The Hunt for Pablo Escobar

By the early 1990s, the Colombian city of Medellín was at the centre of the world's largest drug empire. The fearsome Medellín Cartel, led by the notorious drug lord and narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar, brought murder and mayhem to the city and the world for nearly two decades. In this episode, Dan is joined by the men portrayed in the critically acclaimed series Narcos, ex-DEA agents Javier Peña and Steve Murphy. They tell us the true story behind the rise and fall of the infamous Pablo Escobar. Produced by Freddy Chick and James Hickmann, and edited by Dougal Patmore. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dan Snow?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favourite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 1:15Speaker 01

  Apple Card, issued by Goldman Sachs Bank USA, Salt Lake City branch. Terms and more at applecard.com.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Host Thanksgiving with industry-leading quality standards from Whole Foods Market. There are no antibiotics in their meat department, ever, so carve up turkey and spiral-cut ham with peace of mind. Shop organic sides like stuffing mix and cranberry sauce from 365 brand. And guess what? All their delectable pies are made with no high-fructose corn syrup. Gourmet Thanksgiving flavours with the quality you want, only at Whole Foods Market.

• 1:53Dan Snow?

  Hey everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. I'm looking at a photograph now, taken on December the 2nd, 1993. It's taken in the beautiful city of Medellin in Colombia. It's not a beautiful photo. It's a photo of men posing above the corpse of a man who's just been shot dead. Medellin was the murder capital of the world in the early 1990s. Hundreds of people could die in a weekend, and sadly, it didn't even make the headlines anymore. And many of their deaths were the responsibility of the man whose corpse I'm looking at in this photograph.

• 2:32Dan Snow?

  That's the body of Pablo Escobar, probably the wealthiest criminal who's ever lived. The man who turned his hometown into an endless, seething bloodbath of drug war. He was thought to be responsible for thousands of deaths directly and, of course, countless others indirectly. One of the men crouching over Pablo Escobar's body is joining me on today's podcast. Steve Murphy was a DEA agent assigned to Bogota in the 1980s and 90s. He's joining me with his partner Javier Pena, or JP. He was part of the operation to hunt down Pablo Escobar, but he flew out of the country

• 3:16Dan Snow?

  the day before the final raid and flew back in that same night. These two men were key characters. They were heroes of the Netflix smash hit Narcos. So it's great that we're talking to the real thing. So here, to talk me through the hunt for Pablo Escobar, is Steve Murphy and Javier Pena. Enjoy.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...

• 3:54Dan Snow?

  Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. This is very exciting. Who was Pablo Escobar when he was at the height of his powers? What was he doing and who was he?

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Pablo Escobar was probably the biggest, baddest trafficker in the world during the height of his Medellin cartel empire. I mean Pablo was responsible for 80% of the cocaine that was going to the world, 80%. Plus, he is the first trafficker who employed terrorism. We never knew what terrorism was in the narco world and Pablo Escobar introduced it, you know, used the car bombs to kill as many Colombians as he could. Down the commercial airline, the Avianca airline, 1989, killed the

• 4:45Speaker 04

  next president of Colombia, Luis Carlos Galan. So Pablo Escobar was the first trafficker to employ narco-terrorism to send his cocaine to the world.

• 4:59Dan Snow?

  And how did he establish himself within Colombia? Just was he more brutal the next guy? Was he a better businessman than the next guy?

• 5:06Speaker 05

  Well, you know, we hate to give this guy credit for anything, to be quite honest, but he did have a charismatic personality, but I think his strongest trait was he had no remorse, no guilt feelings whatsoever. So he started out as a petty criminal, but then he got involved in a small drug deal. He realized how much money was available there and so he killed the drug dealer so he could take over his position. People like to say, well, he was such a successful businessman. If he'd gone into a legal business, you know, he would have been extremely successful there as well. Well, his business plan is, I tell you to do something, Dan, and if you don't do it, I kill you. You know, that just doesn't work in the legal business world, right?

• 5:45Dan Snow?

  And how are they getting their drugs through? It was the US, the biggest market. How are they getting them through to the US?

