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Canongate Books - Virginia Vallejo

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251 pages

English

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VIRGINIA VALLEJO:Top Colombian television journalist, cover model and socialite PABLO ESCOBAR:Head of the Medellin cartel, the founder of the global cocaine industry and one of the most ambitious - and brutal - criminals in historyOver the course of their tempestuous love affair, Vallejo witnessed first-hand the bloodshed, fear and corruption that accompanied the rise of Escobar's crime empire. In this explosive tale of drugs, sex, wealth and violence, Vallejo describes the man she knew and loved. But, increasingly plagued by threats of kidnap and death for her knowledge on Escobar's ties to the political establishment, Vallejo sought extradition to the United States. Her testimony would reopen one of the most important criminal cases in Colombian history.

Sujets

Droit et juridique

True crime

Organized crime

Colombia

Informations

Publié par	Canongate Books
Date de parution	31 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	7
EAN13	9781786890566
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0400€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Virginia Vallejo was the most important Colombian radio anchorwoman and television presenter in the late 1970s and ’80s. In 1982, she met Pablo Escobar, head of the Medellín Cartel. In 1983, they began a romantic relationship that ended in 1987, six years before his death.
In July 2006, she offered her testimony against a former justice minister on trial for conspiring with Escobar in the assassination of a presidential candidate. That same month, the DEA took her out of Colombia, on a special flight to save her life, so she could testify in other leading criminal cases.
Originally published in 2007 by Random House Mondadori, Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar ( Loving Pablo, Hating Escobar ) became a number one international bestseller in Spanish. Due to brutal attacks and threats from the Colombian government, paramilitary, and media, she received political asylum from the United States in 2010. She continues to live in Miami, where she is writing two more books.
Megan McDowell has translated many contemporary authors from Latin America and Spain, including Alejandro Zambra, Samanta Schweblin, Mariana Enriquez, Lina Meruane, Diego Zuñiga, and Carlos Fonseca. Her translations have been published in The New Yorker , The Paris Review , Harper’s and Vice . She lives in Chile.

