The bomb ripped through Avianca Flight 203 five minutes after takeoff from Bogotá. One hundred and ten people fell from the sky. The death certificates read “blunt trauma due to falling from aircraft,” but many were still alive as the plane went down. It wasn’t an accident.
Investigators found a cassette recorder rigged with explosives—someone had been tricked into thinking they were receiving instructions when they pressed play. The real target was presidential candidate César Gaviria, who’d canceled his flight at the last minute. Gaviria had staked his career on denouncing Pablo Escobar. Imagine one man ordering the destruction of an aircraft, over a hundred people dying because of his desire to kill one man.
Two of the dead held US passports, and that changed everything. Escobar’s indiscriminate slaughter opened him up to terrorism charges, which gave American authorities worldwide jurisdiction. But Escobar was no stranger to violence. He started as a boy robbing gravestones, carving off names, and reselling them.
He was a car thief, a thug, a juvenile delinquent. Then he discovered cocaine, and everything changed. By 1985, eight million Americans were hooked on the cocaine flooding in from Colombia. The drug became a status symbol, and the Colombian criminals were astute—they filled the market no one else would.
Escobar rose quickly from smuggler to trafficker to producer. Nothing and no one got in his way. He was arrested in the early 1980s with eighteen kilos of cocaine and let go after threatening the judge. Then he had the police officers who arrested him killed.
By the mid-1980s, he led the Medellín Cartel. Forbes listed him among the richest men in the world. He built a lavish estate with nine man-made lakes, water slides, and life-size fiberglass dinosaurs—all paid for in blood money. But he didn’t just buy luxury.
He bought loyalty. He funded food banks, hospitals, and homes for the poor, making himself a Robin Hood figure. He entered politics, winning a seat in Congress with immunity from prosecution. Then Justice Minister Lara Bonilla accused him of corruption outright.
Lara Bonilla signed his own death warrant. A motorcycle pulled alongside his car, and a sixteen-year-old sprayed his head with bullets. Escobar realized he’d lost his protection, so he turned to violence big time. Medellín became a killing field—bodies left on the roadside because authorities couldn’t keep up.
The only thing Escobar feared was extradition to the US. When presidential candidate Luis Galan promised to send him there, Escobar struck first, murdering Galan in August 1989. That launched open warfare against the Colombian government. The DEA focused all efforts on taking him down.
Special Agent Joe Toft led the hunt, working with an elite Colombian unit called the Bloque de Búsqueda, or Search Bloc, led by Colonel Hugo Martínez, whose best friend Escobar had murdered. But Escobar’s sources inside the police tipped him off again and again. The DEA attacked his wealth instead. They seized 60,000 kilos of cocaine and arrested dozens of his top men.
Escobar responded by putting a bounty on every police officer—$700 a head. They killed thirty Search Bloc officers in fifteen days, and 457 police officers in total. Toft watched pregnant widows cling to caskets at funerals. Escobar put a price on Toft’s head twice, but Toft refused to leave.
Then Escobar blindsided everyone. On June 19, 1991, he surrendered voluntarily, on the condition that Colombia deny US extradition requests. He served his time in a private prison—with a discotheque, soccer field, big TVs, and weapons hidden in the walls. It was country club living.
Escobar rebuilt his empire from behind bars while the government looked the other way. But when protests forced his transfer to a high-security prison, a poorly coordinated operation tipped him off. He escaped and slipped back into Medellín. Toft celebrated.
Now they could hunt him for real. The US provided Centra Spike—a top-secret army unit with aircraft tracking his radio-telephone calls. The intelligence fed to the Search Bloc pinpointed his locations. But Escobar knew the game.
He never stayed in one place more than a couple of days, always moving while talking to avoid triangulation. He also kept calling his family, especially his wife, and that was his weakness. But Los Pepes—those persecuted by Escobar—were hunting him too. Made up of his former lieutenants and rivals from the Cali Cartel, they systematically killed his attorneys, associates, and family members.
They were responsible for stripping Escobar bare. After Los Pepes bombed his family’s apartment, Escobar tried to send them to Europe. His son Juan Pablo even walked into the US Embassy asking for visas. Toft told him they could bring the heads of the Cali Cartel on a platter and still wouldn’t get visas.
When Escobar’s family boarded a flight to Germany, the DEA worked behind the scenes to get them turned away. Escobar went into meltdown. He made more calls, took more risks, made more threats. On December 2, 1993, a police radio location team intercepted a call he made to his son.
The younger Martínez, following the phone trace, spotted Escobar in a second-story window of a house on a quiet residential street. Backup arrived. Escobar jumped from the back window onto another roof, firing both semi-automatic pistols. He was hit three times but kept shooting until he went down for good.
At 3:03 p. m. , the radio crackled: “Viva Colombia. Matamos a Pablo Escobar.
” Long live Colombia, we killed Pablo Escobar. Joe Toft got the news 150 miles away in Bogotá. “Pablo is dead,” he said. “Pablo is finally dead.
” He was static. He’d gotten the man he’d hunted for six years. But he had three kids he left behind, and that guilt stays with him to this day. Escobar was the biggest criminal on the face of the planet.
The world will never see a criminal that big again. Colombia survived him, and the people are wonderful. But the trail of death he left—from Colombia to the USA and across the globe—remains a scar on history.