• 5:50Speaker 04

  A lot of it was coming through Mexico, coming to the United States, the Caribbean countries. I mean, he employed methods via boats, via airplanes, human smugglers. I mean, you know, people ingesting, they would pack it inside fruits, inside oranges, inside fish. I mean, you know, the imagination was the limit, basically. Whatever it took, I remember the first load I saw when I arrived in Colombia. It was on an American airline coming to Miami. And I remember I went out to the airport, the cops had called me, and it was just boxes.

• 6:31Speaker 04

  It was 800 kilos of cocaine in the cargo area of the airplane. But it wasn't hidden. It was just as you'd open the box and it was just part of the cargo. I mean, that as simple as that. So obviously, the corruption at the airport was there. People were paid off to look the other way. I think also, like I said, a lot of the airplane transportations, you know, the private airplanes, they'd buy the airplanes and, I mean, Steve saw them in the, where Bahamas, Steve, right? Those downed airplanes where they would crash them.

• 7:04Speaker 05

  Yep. And they would just, they'd fly in hundreds of kilos of cocaine. And then they would just leave the aircraft in the water. And believe it or not, they're still there today.

• 7:12Dan Snow?

  You guys were sent to Colombia, working for the DEA. Was that volunteering or did you guys just have to do what you were told?

• 7:21Speaker 05

  Well, maybe we made our bosses mad and they sent us. I don't know, but no. It was strictly voluntary, but I think what's going to lead into here is, did we volunteer to go work against Pablo Escobar? You don't know what cases you're going to be assigned or what operations you're going to work on. So when I got there, Javier was already working with his other partner, Gary Sheridan. Then Gary got promoted and moved to Barranquilla. And that's how Javier and I became partners in 1991. And, you know, here we are in 2023 and we're still partners.

• 7:51Dan Snow?

  Was it incredibly dangerous?

• 7:54Speaker 04

  You know what, Colombia at that time, yes, it was very dangerous. And you know, I mentioned the, those infamous car bombs. That to me was the most dangerous because you never knew where Pablo Suárez was going to place them. I mean, he was placing them at restaurants, shopping centers, bookstores. We saw one where kids and parents were buying their school supplies to go back to school. So if you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, you were going to be part of that car bomb. And it's an eerie feeling because, for example, if you go out to dinner with your family

• 8:34Speaker 04

  and you're sitting in a little cafe, then right next door, a car bomb, I mean, a bomb, and it could be a bomb that they placed at a restaurant. I mean, if you talk to any Colombia that grew up during this era, they're going to remember someone, a friend, a relative, or someone who was killed in this car bombs.

• 8:57Dan Snow?

  Why did you go, gents? Why not stay in a nice cushy assignment in Orlando, Florida, where everyone else goes for a vacation? You can just sit there having a great time.

• 9:06Speaker 05

  You know, at that time, I was stationed in Miami in the late 1980s and, and it was very, very exciting. I have to say, it was very dangerous. I had my partner who was shot in 1989 and we got in a shootout in Hialeah and our informant was killed. But my wife and I, and she's a registered nurse, she's retired now, but you know, she loved the, the blood and guts associated with the medical field, you know, the trauma centers, the ERs, the ICUs and things like that. She came to me one day, she said, you know, this has been very exciting, living, working in Miami. What's the next most exciting thing we can do? And I said, well, you know, I'm working a case with the DA office in Barron Kea. We could go to Colombia. She looked at me like I had three eyes, you know, and I know my wife and if you tell her to do something, it's not going to happen. But I just let her think about it and about three weeks later, she said, were you

• 9:51Speaker 05

  serious? And I said, yeah, I'd love to go to Colombia. And she said, well, hey, if we're gonna do it, let's do it while we're young. I joke around and say, you know, they didn't hire us because we were real smart. You know, we were willing to take risks like this. But it's the excitement and the adrenaline rush. It's the idea that I'd been a local cop for 12 years before I joined DEA and you're arresting street dealers and people like that. But now you've got a new opportunity to go for the biggest people in the world. I mean, the people who are actually manufacturing the cocaine. So not knowing that I was going to get to work on the Escobar case, just kind of hope you will. Honestly, it was for the excitement and the adrenaline rush that goes with it.

