think that it's also important to note that the official mission is training and intelligence support, right? So formally, there is no authorization to kill Pablo Escobar. I think that there is a bit of a clue as to the Delta mentality that's actually in Jerry Boykin's book, where he's describing kind of the blueprint for the unit in general.

17:27Gordon:And I think it's worth just reading a little bit from it. Charlie's blueprint called for us to build a unit that could be deployed in response to a terrorist crisis anywhere in the world on a moment's notice. Delta would move in below the radar and work with local officials, military and police to get the bad guys. Then we would simply fade away so that as far as anyone else knew, the resulting counterterrorism action had been a local operation. So the MO is very much, we're going to do what's required so that you get the job done. We will take zero credit and nobody else will know we're here.

17:55David:Let's maybe start having set that up. Let's look at how they're going to try and find him. And I guess, again, here, it's going to be about trying to mix informers, human intelligence, and the kind of intercepting of communications and that kind of geolocation together. That's the package they've been using all along, which is going to be the core of this again.

18:19Gordon:That's right. So to get kind of the financial wheels going, the U.S. posts a$2 million reward for information leading to Pablo's capture. And then Centrispike, which is now back in the country, along with Delta, gets back to work. And what's interesting is in the kind of first maybe days, week of Pablo being on the loose, he's using a cell phone. I think maybe he suspects that surveillance has not been spooled up yet on him. So he's talking on a cell phone in a wealthy suburb of Medellin. He's about four miles from the prison. What I find very fascinating about these intercepts, Gordon, is that Pablo wants to go back into the prison.

18:53Gordon:So he wants to strike a deal to go back because he didn't want to be plucked out of that prison and taken to Bogotá. He wants to go back to La Catedral. He's saying, I've been fine with the deal. He seems surprised, like legitimately surprised that the Colombians were tweaked about him killing his capos in the cartel. This is like an internal feud. Why would the Colombian state care? And he is viewing the assault on La Catedral as this kind of American-backed hit, right? So he's on the phone, he's talking, center spike is trying to locate him. Four members from the Delta team, after arriving in Bogota, they travel up to Medellin.

19:34Gordon:They have with them a portable GPS satellite positioning device, microwave visual imagery platforms, video cameras with powerful lenses for remote ground surveillance. they establish a kind of sniper slash observer position actually up at La Catedral because it has great views of the sort of entire valley that Medellin sits in. And these four operators link up with the search block at this kind of police academy, this kind of training center outside of town, which is going to become the kind of task force HQ. Now, Joe Vega is there up at La Cathedral. He has with him a satellite phone, a laptop computer to help him sort of correlate Centra Spike's coordinates on the map.

20:16Gordon:He's got a video camera with lenses to focus in on the target, and he's got this microwave relay to transmit images back to the academy. So the idea here is Centra Spike could get a coordinate from the plane. They could send it to Joe Vega. Joe Vega could then figure out where the building is, take pictures of it, and figure out what's going on around the premises, all that information can then go to the search block to potentially conduct a raid. Now, at this time, the CIA, Gordon, God bless him, is also supplying satellite imagery. And the DEA agents are kind of going back and forth between Bogota and Medellin.

20:59Gordon:And I do think it's interesting. I don't know if this is a controversial position, but when you watch the show Narcos, you get the sense that the DEA is really deep, specifically in this hunt for Pablo. The rumors are that the DEA guys were not up there all that much. Oh, how surprising the CIA man is going to claim it was all the CIA. I'm not claiming it was all the CIA at all. I'm just saying the direct connection between the work of the DEA and Pablo himself, I'm not quite seeing. I'm seeing Centrispike and Delta and the search block with the CIA and the DEA, frankly, in a bit of a background role.

