Sixteen elite members of the same armed movement took over the embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogota as they were celebrating their national holiday on February 27, 1980, during the presidency of Julio Cesar Turbay. For sixty-one days almost the entire accredited diplomatic corps in Colombia, including the ambassadors of the United States, Israel, and the Vatican, were held hostage. The M-19 demanded a fifty-million-dollar ransom and the release of 311 of their members who were in prison. President Turbay refused to negotiate, but the hostages were freed on April 28 with no expressed conditions, and their abductors left the country under the protection of the Cuban government, which had responded to a request by the Colombian government. The guerrillas stated in private that they had received a ransom of five million dollars in cash collected by the Jewish community in Colombia with the help of other Jews throughout the world.
On November 6, 1985, a commando unit of the M-19 took over the crowded Supreme Court building at the busiest time of day and demanded that the highest court in the nation put President Belisario Betancur on trial for not having kept his promise to establish peace. The president did not negotiate, and the army stormed the building and recaptured it after ten hours of bloody fighting that cost an unknown number of missing and ninety-five civilian deaths, including nine magistrates of the Supreme Court and its president, Alfonso Reyes Echandia.
President Virgilio Barco, who was almost at the end of his term, did not resolve the abduction of Alvaro Diego Montoya, the son of his secretary general. Seven months later, Pablo Escobar's rage blew up in the face of Barco's successor, Cesar Gaviria, who began his presidency facing the grave crisis of ten well-known hostages.
In his first five months, however, Gaviria had created a less turbulent atmosphere for weathering the storm. He had achieved a political agreement to convene a Constituent Assembly, invested by the Supreme Court with unlimited power to decide any issue--including, of course, the hottest ones: the extradition of Colombian nationals, and amnesty. But the underlying problem, for the government as well as the drug traffickers and the guerrillas, was that as long as Colombia did not have an effective judicial system, it was almost impossible to articulate a policy for peace that would position the state on the side of good, and criminals of any stripe on the side of evil. But nothing was simple in those days, least of all obtaining objective information from any quarter, or teaching children the difference between good and evil.
The government's credibility was not at the high level of its notable political successes but at the abysmal level of its security forces, which were censured in the world press and by international human rights organizations. Pablo Escobar, however, had achieved a credibility that the guerrillas never enjoyed in their best times. People tended to believe the lies of the Extraditables more than the truths told by the government.
Decree 3030 was issued on December 14, 1990, modifying 2047 and nullifying all previous decrees. Among other innovations, it introduced the judicial accumulation of sentences; that is, a person tried for several crimes, whether in the same trial or in subsequent ones, would not serve the total time of the various sentences, but only the longest one. It also established a series of procedures and time limits relating to the use of evidence from other countries in trials held in Colombia. But the two great obstacles to surrender were still firmly in place: the somewhat uncertain conditions for non-extradition, and the fixed time limit on pardonable crimes. In other words, capitulation and confession remained the indispensable requirements for non-extradition and reduced sentences, as long as the crimes had been committed before September 5, 1990. Pablo Escobar objected in an angry message. His reaction this time had another motivation he was careful not to reveal in public: the accelerated exchange of evidence with the United States that facilitated extradition hearings.
Alberto Villamizar was the most surprised of men. His daily contacts with Rafael Pardo had led him to expect a more lenient decree, but this one seemed harsher than the first. And he was not alone in his response. Criticism was so widespread that on the same day the second degree was issued, a third one began to be considered.
An easy conjecture as to the reasons for the greater severity of Decree 3030 was that the more radical sector of the government--in reaction to a campaign of conciliatory communiques and the gratuitous release of four journalists--had convinced the president that Escobar was cornered. In fact, he had never been stronger than he was then, with the tremendous pressure of the abductions and the possibility that the Constituent Assembly would abolish extradition and proclaim an amnesty.
The three Ochoa brothers, on the other hand, took immediate refuge in the capitulation option. This was interpreted as a rupture at the top of the cartel. In reality, however, the process of their surrender had begun in September, at the time of the first decree, when a well-known senator from Antioquia asked Rafael Pardo to see a person he would not identify ahead of time. It was Martha Nieves Ochoa, who with this bold step initiated negotiations for the surrender of each of her three brothers, at one-month intervals. And that is how it happened. Fabio, the youngest, turned himself in on December 18; on January 15, when it seemed least feasible, Jorge Luis surrendered, as did Juan David on February 16. Five years later, a group of reporters from the United States put the question to Jorge Luis in prison, and his reply was categorical: "We surrendered to save our skins." He acknowledged that behind it lay irresistible pressure from the women in his family, who would not rest until their brothers were safe inside the fortified prison in Itagui, an industrial suburb of Medellin. It was an act of familial confidence in the government, which at the time could still have extradited them to serve life sentences in the United States.