• 10:30Speaker 04

  And for me, Dan, I was in Austin, Texas at the time, and I was working lower class type traffickers, you know, the one pound, one kilo, couple of ounces, a lot of surveillances. And a lot of Mexican traffickers come in with the heroin. And Austin was the capital for the methamphetamine boom, a lot of methamphetamine labs. But it was lower class type traffickers. Like Steve said, I wanted to see what the real, like, you know, I'm a baseball fan, major league traffickers were all about. So I applied. And like Steve said, I applied to go to Mexico. And my boss comes in and says, oh, yeah, did you apply for Colombia?

• 11:15Speaker 04

  And I said, sir, I applied for Mexico. He said, well, you picked a likely for Colombia. He says, you want to fight it? So I did. I said, nah, let me just go see the map where Colombia is. And I ended up in Colombia. That was all by mistake. And like Steve mentioned, you know, we were, I was assigned the case. I didn't go in there. Says, I want to go after Pablo Escobar. I really did not know who Pablo Escobar was at this time.

• 11:39Dan Snow?

  In 1991, Pablo Escobar cut a weird deal with the government, didn't he? Kind of handed himself in, built his own prison, which was actually like a five star hotel. Tell me about that strange phase.

• 11:51Speaker 05

  We call it the deal of a lifetime. The Attorney General down there, Gustavo de Grief, created this program, he called a self-surrender program, whereas criminals could come in, plead guilty to one felony of their choosing, and in exchange, they would be absolved of every other crime they committed in their entire lives, included multiple murders. So that's why we call it the deal of a lifetime. So Pablo goes in and pleads guilty to one unknowingly participating in the transportation of a couple hundred kilos of cocaine. So he pleads guilty to that, but before he did, he told him, he said, you know, I've got some conditions that go along with the surrender. And so the Attorney General said, okay, what is it? And he said, well, you know what? I'm gonna build a special prison that I know is secure because I have a lot of enemies,

• 12:36Speaker 05

  the Cali cartel's trying to kill me, all this stuff, but you know what? I'm gonna pay for it myself, so the taxpayers of Columbia don't have to bear that financial burden. And Attorney General said, okay. And he said, then Pablo said, well, listen, I'm gonna hire my own protective force. I will pay for the guards there, because again, I don't want the citizens of Columbia to have to bear that financial burden. Government said, okay. He said, well, now, listen, my fellow inmates, I'm gonna handpick them all, because they gotta be people that are loyal to me, that I don't have to worry about killing me in my sleep. So there was only 14 prisoners in this prison, counting Pablo. And the government said, okay. He said, listen, by the way, those good guys, you know, the Colombian police, the military, and the gringos, they're not allowed to come within a couple miles of the perimeter of the prison, because I don't want them trying to come in here and kidnap me, or attack me, or kill me in my sleep, and that type of thing.

• 13:21Speaker 05

  And the government said, okay. Then the sentence was five years. That's all he had to do, which he would have gotten out sooner than that. And you know what? All the assets, the estimated $30 billion that he was worth, he got to keep all his assets after the five years. It's just, it's not even a deal of a lifetime, it's the biggest joke in law enforcement history.

• 13:44Dan Snow?

  So he's in his own prison. What was the nickname of the prison?

• 13:47Speaker 04

  La Catedral, the cathedral.

• 13:52Dan Snow?

  It had a football pitch, it had a jacuzzi. Did it have a giant doll's house?

• 13:56Speaker 04

  Yeah, he had a, for his kids that come in and visited him, yeah, it was, it had running water. I mean, it was just a joke. And you know what? When he escaped from the prison, well, because we were there the next day, Steve and I, we found photos of the Colombian national team playing soccer with Pablo Escobar. They used to have tournaments. I mean, a lot of famous Colombian soccer players went and visited him at the prison. There was no cell, there was no bars. He had an apartment, living in an apartment with refrigerator, freezers, the biggest TVs at that time, all the modern accommodations. He had paintings of famous artists.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  It was a fancy penthouse, had all the modern accommodations. And then on the, towards the back of the prison, and if I can explain, it's like a little hillside type. He called them chalais, basically apartments. So he had built apartments, chalais, on the side of the prison, fancy ones. If he needed to go relax, go with someone, they'd have this chalais right outside the building. So it was not a prison. It was all luxury type of living.