21:44Gordon:So Boykin, commanding the Delta team in Colombia, set up a sort of command center inside the CIA station in the embassy in Bogota. And they've got radio comms established with that police academy up in Medellin, the observer post at La Catedral, and they're waiting for Pablo to make phone calls. And literally, the next day, Pablo does, he gets on the phone, Centrispike picks up the call, Joe Vega pinpoints the coordinates on the map, focuses on his camera and sends an image to the operators who are liaising with the search block. And the search block, Gordon, kind of just sits there, right? And Jerry Boykin in his memoir says that the commander of the search block, and we should note actually, this is an important point.

22:33Gordon:So Hugo Martinez, who listeners will remember, who had been the commander of the search block, the brave commander of the search block, has been rotated off and given a kind of plum assignment sort of as a reward where he's essentially the military liaison, the attache in Spain. Yeah, but he'll be back. He'll be back, but he is not here right now. The commander of the search block at this point is a guy named Pinzom who gets all this information from Delta. And according to Jerry Boykin, he seems bored by this and says, we get these kind of leads all the time. And the Delta guys, to your point, Gordon, about they're not really the type to sort of sit around and just kind of hang, go to the ambassador of the country team.

23:20Gordon:And then there's an intervention at the presidential palace. The Colombian president basically goes back and kind of pushes on Pinzon, the colonel leading the search block, and says, what are you going to do with this? Now, as you can imagine bureaucratically, that's very frustrating to this colonel, right? Because he's now had the Americans go over his head on a raid that he didn't seem particularly excited to conduct. But a raid is finally launched the next morning, but Pinzon sends 300 men, despite Delta's advice to send a much smaller party. And Boykin says a deaf drug lord could have heard them coming.

23:55Gordon:So by the time the raid reaches the estate where Pablo is hiding out, Pablo, unsurprisingly, is gone. But he had been there. One of the clues is that there's a new bathroom that had a really nice toilet. So that's sort of his calling card, right? Very picky about his toilets. And the next day, Pablo is again sort of back on his radio phone making calls. And there's another opportunity for a raid. So again, we have this flow. It goes centra spike to delta. Delta passes it to pin zone in the search block. But again, Pinzon sits on it. And one of the Delta guys says that he'd gone to Pinzon's house to try to get things moving.

24:34Gordon:And the colonel had answered the door in his pajamas. And from that day on, he got hung with the nickname Pajamas by the Delta team, Pajamas Pinzon. And legitimately, I mean, Boykin in his memoir says he wondered if Pinzon was on Pablo's payroll, but they decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and decided that he was merely a coward. Now, the hunt for Pablo has attracted a lot of attention in Washington, as we mentioned. And there are loads of air platforms, Gordon, soaring over Medellin to collect SIGINT and IMMINT imagery. So the Air Force has sent U-2s and SR-71s. The Navy has sent P-3 spy planes.

25:16Gordon:The CIA, Gordon, has got something in the air called a Schweitzer, which looks like a giant glider and it can loiter over a target for hours, which I mean, very novel, of course, in the early 90s, right? Sort of a preview of a lot of the drone stuff that's to come a decade down the line. and it can provide really detailed imagery, kind of float around for a long time and can peer through the cloud. So there are so many American spy planes over Medellin. It's like clogged the airspace.

25:46David:Which means perhaps unsurprisingly, the Colombian people and journalists start to notice, don't they? I mean, it becomes so obvious that you've got all of these flights going over. One of the radio stations is broadcasting the tail numbers of the planes because of that. Which is not good because it's just so many. and foreign military aren't supposed to operate there. So it is starting to draw attention, isn't it? But I think one of the interesting aspects of this is the extent to which different bits of the US intelligence and national security system are basically competing to get in there and to show that their technology works and prove that it works.

26:22David:I mean, it's very American, if you don't mind me saying. And then there are kind of bureaucratic battles around it to say, hey, we can do this and we can do it better than them. And they're kind of at times almost racing to send messages back to Washington or competing or even stealing the other people's kind of intelligence. I think it is worth saying, though, David, and I think we touched upon this in an earlier episode, that the Schweitzer and the CIA stuff is not the best stuff. Centrispike outperforms, doesn't it, the CIA tracking technology that's coming from the air? Allegedly. No, I think that's pretty clear from all the histories.