Dona Nydia Quintero, always mindful of her premonitions, did not discount the importance of the Ochoas' surrender. Less than three days after Fabio turned himself in, she went to see him in prison, accompanied by her daughter Maria Victoria, and Maria Carolina, Diana's daughter. Faithful to the tribal protocol of Medellin, five members of the Ochoa family had come for her at the house where she was staying: the mother, Martha Nieves and one of her sisters, and two young men. They took her to Itagui prison, a forbidding structure at the top of a narrow, hilly street decorated with colored-paper wreaths for Christmas.
Waiting for them in the prison cell, in addition to the younger Fabio, was the father, don Fabio Ochoa, a patriarch weighing 330 pounds with the face of a boy, who at the age of seventy bred fine-gaited Colombian horses and was the spiritual head of a vast family of intrepid men and powerful women. He liked to preside over family visits sitting in a thronelike chair and wearing his perpetual horseman's hat with a ceremonious air that suited his slow, determined speech and folk wisdom. Beside him was his son, who is lively and talkative but barely uttered a word that day while his father was speaking.
Don Fabio began by praising the courage with which Nydia had moved heaven and earth to rescue Diana. He formulated the possibility of his intervening with Pablo Escobar on her behalf with masterful rhetoric: He would, with the greatest pleasure, do whatever he could, but he did not believe he could do anything. At the end of the visit, the younger Fabio asked Nydia to please explain to the president the importance of extending the time limit for surrender in the capitulation decree. Nydia said she could not do it but they could, with a letter to the appropriate authorities. It was her way of not permitting them to use her as their messenger to the president. The younger Fabio understood this, and said goodbye with the comforting phrase: "Where there's life, there's hope."
When Nydia returned to Bogota, Azucena gave her the letter in which Diana asked that she celebrate Christmas with her children, and Hero Buss telephoned, urging her to come to Cartagena so that they could talk in person. She found him in good physical and emotional condition after three months of captivity, and that helped to reassure Nydia somewhat about her daughter's health. Hero Buss had not seen Diana after the first week, but there had been a constant exchange of news among the guard
s and the people who ran the houses, which filtered down to the hostages, and he knew that Diana was well. The only serious and ongoing danger was an armed rescue. "You cannot imagine the constant threat that they'll kill you," said Hero Buss. "Not only because the law, as they call it, is there, but because they're always so edgy they think the tiniest noise is a rescue operation." His only advice to her was to prevent an armed rescue at any cost, and to persuade the government to change the time limit on surrender in the decree.
On the same day she returned to Bogota, Nydia expressed her forebodings to the justice minister. She visited the defense minister, General Oscar Botero, accompanied by her son, the parliamentarian Julio Cesar Turbay Quintero, and her anguished plea, on behalf of all the hostages, was that they use intelligence agencies rather than rescue teams. Her disquiet was accelerating, the premonition of tragedy becoming more and more acute. Her heart was breaking. She wept constantly. Nydia made a supreme effort to regain her self-control, but bad news gave her no peace. On the radio she heard a message from the Extraditables, threatening to dump the captives' bodies, in sacks, outside the presidential palace if the terms of the second decree were not modified. In mortal despair, Nydia called the president. He was at a meeting of the Council on Security, and she spoke to Rafael Pardo.
"I implore you to ask the president and the members of the Council on Security if they need to find bags of dead hostages at their door before they change the decree."
She was in the same agitated state hours later, when she asked the president in person to change the time limit in the decree. He had already heard that Nydia was complaining about his insensitivity to other people's grief, and he made an effort to be more patient and forthcoming. He said that Decree 3030 had just been issued, and the least they could do was give it enough time to work. But Nydia thought the president's arguments were no more than rationalizations for not doing what he should have done at the opportune moment.
"A change in the deadline is necessary not only to save the lives of the hostages," Nydia replied, tired of so much talk, "but it's the one thing that will make the terrorists surrender. Change it, and they'll let Diana go."
Gaviria did not yield. Convinced that the time limit was the greatest obstacle to the capitulation policy, he resisted changing it in order to keep the Extraditables from getting what they were after when they took the hostages. The Constituent Assembly, shrouded in uncertainties, would meet in the next few days, and he could not allow weakness on the part of the government to result in an amnesty for the drug traffickers. "Democracy was never endangered by the assassinations of four presidential candidates, or because of any abduction," Gaviria would later comment. "The real threat came at those moments when we faced the temptation, or risk, or even the rumor of a possibility of an amnesty"--in short, the unthinkable danger that the conscience of the Constituent Assembly would also be taken hostage. Gaviria already knew what he would do: If that happened, his calm, irrevocable decision was to dissolve the Assembly.
For some time Nydia had been thinking that Dr. Turbay should do something for the captives that would shake the entire country: a mass demonstration outside the presidential palace, a general strike, a formal protest to the United Nations. But Dr. Turbay tried to mollify her. "He was always that way, because he was responsible and moderate," Nydia has said. "But you knew that inside he was dying of grief." That certainty, rather than soothing her, only intensified her anguish. This was when she decided to write a private letter to the president "that would move him to take the action he knew was necessary."