• 15:14Dan Snow?

  So why the heck did he escape from that luxury? Why did he go on the run?

• 15:20Speaker 04

  He went on the run because we, or the Colombian government, was going to move him to a real jail cell, bringing him back to Bogota. Because the government of Colombia...

• 15:37Speaker 04

  Find out that he had killed two of his best friends inside the prison and he had ordered the massacre of other families in Medellin that he thought were cheating on him, taking money from him. So there was bloodbath in Medellin orchestrated by Pablo Escobar and he had killed two of his traffickers. So that's what prompted the government of Colombia to move him.

• 16:05Dan Snow?

  So he, he got tipped off, right? And he escaped and went on the run. And then that's when you guys were called in.

• 16:11Speaker 05

  We were already, uh, you know, living in Bogotá, working with the Colombian National Police. I don't know that he got tipped off because what happened is they sent the Deputy Justice Minister, a guy by the name of Mendoza, a young man, maybe 25 years old, up there with a Colombian military unit ostensibly to tell Pablo, listen, we're going to move you to a, another prison temporarily so that we can reinforce the security of your existing prison. You know, it is all a ruse to get him out of there and hopefully not suffer any bloodshed. So when they got up there, the Deputy Justice Minister goes in and of course they saw right through the charade. They held him captive. Eventually they sent

• 16:53Speaker 05

  in a special unit of Colombian police officers, the COPAs. They conducted the raid. Unbelievably, no good guys were killed. There were several guards killed during the raid. Unbelievably, Mendoza, they were able to get him out unharmed. It's just a miracle that he's still alive. So I don't think there was a tip off to it, but Pablo, I mean, he saw what was going to happen here. He wasn't going to give up his nice accommodations, plus the security of his prison. Again, the deal of a lifetime.

• 17:20Dan Snow?

  We're talking about Pablo Escobar and the war on drugs. More coming up.

• 17:32Dan Snow?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. I never thought about the history of coffee. You make it, you drink it, nothing more to it. Then I've had a TikTok video about how people in the 1700s would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it. I love that sort of discovery. A detail, but suddenly you're imagining how people lived and drank and socialized. Now I wonder what all baffled historians about us. Mugs. It's a ceramic vessel, but crucially, it has a handle. Well, that's the joy of TikTok, folks. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different. Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok. Learn more at tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 18:16Speaker 01

  This is a paid partnership with Apple Card. The coolest flex at brunch these days is not the Bloody Mary with the bottomless gold flake caviar topping. It's not whipping out your wallet to pay. It's not having a wallet at all. Jack's been an Apple Card user since 2019. That's the same year he tossed his wallet in the trash. Because Apple Card holders earn 2% daily cash back on purchases made using Apple Pay. It's the only credit card designed for the iPhone. I tap to pay with Apple Card at the grocery store, at the gas station, at restaurants. And yes, I use it at my second home, the farmer's market. Jack tapping to pay with his Apple Card with Apple Pay is his favorite thing to do. And the pleasant vibration and chime sound means I just got 2% daily cash back on my latest purchase. Apply in the Wallet app on your iPhone today. Subject to credit approval.

• 18:58Speaker 01

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• 19:04Speaker 02

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• 19:34Speaker 06

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• 20:17Speaker 06

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• 20:30Dan Snow?