26:59David:Because I particularly like the CIA's got its glider, which also feels a bit low tech to me. I'm not quite sure. I'm just imagining a guy with a glider and a direction finder kind of.

27:09Gordon:I was picturing the guy with the wings that he's taped on, soaring over Medellin with a radio.

27:17David:With a microphone. With a microphone, yeah, exactly.

27:20Gordon:One lens would be competition. I think the other lens would be the more stuff you have operating over Medellin, the more likely you are to pick up one of the frequencies that Pablo is speaking on. It depends on your perspective, but it is true, Gordon, that there was a bit of a head-to-head competition, I think, between Centrispike and some of the CIA's tech. There was a program that the CIA was running at the time called Majestic Eagle, which I think is a good name.

27:48David:Good code name. Shame about the results.

27:50Gordon:Shame about the results. It was conducting direction finding over Medellin as well. And it seems like there was actually a head-to-head competition between Centrispike and Majestic Eagle to figure out whose direction finding equipment was better. And it seems, according to the publicly available information, Gordon, although who knows what could be lurking in the classified files, that Centrispike could pinpoint the target to under 200 meters. But the majestic Eagle tech of the CIA was actually more like seven kilometers, which is a significant difference. But critically, Gordon, by the second week of Delta and Centrispike being back on the ground for all of these collection platforms have been floating over Medellin, the SIGINT is starting to dry up.

28:34Gordon:Pablo is on the phone a lot less. There isn't really any humant and the hunt is going to get a lot more complicated.

28:44David:So I think there, as we wait to see how they're going to reacquire the trail of Pablo Escobar, let's take a break. And when we come back, we'll see how they get onto his tail.

29:03David:Hello, it's Gordon here, and I'm with Tabby from Goldhanger's new show, The Book Club. We're not here, are we, Tabby, to announce the new James Bond? But we are here to discuss a book that you've just covered, which may have inspired the character. That is correct, Gordon. So this week, Dominic Sandbrook and I have been discussing John Buchan's The 39 Steps. And now this is undoubtedly one of the greatest British spy thrillers of the 20th century.

29:29Gordon:And it's a real trailblazer for that genre. So the birth of Bond.

29:33David:Absolutely. Absolutely. Secret squirrels will know that here on Classified, we're a big fan of historical intrigue. And in the 39 Steps, we meet the dashing Richard Hannay, based on David McCloskey, as he races to prove his innocence whilst inadvertently foiling a German plot to spark the First World War.

29:52Gordon:Yeah, and it's a plot that bears an uncanny resemblance to the assassination of the figure that sparked the First World War in real life.

30:00David:So that's intriguing. And Hanne's journey takes us from the hustle and bustle of London to the Scottish Highlands in this game of cat and mouse and espionage that starts to unfold around our main character. So to listen to the 39 Steps, search for The Book Club wherever you get your podcasts and follow along so you don't miss out on more of their upcoming thrillers. Yeah, including Goldfinger and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. So lots to look forward to. Thank you so much for listening. Thank you for having me, Gordon. Goodbye. No problem, Tabby. Bye.

30:42David:Welcome back. And we're on the hunt for Pablo Escobar. And I guess it's clear that the search block led by pajamas. It's not quite doing the business. And so it's time for our old friend, Hugo Martinez. Flacco, skinny. To be recalled back from Madrid. I mean, he's got this kind of very personal battle it becomes with Escobar, doesn't it? That he's engaged in, which he's going to lead through the final stages.

31:09Gordon:It's fair to say that Hugo Martinez and Pablo are locked in some kind of like death dance together because Pablo has certainly not forgotten about Hugo, even though Hugo had been sent to Spain. A bomb had been placed on the plane that actually flew the colonel's family to Spain back in 1991. It had been set to explode when it reached a certain altitude, but the airline got a phone tip about it after the plane was airborne, suggesting this might have been a message and not really intended to kill him. But the bomb had been found and removed. And then also in 1992, in Madrid, a car bomb was discovered on the street outside the the Colombian embassy, right where Martinez passes each day on his way to work.

