Pablo Escobar: The Hustler of Both Worlds by Michael Klein

Author:Michael Klein [Klein, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2016-11-18T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Two High On Cocaine – The 1980s

Despite guerrilla movements and calls for land reform, drug cartel purchases of land by the 1980s gave the impression that drug lords were participating in counter-land reform. Although the state had distributed 900,000 hectares to landless people, three times that amount passed into the hands of drug lords. And drug lords, as they would come to be known, were making deals not just amongst themselves but among dictators like former Panamanian politician and military officer Noriega. Despite early exposure to social justice and inequality, their embrace of vehement capitalism eclipsed all other considerations. They would come to share with landowners a deep hatred of the goal of massive land reform and the guerrillas. Their solution became creating paramilitary groups in certain regions to protect their assets, operations and lives.

Although the lines, as mentioned earlier, between the guerrillas and the drug traffickers did not altogether remain clear. Some traffickers, despite clashes over turf would come to rely on cooperation with guerrillas occasionally. The FARC demanded a tax of the increasingly growing drug-producing facilities in their territories and in government-controlled areas, drug lords paid paramilitary forces and the Intelligence Hunter/Killer teams.

Despite the FARC having gotten involved in some business transactions providing a security apparatus to protect the illicit drug trade, by the mid-1980s leasing the FARC became easily replaced by their own security forces. Political science author and scholar James F. Rochlin explained that this was largely due to ideological motivations since narco-trafficking kingpins were fiercely capitalistic, considered themselves to represent the legitimate bourgeoisie of Colombia, and clashed with the socialistic FARC. FARC had been insisting on land reforms that threatened huge estates that executives within cartels had bought up as traffickers.

However, within the environment of rural guerrilla war and government offensives, and large parts of the country finding itself under rebel control, on December 3, 1981, a helicopter flew over the city of Cali. It dropped leaflets announcing the formation of the Muerte a Secuestradores (MAS) "Death to Kidnappers." When reading the flier that fell over soccer stadiums, it showed photos of M-19 leaders and promised retaliation. It was created in response to a kidnapping that had touched one of the Ochoa brothers personally and Pablo Escobar was having none of it. It has been described less as a flier and more as a manifesto since it spoke of 223 top-level Colombian "businessmen" who were no longer going to tolerate guerrilla groups intending revolution and gaining financing through their constant reliance on ransoms.

On November 13, 1981, Jorge Luis Ochoa told Escobar that his sister Marta Nieves Ochoa had been kidnapped. She was being held by M-19 for $12 million. She had been seized from the campus of the University of Antioquia in Medellin. The businessmen were Colombia's drug traffickers.

Escobar knew the M-19 people and set up a meeting with the 223 traffickers. There, he announced the formation of MAS. He and Jorge, nicknamed "El Gordo," ran the meeting and Lehder played a major role in the assembly that took place in late November.

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