  But on the run, his organisation falls apart. I mean, not only is there the violence, you guys experienced violence trying to catch him, but there's a wave of violence as his leadership of that organisation starts to come apart and people start jockeying for position, right? It sounded like a very, very difficult time.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, it was. And you know what? When he first escaped from the so-called prison, it was in disarray. He was running, he was trying to get organised and he was very vulnerable. And we were there and you know what? I'll be honest, we should have had him at the very beginning, but we made some errors in our strategy. Later on, we corrected those errors, which is what helped us and brought him down towards the end. You know what, Danny? If I can also just credit one of the Colombians, Colonel Hugo Martinez, he was our boss in Medellin. He wasn't there when Pablo Escobar escaped and he had been chasing Pablo for, I don't

• 21:31Speaker 04

  know, three, four years. So anyway, long story short, when Pablo escaped, we don't have Martinez there and we're, we're not that good, we're not that organised, we had some problems in our hierarchy. So, once we brought back Martinez, it all changed and obviously it took us, what, 18 months, Steve, right? Right. And like I said, Steve was there towards the end. I mean, I was there, we were there together. That's where the emergence of Loppepis came into existence. And Loppepis was that right wing vigilante group. In Medellin, that was made up of traffickers that wanted to kill Pablo Escobar.

• 22:12Speaker 04

  Pablo killed their bosses. So this guy's wanted to kill anybody associated with Pablo. They wanted to kill his mother, his wife, his two kids. They were able to kill, we calculated thirty of Pablo Escobar's friends, attorneys, teachers that were teaching these kids. I mean, it was a personal, it was a blood war. And they would torture these guys, they would tie their hands, torture them, kill them, and they put that placard, Los Pepys, which was getting publicized. So Pablo Newton was there. So he was running from Los Pepys, he was running from us towards the end. You know, he was so afraid of Los Pepys that he tried to get his family members out of the country.

• 22:53Speaker 04

  Put him on an airplane, go to Miami, Florida. We stopped that. They had visas, we stopped that. Then he put him on a plane to go to Frankfurt, Germany. And we found out about that plot. Luckily, Germany did not allow the family to stay there. They sent him back to Volta.

• 23:11Dan Snow?

  So actually, this period when he's on the run, he's in trouble. He's struggling to keep his enemies at bay.

• 23:17Speaker 05

  Pretty much. He's running through his resources. You know, at one point, he had as many as 500 sicarios protecting him. I mean, he had a small army there, right? The day that he was killed, he had one sicario left. His nickname was Limon. He was killed also in that final shootout. He was losing his influence over people. He was losing his power base. The Cali cartel was funding Los Pepys, so they pretty much had unlimited funding. He was just running out of people who were willing to protect him.

• 23:46Dan Snow?

  So tell me about that fateful day that you mentioned. It's late 1993, December 1993. Was he difficult to find? Were you guys coming to the end of your tether? Or did you feel you were closing in on him?

• 23:57Speaker 05

  There was a time period, a couple of months before he was killed, where Javier and I, we were getting frustrated. We kind of ran into a dry period where we weren't getting a lot of leads, a lot of tips coming in, and just frustrated. We've been living in Medellin all this time. My wife's back in Bogota by herself. She and I adopted our first daughter in October of 93, and I'm in Medellin and my family's back there. And my two sons were still here in the United States at the time. So, you know, you start feeling sorry for yourself, just to be quite honest. But then, we would see one of our police friends would get killed in an operation. And that kind of brings your focus back to quit feeling sorry for yourself, you know, get back on mission, get back to the job, and let's get

• 24:37Speaker 05

  this thing done. So, when early December comes around, we knew we were close. We knew we were really close. And Javier mentioned Colonel Ugo Martinez, superhero. I mean, he's the head of the search block there, and he's our boss in Medellin. True hero. His son, Lieutenant Ugo Martinez, had trained himself on how to use radio directional finding equipment. And the telephone systems back then, especially the systems that Pablo were using, were just basically radio telephones. So it operates off a radio frequency. If Pablo wanted to thwart our efforts to listen to his calls, he knew we were intercepting him. If he wanted to make it so we couldn't listen, all he had to do was change the dial to a different frequency. But it's not quite that simple, because he's got to get that new