31:48Gordon:So I think Martinez probably feels some sense of like, it's him or me, it's him or me, right? Exactly. Pablo is going to try to kill me, or I'm going to kill Pablo, right? So Martinez is brought back to replace pajamas. And it's fair to say that the collaboration between the Americans and Delta Force and Hugo Martinez is going to be significantly better than the collaboration with pajamas. Delta ramps up a really intense training program for the search block. And they run this at a camp in the lowlands south of Bogota. They run this for about 100 of the search blocks operators, the people who actually will go on the raids.

32:29Gordon:And it's quickly clear that the Colombians, the search block struggle with a lot of basic kind of tactics. One of the interesting things I found is ammunition is expensive. And so many of the kind of soldiers and police that make up these search block units, we're only shooting 20 or so training rounds per year. So they actually don't have a lot of practice in marksmanship. And Delta brings 16 trainers down from Fort Bragg, and they run at about 100 search block operators through a really intensive three week mini assault course, which culminates in a kind of live fire exercise where they're simulating a raid conducted by helicopter.

33:09Gordon:So the whole idea here is how do we get you ready to do exactly the kind of raids that we hope will eventually capture Pablo Escobar. And for the rest of 1992, Gordon, Delta keeps about a dozen people in the country. They're split between the embassy in Bogota and that search block headquarters up in Medellin. The Delta teams are rotating through, they sleep on cots and air mattresses, and they basically assist the search block as kind of forward observers and advisors, and they are going on raids, right? They're going on the raids. They might not be in the lead, but they are on raids with the search block.

33:44Gordon:And for six months, they really have no luck finding Pablo. He's using his phone much less. He's constantly shifting frequencies on the radio. Though in the fall, Gordon, of 1992, they do kill one of his Sicarios. And by the end of the year, they've killed 12 more. And this, again, will be that theme of they're not capturing people at this point. They are killing cartel associates and leaders during these raids.

34:15David:But then Pablo is doing the same. He's now going after them and his associates aren't there. And they are upping the game. So the violence is kind of intensifying, but in this very controlled way between these two groups who clearly know they're in this death struggle.

34:27Gordon:Throughout the first six months of the hunt, Pablo and his guys kill 65 members of the search block. There's a special national police chapel in Bogota where they do the funerals, and it apparently just reeks of death, right? There's so many funerals. Then in January of 1993, a massive car bomb explodes in Bogota outside a bookstore, kills 21, including a number of children.

34:53David:This is a big moment, isn't it? because it's, again, Pablo Escobar turning to something more like terrorism. I mean, I guess this is back to Pablo's negotiating tactic, isn't it? Which is, I'm willing to escalate the violence to such a level of just killing civilians outside a bookstore to try and get you to stop this hunt and cut a deal with me. That's the calculation he's making. But in a sense, this time, A, the public is turning against him because of this. And B, I think patience has slightly run out. I think he hasn't worked out that something has changed. And now they are basically out to kill him rather than negotiate.

35:30David:So it's a different dynamic. But he's still trying to use that tactic, it feels.

35:34Gordon:I should say that it's probably the case, a little grim, but it's probably the case that the Colombian military police, the search block, can throw more bodies at the problem than And Pablo and the cartel can, right? So if they can just keep killing people, the Colombians conceivably could sort of win a war of attrition. But, you know, Pablo, I mean, he still has some cards to play because it seems that he actually, I mean, he's recruited some people inside the search block. There's this case where in one instance, after Sentra Spike hears Pablo on the phone, they send coordinates to Hugo Martinez and his staff.