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Canongate Books Ltd,
14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2018 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Virginia Vallejo, 2007
English translation copyright © Megan McDowell, 2018
Originally published in Mexico as Amando a Pablo, Odiando a Escobar by
Random House Mondadoria, Mexico, in 2009
Published in the USA by Vintage Books, 2018
All photographs courtesy of the author’s private collection
The moral right of the author has been asserted
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 78689 105 1 eISBN 978 1 78689 056 6
Book design by Anna B. Knighton
To my Dead ,
to the heroes and the villains .
We are all one ,
one single nation ,
just one atom
recycled infinitely
always and forever .
Contents
Introduction
PART ONE DAYS OF INNOCENCE AND REVERIE
The Kingdom of White Gold
Presidential Aspirations
Ask Me for Anything!
Death to Kidnappers!
PART TWO DAYS OF SPLENDOR AND FEAR
The Caress of a Revolver
Two Future Presidents and Twenty Love Poems
The Lover of El Libertador
In the Devil’s Arms
A Lord and a Drug Lord
The Seventh-Richest Man in the World
Cocaine Blues
Not That Pig Who’s Richer Than Me!
Under the Sky of Nápoles
That Palace in Flames
Tarzan Versus Pancho Villa
How Quickly You Forgot Paris!
A Diamond and a Farewell
PART THREE DAYS OF ABSENCE AND SILENCE
The Cuban Connection
The King of Terror
There’s a Party in Hell Today
Introduction
IT IS SIX IN THE MORNING on July 18, 2006. Three bulletproof cars from the American Embassy pick me up from my mother’s apartment in Bogotá to drive me to the airport, where a plane headed to some place in the United States is waiting for me with its engines running. A vehicle with security personnel armed with machine guns precedes us at top speed, and another one is behind us. The night before, the embassy’s head of security had warned me that there were suspicious people at the other end of the park that the building overlooks, and he informed me that his mission was to protect me; I shouldn’t get close to the windows for any reason or open the door to anyone. Another car with my most precious possessions left one hour earlier; it belongs to Antonio Galán Sarmiento, president of the Bogotá City Council and brother of Luis Carlos Galán, the presidential candidate assassinated in August 1989 under orders from Pablo Escobar Gaviria, head of the Medellín Cartel.
Escobar, my ex-lover, was shot to death on December 2, 1993. To bring him down after a hunt that lasted nearly a year and a half, it was necessary to offer a reward of twenty-five million dollars and to employ a Colombian police commando unit specially trained for the purpose, plus some eight thousand men from the state security organizations; the rival drug cartels and the paramilitary groups; dozens of agents from the DEA, the FBI, the CIA, the Navy SEALs, and U.S. Army Delta Force; and U.S. planes with special radar as well as money from some of the richest men in Colombia.
Two days earlier, in Miami’s El Nuevo Herald , I had accused the ex-senator, ex–minister of justice, and former presidential candidate Alberto Santofimio Botero of instigating the murder of Luis Carlos Galán and of having built golden bridges between the bosses of the drug cartels and the presidents in Colombia. The Florida newspaper dedicated a fourth of the front page, plus a complete inside page, of Sunday’s paper to my story.
Álvaro Uribe Vélez, who has just been reelected president of Colombia with more than 70 percent of the vote, is preparing to take his oath on August 7. After my offer to the nation’s attorney general to testify in the open case against Santofimio, which should have lasted for another two months, the judge has abruptly closed it. In protest, Colombia’s ex-president and ambassador to Washington has resigned, Uribe has had to cancel the naming of another ex-president as the new ambassador to France, and a new minister of foreign affairs has been named to replace the former, who went to occupy the embassy in Washington.
The United States government knows perfectly well that if they deny me their protection, I could well be killed in the coming days, because I am the only witness in the case against Santofimio. They also know that with me, the keys to some of the most horrendous crimes in Colombia’s recent history would also die, along with valuable information about the penetration of narco-trafficking into all the most powerful and untouchable levels of presidential, political, judicial, military, and media power.
Officials of the American Embassy are posted at the plane’s stairs; they’re there to carry up the suitcases and boxes I managed to pack in a few hours with help from a couple of friends. They look at me curiously, as though wondering why an exhausted-looking, middle-aged woman awakens so much interest in the media, and now also from their government. A DEA special agent six and a half feet tall, who identifies himself as David C. and sports a Hawaiian shirt, informs me that he has been tasked with escorting me to American territory. He also tells me that the bi-engine plane will take six hours to reach Guantánamo, and after an hour-long stop to fill up on fuel, two more to reach Miami.
I don’t feel at ease until I see, safe in the back of the plane, two boxes containing evidence of the crimes committed in Colombia by the convicted felons Thomas and Dee Mower, owners of Neways International of Springville, Utah, a multinational company that I am facing in a lawsuit from 1998 worth thirty million dollars. Although in only eight days a U.S. judge has found the Mowers guilty of some of the crimes I’ve spent eight years trying to prove before Colombian courts, all my offers to cooperate with Eileen O’Connor’s office in the Justice Department in Washington—plus five IRS attachés in the American Embassy in Bogotá—have blown up. Reacting furiously when they learned about my calls to the DOJ, the IRS, and the FBI, the embassy’s press office has sworn to block any attempt at communication with the government agencies of the United States.
The reason for their resistance has nothing to do with the Mowers and everything to do with Pablo Escobar: in the embassy’s Human Rights office works a former collaborator of Francisco Santos, the vice president of the republic, whose family owns the publishing house Casa Editorial El Tiempo. The media conglomerate occupies 25 percent of Álvaro Uribe’s ministerial cabinet, which allows the company access to a gigantic cut of the state publicity budget—the largest Colombian advertiser—on the eve of El Tiempo ’s sale to one of the main editorial groups in the Spanish-speaking world. Another member of the family, Juan Manuel Santos, has just been named minister of defense and tasked with renovating the Colombian Air Force fleet. So much State generosity for a single media family serves a purpose far beyond securing the country’s main newspaper’s unconditional support of Uribe’s government. It guarantees the newspaper’s absolute silence on the imperfect past of the president of the republic. It’s a past that the United States government already knows about. I do too, and very well.
ALMOST NINE HOURS AFTER TAKEOFF, we reach Miami. I am starting to worry about the abdominal pain that has been with me for almost a month. It seems to get worse with every hour that passes. I haven’t seen a doctor in six years, because Thomas Mower has stripped me of my modest estate and the perpetual hereditary income generated by their South American operation, which I led.
The chain hotel is impersonal and large, as is my room. Minutes later, half a dozen officers of the DEA make their entrance. They look at me with inquisitive eyes while they examine the contents of my seven Gucci and Vuitton suitcases, loaded down with dresses by Valentino, Chanel, Armani, and Saint Laurent, and the small collection of artworks that have been in my possession for almost thirty years. They inform me that, in the coming days, I will meet with several of their superiors and Richard Gregorie, prosecutor in the case against General Manuel Antonio Noriega, so I can talk to them about Gilberto and Miguel Rodríguez Orejuela, the top bosses of the Cali Cartel. The criminal case against Pablo Escobar’s archenemies will begin in a matter of weeks in a Florida court, led by the same prosecutor who won the Panamanian dictator’s conviction. If they are found guilty, the U.S. government will be able to