• 25:21Speaker 05

  frequency to the people he wants to talk to. That makes sense. So, it's a little bit challenging for him as well. Well, we can talk about this now. The CIA had an operation there called Center Spike. And basically, Center Spike was a twin-engine airplane that flew over the city of Medellin with radio intercept equipment. And they were the ones monitoring the frequencies to try to identify the new frequency. Well, Javier had an informant who was able to come up with that new frequency, called him, gave it to him. We passed it to CIA. They gave it to Center Spike, and we got confirmation that that was his new frequency. So on December 2nd, 1993, now the day before, and this is my biggest regret with the whole operation, the ambassador made Javier go to Miami to talk to an informant, a guy

• 26:04Speaker 05

  named Navagante, who's portrayed in the narco series, he's a real person. So Javier was forced to go to Miami because, you know, the ambassador, he's the president's representative, and if you don't do what he tells you, he can kick you out of country. But back at the base, Lieutenant Martinez was able, using his equipment, he was able to pinpoint the location. And as he's driving down the street, he says, he looked up and he saw Pablo looking at him on the phone. And these guys are in plain clothes, but the equipment that he was using required him to hold a handheld antenna out the window of his car and drive down the street, holding that up in the air. And that's, you know, very unusual. But we've gone back and listened to the tapes where Pablo was, he was actually talking to his son, Juan Pablo. And there's no indication that he realized what he was seeing. And

• 26:48Speaker 05

  you know how it is, like, we're off talking now, and we're seeing each other, but we're kind of reliving these events in your mind, and you're really not realizing what you're seeing at that very moment. And that's the only explanation we've ever come up with as to why Pablo didn't, listen, I gotta go, you know, and then try to escape. So the, the dahin unit, this is a specialized group of Colombian national police officers that Javier and I worked with, we lived with, we ate with, these are the guys that protected us while we were there. They were out there with the lieutenant, they surrounded the place. Now, in the narco series, it shows that I was on the roof when Pablo was killed. That's not true. I was back at the base. Things were happening in the base. I went over to Colonel Martinez's office, and the operation was underway. Colonel Martinez

• 27:30Speaker 05

  is telling the major in charge of dahin, listen, we're mounting the troops up, surrounding, but don't let him get away. Do what you have to do. Well, they go ahead and launch an operation, and that was about 10, 12 guys. So they launch an operation on this three-story row house. As we now know, he only had one sicario left, Limon. As the police enter the row house and start making their way up the steps, Pablo starts shooting at them, they shoot him back. Limon jumps out the window of the third floor of this row house onto the roof of a two-story row house behind them. So he's making his way over to the edge. The police on that side order him to surrender. He starts shooting at them, and they shoot him, and he falls off the roof dead. Pablo makes his way up to the third floor.

• 28:14Speaker 05

  He realizes now he's there's cops outside and there's cops coming up the steps. So he's in a really, really precarious situation here. He goes out and jumps onto the roof of the two story behind him. As he's trying to make his way across, he starts shooting the police again. They catch him in crossfire and he was killed that day. This was December 2nd, 1993. So my biggest regret, you know, Javier was there twice as long as I was in Colombia. He should have been there rather than me. That's the only regret I have about this whole operation.

• 28:41Speaker 04

  I'll just say, hey, you know what? I'm glad it happened. I'm glad Steve was there and Steve, you had the only camera, right?

• 28:48Speaker 04

  That's why.

• 28:48Speaker 05

  Yeah, I had the only camera that worked.

• 28:50Speaker 04

  But you know what? It was the end of, like I said, very violent era in Colombia. That was carried out by Pablo Escobar. So I'm glad it happened. It needed to happen. I mean, if you look at all the people that Pablo Escobar killed, Steve and I put the figure at 10 to 15,000 people and we were way off. One of Pablo Escobar's main sicarios, a guy by the name of Popeye, who was with Pablo during all this time. He puts the figure at 50,000 people that Pablo Escobar killed.

• 29:27Dan Snow?

  When he died, when he was killed, you were optimistic about the future. Did things improve afterwards?