36:14Gordon:and then after doing that, Centrispike picks up a call to a Pablo associate that's actually coming from the search block base and it's alerting Pablo and his people that quote, they are coming for you. So there is a snitch inside the search block and so in Martinez now has this big problem, which is, you know, not only am I out there fighting Pablo, but he's in here. I've got to fight him sort of inside the four walls of my headquarters. So Hugo Martinez dismisses a number of his men, reassigns them to Bogota, you know, in an attempt to sort of potentially just send the mole away. And then the same thing happens again.

36:52Gordon:And the search block kind of inner circle at this point is pretty small. It's Martinez and maybe three guys who he really trusts who are kind of the collective leadership. and they realize that there's a guard who had been standing nearby during these conversations, like away but close enough. And then they run the same kind of play the next day, but this time they flush false information through the system. And it's what's known as a barium meal or a barium enema. So you put something in one end and then see what comes out the other, right? And lo and behold, the same information that had been passed within earshot of that guard makes it back to Pablo's associate.

37:32Gordon:The guard had apparently been recruited by another one of Martinez's men who'd been sent back to Bogota. And they'd been told also to kill Martinez. So to think of this whole conflict as like a police action or something like that is really wrong. They're not fighting criminals. This is like a war in Medellin.

37:54David:Against a kind of guerrilla group. It's much more like that. I mean, one of the things I found is that Pablo still manages to stay just ahead of them. I mean, and he's learning, isn't he, about how to use his comms much better. But there's this crazy fact that at one point, SearchBlock shuts off all the cell phone service in Medellin, which is an amazing thing to do. They're just going to switch off. I mean, I guess there weren't that many cell phones then, but the fact that they're able to do that to try and flush him out, but then he switches to radio, to couriers. He just seems to be one step ahead of them, whether it's due to snitches, whether it's due to his understanding of the technology.

38:31David:So they seem to be always missing him. They're always just a bit too late to get him.

38:36Gordon:And he's calm, Gordon, in the intercepts. He's calm. He's collected. The raids are always too late. And we've got a log jam going, Gordon. And I think we're in the first months of 1993. He's been on the loose for six, seven months. And how do you break a log jam, Gordon? what would you do? What would you do in this case? You're stuck. You're the Colombians. You're the search block. You're Delta. This guy is elusive. He's got a lot of control in Medellin. He's recruited snitches on your payroll to try to kill you and to steal information. I mean, I'm thinking

39:13David:back to our Bin Laden case, where what you do is you go up through the couriers, you work out who he trusts, you build a picture of his network and try and find him that way. Or you try and turn the population against him, maybe, on the basis that he needs to be able to swim amongst the population, hide there. What's interesting is the way, because I know what happens, the way they do it is not the way I would necessarily have done it, or the way it looks like it emerges. Because it's pretty wild, isn't it, the way he's flushed out.

39:45Gordon:So fundamentally, up to this point, the search block is fundamentally playing by different rules than Pablo Escobar, right? The search block is not blowing up civilian airliners. The search block is not detonating pipe bombs on the streets of Medellin or Bogota. And so the search block is not targeting for torture and execution the families of cartel members and associates who might be one or two circles removed. There's different rules, And it's hard to beat somebody who's playing by a different set of rules. So what you kind of need is a good old-fashioned death squad, Gordon, to break this logjam.

40:28David:We'll come back to this, but it is remarkably coincidental that just as the police and, you know, Delta and the others are a bit stuck in their hunt for Escobar, a new player enters the game, which is going to kind of take him on and play by very different rules. And it's called Los Pepes. Los Pepes, yes. Los Pepes. Los Pepes. And this I find actually one of the most intriguing and interesting bits of the story, if it wasn't wild enough already. I think this group is fascinating because they are just, I mean, they are basically a death squad, aren't they? I mean, is that a bit harsh? Maybe it's a little extreme.

41:06Gordon:I might be overselling it just a little bit. It is definitely a group that is going to play by Pablo's rules, not by the state's rules.