Dr. Gustavo Balcazar, Nydia's husband, was worried about her, and on January 24 he persuaded his wife to spend a few days with him in their house in Tabio--an hour's drive from the city, on the Bogota savanna--to try to alleviate her despair. She had not been there since her daughter had been abducted, and so she brought her statue of the Virgin, and two large fifteen-day candles, and everything she needed to stay connected to reality. In the icy solitude of the savanna, she spent an interminable night on her knees, praying to the Virgin to protect Diana with an invulnerable bell jar that would shield her from abuse and fear, and not let bullets touch her. At five in the morning, after a brief, troubled sleep, she sat at the dining-room table and began to write the letter from her soul to the president of the republic. Dawn found her scrawling random ideas, crying, tearing up drafts as she wept, making clean copies in a sea of tears.
In contrast to her own expectations, she was writing the most judicious and forceful letter of her life. "I don't pretend to be composing a public document," it began. "I want to communicate with the president of my country and, with all due respect, convey to him my most considered thoughts, and a justifiably anguished plea." Despite the president's repeated promise that no armed effort to rescue Diana would ever be attempted, Nydia left written evidence of a prescient appeal: "The country knows, and all of you know, that if they happen to find the kidnappers during one of those searches, a terrible tragedy might ensue." Convinced that the obstacles present in the second decree had interrupted the process of releasing hostages begun by the Extraditables before Christmas, Nydia alerted the president to a new, self-evident danger: If the government did not take some immediate action to remove those obstacles, the hostages risked having the issue left in the hands of the Constituent Assembly. "This would mean that the distress and anguish suffered not only by the families but by the entire nation would be prolonged for endless months," she wrote. Nydia ended with an elegant closing: "Because of my convictions, because of the respect I have for you as First Magistrate of the Nation, I would be incapable of suggesting any initiative of my own devising, but I do feel inclined to entreat you, for the sake of innocent lives, not to underestimate the danger that time represents." When it was finished and copied out in a fair hand, it came to two and a quarter full-size sheets. Nydia called the president's private secretary to find out exactly where it should be sent.
That same morning the storm broke with the news that the leaders of the Prisco gang had been killed: David Ricardo and Armando Alberto Prisco Lopera, the brothers accused of the seven assassinations of public figures during this time, and of being the brains behind the abductions, including the capture of Diana Turbay and her crew. One had died carrying false papers that identified him as Francisco Munoz Serna, but when Azucena Lievano saw the photograph in the papers she recognized don Pacho, the man responsible for her and Diana in their captivity. His death and his brother's, at that turbulent moment, were an irreparable loss for Escobar, and he would not wait long to make that known by actions.
In a threatening communique, the Extraditables said that David Ricardo had not been killed in combat but cut down by the police in front of his young children and pregnant wife. As for his brother Armando, the communique insisted he had not been killed in a gunfight, as the police claimed, but murdered on a farm in Rionegro even though he was paralyzed as the result of an earlier attempt on his life. His wheelchair, the message said, could be seen clearly on the regional newscast.
This was the communique that had been mentioned to Pacho Santos. It was made public on January 25 with the announcement that two captives would be executed within a week's time, and that the first order had already been issued against Marina Montoya--a stunning piece of news, since it was assumed that Marina had been murdered at the time of her abduction in September.
"That's what I was referring to when I sent the president the message about the bodies in sacks," Nydia has said, recalling that ghastly day. "It's not that I was impulsive, or temperamental, or in need of psychiatric care. But they were going to kill my daughter because I might not be able to move the people who could stop it."
Alberto Villamizar was no less desperate. "That was the most horrible day of my life," he said at the time, convinced that the executions would not be long in coming. Who would be first: Diana, Pacho, Maruja, Beatriz, Richard? It was a deadly lottery he did not even want to imagine. He called President Gaviria in a rage.
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"You have to stop these raids," he said.
"No, Alberto," Gaviria responded with his blood-chilling calm. "That isn't why I was elected."
Villamizar slammed down the phone, astonished at his own vehemence. "Now what do I do?" he asked himself. To begin with, he requested help from former presidents Alfonso Lopez Michelsen and Misael Pastrana, and Monsignor Dario Castrillon, the bishop of Pereira. They all made public statements repudiating the methods used by the Extraditables and pleading for the lives of the captives. On the National Radio Network Lopez Michelsen called for the government and Escobar to stop the war and search for a political solution.
At that moment the tragedy had already occurred. Minutes before dawn on January 21, Diana had written the last page of her diary. "It's close to five months, and only we know what this means," she wrote. "I don't want to lose the faith or the hope that I'll go home safe and sound."
She was no longer alone. Following the release of Azucena and Orlando, she had asked to be with Richard, and her request was granted after Christmas. It was good for both of them. They talked until they were exhausted, listened to the radio until dawn, and in this way acquired the habit of sleeping by day and living at night. They had learned about the death of the Priscos from the guards' conversation. One guard was crying. The other, certain this meant the end and no doubt referring to the hostages, asked: "And what do we do now with the merchandise?" The one who was crying did not have to give it a second thought.