• 29:33Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, yep, it improved for about what? A couple of weeks, about a month, everything stopped. And then the Cali cartel took it over. Cali cartel was a vicious enemy of Pablo Escobar. They helped finance those papers. The Cali cartels took over the business. So it was drug trafficking again. However, the car bombs stopped, the assassinations, the kidnappings. Cali cartel was more business like where Pablo was wow, wow, west. Then what happened? We take down the Cali cartel. What happened? Another cartel, the North Valley cartel takes over. So you take down the cartel, there's people ready to take over the drug business.

• 30:16Dan Snow?

  So when you look back at those experiences, did your sacrifice, did the dangers that you guys run, were they worth it?

• 30:24Speaker 05

  Absolutely, absolutely. People say, let's legalize it. You can't just stand back and. There's more to it than just legalizing because of the deaths that are involved with this, not whether it's an accidental overdose, or whether it's a vicious criminal like Pablo Escobar, or the Rodriguez Orellola brothers, or whoever the drug traffickers are. There are innocent people being killed. You can't turn a blind eye to this.

• 30:45Dan Snow?

  Do you guys look back with pride on that?

• 30:47Speaker 04

  Yes, we helped. We were part of history. And you know what? This thing really happened. We witnessed it. We saw the heroes. We saw the innocent people that got killed. We saw friends of ours, police officers that got killed. I hope I never go through that again. I mean, we went to a funeral where we had eight coffins, eight coffins in the church. All of them had been our friends, killed by Pablo Escobar. We saw a lot. We experienced a lot. And it's a point in history where someone is just killing, no disregard, of

• 31:32Speaker 04

  course, for human life. I mean, and if you look at even the Avianca airline, the Avianca airline was a commercial airline that was going from Bogotá to Cali. Pablo Escobar put a bomb on that airplane. 107 innocent people were killed. Pablo Escobar was there, put a bomb to kill one person who was not on board that plane. I mean, look at all the victims that they killed. And if you just don't do anything about it, well, what's gonna happen, you know? And this is why, you know what, in all our presentations, we always say the real heroes were the Colombian National Police, Colonel Lolo Martinez, General

• 32:14Speaker 04

  Octavio Vargas Silva. This guy, the general, was the one who organized the search on Pablo Escobar and never gave up. So they're the heroes, and all the victims out there. So you have to do something. Like Steve said, when we see our friends get killed, yeah, we wanted to give up. We wanted to let him surrender, and just all go home. But you just cannot do that. You gotta stay with that fight until the end, you know?

• 32:41Dan Snow?

  You guys have seen people do the worst things that any human has done, living, you know, today. Do you feel positive about human beings, about the world? Are you optimists?

• 32:49Speaker 04

  Oh, of course. You know what? And I tell people, the majority of us are all good people. The majority, you know what? It's that small little percent that is not. But the majority of the people are great people. They're good people. And of course, it was worth it being out there. We saw our friends get killed. But the majority of law enforcement is good. They're trying to do the right thing. It's that few rotten apples. And we've had them in DEA. We had them in Colombia. And, you know, we've seen the media out there of bad people, wrong people. But the majority are still good.

• 33:24Speaker 05

  You gotta have hope. It's not being naive. The golden rule is do unto others as you'd have them do unto you. Treat your fellow man with respect. Not to sound naive or stupid, but I mean, there's, there's no rule that says we can't all get along. That was the premise of my leadership as we got promoted up through the ranks. There was no rule that said we couldn't have fun at work. You don't have to come in to be miserable every day. So if you want to be miserable, life's as good or as bad as you make it individually.

• 33:51Dan Snow?

  Well, thank you very much, Steve and Javier. It's been inspiring talking to you. Thank you very much indeed.

• 33:55Speaker 05

  Well, Dan, thank you for having us on the show. If your listeners would like to find out more about us, if you could check out www.deanarcos.com. That's our website. We're still in our world speaking tour. We've done two UK tours. We love coming to England and Ireland and Scotland. I mean, three of the most beautiful places in the world. Just check us out on the website and you'll see how great we think we are.

• 34:18Dan Snow?

  For sure. Come on another tour soon, guys. Thank you very much indeed.

• 34:22Speaker 04

  Thank you, Dan.

• 34:22Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 34:31Speaker 01

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