41:17David:And we should say, in terms of how they present themselves, if we go back to La Catedral, Pablo had killed two senior members of other families, hadn't he, who were drug barons within his cartel. And ostensibly, Los Pepes are representatives of those families or linked to those families, is that right, who are out for revenge?

41:40Gordon:Well, and it's even, I mean, in the name, Los Pepes, it's an acronym for people persecuted by Pablo Escobar. So the public face of this group is sort of aggrieved former associates, families that have been victimized by Pablo in Medellin. And the actions, though, are very irregular, I would say. So in January, Pablo's mother's hacienda is burned to the ground. She's not there, but they go after Pablo's mom. There are car bombs outside apartment buildings where Pablo's immediate family lives. A bomb goes off at one of his estates and it injures his mom and his aunt. One of his fincas, sort of cattle ranch, his little farms in the country is burned to the ground.

42:31Gordon:All these sort of attacks and, you know, intimidations are claimed by Los Pepes, the people persecuted by Pablo Escobar. And it's murky, I think, who exactly they are. They definitely do portray themselves as sort of former members of the cartel who are going after Pablo now that he's on the run. But there are going to be a lot of theories that emerge about how involved, let's say, the Colombian state is in Los Pepes. But in any case, whoever they are, the heat is really getting cranked up on Pablo because after that bookstore bombing in Bogota, the Colombian government now offers a$6.5 million reward for information leading to his capture.

43:16Gordon:The US already has the$2 million reward out there, so there's some real money that's out there for people who might start to collaborate with the government. the Colombian attorney general issues a general amnesty for trackers and criminals who take part in the hunt for Pablo. So a number of Pablo's former associates begin to talk and agree to cooperate with the government in exchange for amnesty. Pablo's brother and even our friend Popeye, who had been locked up at La Catedral with Pablo, they surrender and they're put into a conventional maximum security prison. By February of 1993, just to give you a sense of the tempo here.

43:51Gordon:Los Pepes are maybe killing six people each day. So they are working very hard. And throughout the spring, the carnage continues. Pablo's real estate guy is killed. His brother-in-law is killed. More sicarios are killed. Estates owned by Pablo's bankers are blown up. One of his lawyers is killed. Another is tortured. Another resigns, but then secretly continues work for Pablo. And that's discovered and then he's shot 25 times. Police that are on his payroll are killed. So you get the sense that they're really going after the sort of military wing of the cartel, but also a lot of the people who were kind of on the periphery.

44:33David:I was going to say, they're going after the organization. They are going after the kind of the white collar bits of Pablo's group as well, like the lawyers, like the kind of money launders, as well as his family. So you can see why this is really putting the pressure on Pablo in a different way, because suddenly, in a way, he'd offered silver and lead to people. Suddenly, everyone else is thinking, if I stay with Pablo, I'm going to get lead. Yeah, exactly. That's the problem for them. And it's disintegrating his organization.

45:03Gordon:Just to give you a sense of how dirty this gets, right? In one instance, Los Pepes steal a prize stallion that had been owned by Pablo's brother. They kill the rider and the trainer, right, who I think we'd all probably argue are not honchos in the cartel, but they're killed. And the horse is castrated. It's brutal. And it is all designed to convince Pablo that anybody that touches you, anybody that sticks with you in any capacity, be they your banker, your sicario, or the guys who train your horse, they're all fair game. Yeah.

45:38David:And so you can clearly see the aim is to isolate Pablo effectively. to reduce circle random. It is also obvious from this that whoever is doing it has very good information on who to go after. I mean, you need very good intelligence in order to know who these people are. Now, of course, you could say, well, if it is the kind of other parts of the cartel, that's understandable. But I think the suggestion is it was a much closer relationship with search block and perhaps the United States and that there was a flow of information which is passing through that. Now, exactly the nature of that relationship, I think, is really interesting.

