In my own words

The father the war left behind

My father was denounced in 1943 as a militant antisemite. The Colombian government, under Allied pressure, was moving that year against Axis nationals — freezing bank accounts, seizing property, drawing up lists. What my father lost, he lost in that period. What he became, afterwards, my mother eventually could not live with. In 1961 the Corte Suprema decreed their separation. She had asked for it on the grounds of what the file called trato ultrajante — outrageous, degrading treatment. I was twelve.

Westbury, Long Island

My mother sent me to the United States in February 1965 to live in Westbury on Long Island. My brother Federico followed. Later that same year she came herself. This is the piece of my life that Colombian courtroom cartoons never draw: I was an Andean teenager in a Long Island suburb, working out my English, missing coffee that tasted like coffee, watching my mother learn a new country in her forties so her sons would have one.

The car years

In 1971 I was arrested in Mineola for possession of a stolen automobile. In 1972 I was arrested again for trying to export a stolen car. Two things I already knew about myself: I understood how a border worked in practice, and I did not intend to be a poor man in a rich country. In April 1974 they sent me to the federal correctional institution at Danbury, Connecticut.

Danbury, and a man named George Jung

In Danbury I met George Jung. He was in for marijuana. He was a Boston boy running weed out of California. I told him what any Colombian of my generation could see plainly by the mid-seventies: marijuana was a farmer’s crop, cocaine was a chemist’s. The economics were not comparable. He listened. He was released on bail in the autumn of 1975. Before he left, we made a promise: when I came to Colombia, he would come to me.

Miami, 1977

I re-entered the United States through Canada in February 1977. In New York I married Yemel Nacel, a Cuban-American woman I had loved for years. Together with her and Jung I set up the first serious cocaine distribution ring in Miami that same year. In August 1978 I met an American pilot named Barry Kane in Miami, and by autumn we had a route: the northern Colombian coast up through a transfer point in the Bahamas, then small aircraft into Florida. The Bahamian transfer point was Norman’s Cay.

Norman’s Cay

In May 1978, for one hundred and ninety thousand US dollars in cash, I bought the property known as Beckwith House on Norman’s Cay. In practice I bought the island. I secured the airstrip, brought over German security personnel who had worked for my father’s people back home, an arsenal, twenty or so cars, and a small pack of Dobermans. This was not a hideout — it was a corridor. In the autumn of 1978 Jung came to visit me in the Bahamas. He felt marginalised from what we had built. Two of my Germans and I ended our partnership with him that afternoon. He would later tell an American jury he had considered having me killed, and had cancelled the plan.

On the twentieth of November 1978 I wrote a letter to the governor of Quindío announcing that I was donating a Piper aircraft, model of 1968, to the department. In the letter I described myself in words that made Colombia laugh for a week:

I retired abroad several years ago and dedicated myself to the hotel business.

In December 1978 the American television anchor Walter Cronkite tried to dock his yacht at Norman’s Cay. He was turned away at the pier. In the same period Ringo Starr and Ronnie Wood came to the island as guests. I asked them, twice, to sing. Both times they did. In September 1979 Bahamian police raided the cay and arrested me and every one of my employees. Someone paid what needed to be paid; the man who signed my release was later suspected of it. I was on a plane out before the report was filed.

Home, briefly — La Posada Alemana

In November 1981 a group of men tried to kidnap me in Armenia, my own town. I decided from that point on to be visible. On the eighth of December 1982 I opened La Posada Alemana, a hotel and estate outside Armenia, built to a German architecture I had grown up with. It had a small zoo — lions, condors, llamas — and at its centre a statue of John Lennon wearing a military helmet, because it was mine and I wanted the joke there. Monseñor Darío Castrillón Restrepo, a Colombian bishop who later worked at the Vatican, performed the blessing.

Movimiento Latino Nacional

I founded the Movimiento Latino Nacional as a political party. Colombian and foreign scholarship has since described it as nationalist with fascist elements, and it was; I would not now sign every sentence I signed then. It won thirteen city council seats in Armenia. In June 1983 we launched the party newspaper, Quindío Libre, printed in green ink. The colour was chosen for what everyone in the region knew it referred to. The paper argued, essentially, that the extradition treaty the United States wanted from Colombia was a nineteenth-century sovereignty question, not a twentieth-century police question. That argument outlived the paper.

Lara Bonilla and the flight

On the thirtieth of April 1984 the Colombian Justice Minister Rodrigo Lara Bonilla was shot dead in traffic in Bogotá. That day, my life ended in the form it had taken. Every serious Colombian trafficker moved to Panama within the week. I stayed in the country longer than most; the United States, from that day, had a target and a doctrine.

Pablo

People will always ask about Pablo Escobar. What I made with George Jung and Barry Kane and Norman’s Cay, Pablo scaled. I turned him into a multimillionaire. He turned me, in the end, over to the DEA. I described our relationship at the time in one line, and I stand by it now:

Escobar and I are water and oil.

He wanted to be feared. I wanted to be understood. Both of those wants have their prices; ours were different.

4 February 1987

Colombian police arrested me on the fourth of February 1987. I was on a plane to the United States within hours. I was the first Colombian citizen extradited to the United States under the modern treaty, a treaty the Colombian Supreme Court would strike down as unconstitutional in June of the same year — after I was already in Florida. My case became, and remains, the doctrinal precedent that every subsequent Latin American extradition rests on.

Jacksonville

I was presented in federal court in Jacksonville, Florida, on the ninth of February 1987. Trial began on the sixteenth of November 1987. The government called one hundred and fifteen witnesses. On the nineteenth of May 1988 the jury returned a verdict of guilty on charges of smuggling more than three tons of cocaine into the United States. On the twentieth of July 1988 — Colombian Independence Day, a date the prosecution chose — I was sentenced to life imprisonment plus one hundred and thirty-five years.

A United States prosecutor said, at the time, that I was to cocaine what Henry Ford had been to the automobile. That is a compliment that is also a life sentence. Both, I earned.

Noriega

In November 1991 I testified in Miami against General Manuel Antonio Noriega of Panama, at his federal trial. What I gave the government mattered enough to their case that I later filed for and won a reduction of my own sentence. It has been described, correctly, as a bargain. I do not pretend otherwise. Every man in a US federal prison who is offered thirty years or ninety years for the same testimony takes the thirty. I was no exception.

The thirty-three years

I served thirty-three years in the United States federal prison system. Six administrations, four sitting Colombian presidents, five DEA administrators, three decades of doctrine that were tested and rewritten on my body first. In that time the demand for cocaine in the United States did not fall. In that time the war I had been made the face of expanded to Mexico, to Guatemala, to Honduras. In that time no one, as far as I have read, was ever put on trial for what a US prosecutor called manufacturing the doctrine of the cocaine importing industry — because the answer was not one man.

16 June 2020

On the sixteenth of June 2020 the United States deported me to Germany, the country of my father, whose citizenship I hold. I spent my first months of freedom in a charitable residence there, quiet, walking in a language I had not spoken in decades. Later I returned to Colombia — the country of my mother, which is the country I remember when the word home is used.

What I want said

I have never claimed to have been a small player. I have never claimed to have been a moral one, in the years the record covers. I have claimed, and I still claim, that a doctrine that produced a thirty-three-year sentence for me and a fifty-year war for Colombia and a two-hundred-thousand-body count for Mexico ought to be examined by people who did not build it, and cannot benefit from continuing to run it.

Every act I am accused of is documented in the record. Every day I served is on file at the Federal Bureau of Prisons. What has not, yet, been examined is the doctrine that made both of those numbers add up. That is what this site exists for.