46:14David:Because I think, you know, at one extreme, you could see Los Pepes as virtually being an arm, a tool of the US and the Colombian government. At the other end, they're a real thing that they're just using by maybe supplying intelligence to them. The more you look at it, the more you go, the relationship looks pretty close, even if people who were there at the time wouldn't want to acknowledge it or talk about it.

46:35Gordon:Absolutely. And I think, at minimum, what seems obvious is that there was a pipeline of information that was flowing from the US and the Colombians to Los Pepe's. And whether the Americans knew that that was happening, suspected it, it's very unclear, but it will never be answered. It seems obvious that elements of the Colombian government and probably the search block were passing this information to Los Pepe's. And I I would wager that given the organization of the violence and the fact that at this point, it's still feasible that Pablo Escobar sort of returns to kind of run this cartel and or strikes a deal with the government, that the sort of muscle behind Los Pepes, it strikes me as a little bit fanciful that it's just an element of the cartel.

47:28Gordon:I would suggest that. And it's interesting that a number of Pablo's inner circle in this period, they're not killed. And these are the people who are under constant audio and sometimes video surveillance by the US and the Colombians, right? Los Pepe's leave them alone. And there's a good reason to do that, which is these are the people who might lead you to Pablo, and you want them alive.

47:51David:Which again, suggests a level of, to use a word sometimes used in collusion between these groups and the state in terms of who to target and who not to target. So I think all of it points to that very close relationship, I think. This is really putting pressure on Pablo, isn't it? I mean, it's starting to take a toll on him.

48:12Gordon:Yeah. I mean, by really spring of 1993, I think you'd say the cartel's in shambles. Pablo's estate, Hacienda Los Napoles is a police headquarters at this point. Many former allies have abandoned him. A lot of people are dead. Pablo is moving from safe house to safe house in Medellin. And by the way, if you think he's in the jungle in this period, you're wrong. I think Pablo is a little bit more of a city and ghetto guy. He's not a jungle guy, right? He's trying to negotiate a deal with the government. He's got bodyguards with him. He's got the couriers. He's got cooks. He's got hookers with him who are usually, you know, then disturbingly quite young, but his entourage is definitely thinning out.

48:56Gordon:He's making offers to surrender, does that in March and delivers it through the Catholic Church.

49:01David:So the Colombian government, you know, I mean, you can see why it might be tempting to some of them to go, maybe there's a way of just ending this war and dealing with it. So there's definitely a tension there, isn't there, over whether to end this with negotiation or whether to pursue it really to the end.

49:17Gordon:And we should say he's not totally neutered. I mean, this is a period where you do have car bombs and pipe bombs going off. Yeah, he's fighting back. He's fighting back, right? And I think by the summer of 1993, we basically have three clocks running in the hunt for Pablo. The first one is that Delta Force and the search block are hunting him with the, I think, non-official but very clear intent that Pablo be killed when he's found, right? So that's the first clock that's running is can he be found by kind of the official good guys, right? Two is that Pablo is trying to keep up the violence. So the Colombian population eventually sort of cries uncle and forces the government to cut a deal with him.

50:00Gordon:And it's pretty clear by the summer of 93 that the kind of always fractious and factionalized Colombian government has elements within it, including the Colombian attorney general that actually want to deal with Escobar, right? So there are people who want to cut a deal, right? So Pablo wants to keep the violence going to give him a deal. And the third clock is that Los Pepe is squeezing Pablo really hard, and in particular in the spot that hurts him the most, and that is going to be his ultimate weakness, which is his family.

50:32David:So there, I think, David, with those three clocks running, with the pressure growing on Pablo, and I think with that crucial issue of his family, let's stop. And next time we'll come to the dramatic conclusion of the hunt for Pablo Escobar and how he finally meets his end.

50:52Gordon:and Gordon, we'd be remiss if we didn't say, speaking of family, if you want to join our family and you want early access to these episodes, you want to join a family that'll keep you much safer and happier than Pablo Escobar, go to the restisclassified.com and join the Declassified Club. We'll see you next time. See you next time.