It was a much fancier part of the city, cut with manicured hedges, lavish mansions, and beefy private security dressed in black, heavily armed, and carrying walkie-talkies. After a few weeks passed with no new threats from Escobar’s people, Bruce found me an apartment in Los Rosales, close to where the U.S. That night, I moved into a safe house that the embassy had set aside for emergencies like mine. Between the CNP and the DEA intelligence experts, we tried our best to get to the bottom of the threat but couldn’t find anything. Escobar’s men didn’t have the exact address, but they knew that I lived at the corner of Seventh and Seventy-second, and it would be a matter of a few days or even a few hours before they traced me to my building, where I was one of the only gringos in residence. Our intel was that he had ordered his sicarios to find “the Mexican” DEA guy, which could only be me, since I was the only American of Mexican origin on staff. I never found out if Escobar had planned to kill me or just kidnap me – an important American pawn in his battle against extradition. Bruce met me at the DEA offices, which were next to the embassy garage, when I arrived. I breathed a long sigh of relief when I saw the steel gates of the embassy, which was built like a fortress. I chose to go through the most congested route to the embassy because I figured that I could easily blend into a traffic jam and become anonymous. I thought of my grandmother and willed myself to breathe deeply as I sat in what seemed like endless Bogotá traffic. embassy, which was only a few miles away. Thankfully, the truck didn’t blow up, and I screeched out of the underground garage and gunned it to the U.S. As I started the engine with a roar, I immediately realized that I hadn’t bothered to check under the chassis for explosives. I felt for my gun and unlocked the door of my OGV – official government vehicle – which in my case was a bulletproof Ford Bronco. I rushed through the garage, furtively looking around to make sure no one was following me. It was the threat of extradition that led to Escobar’s war-his reign of terror – against the Colombian government and us American law enforcement agents. It was my job to help capture and put him on a plane to the United States, where he would stand trial for all his crimes. embassy, I was totally obsessed with my new assignment – getting Escobar. There were tanks at the airport and fierce-looking soldiers armed with machine guns on the streets.Īt the beginning of 1989 when Bruce called me at home, I had already been in Colombia for eight months, and, like everyone else at DEA headquarters in the U.S. All these assassinations took place before I arrived in Colombia, but you could feel the tension everywhere. They had already gunned down Colombia’s minister of justice, massacred most of the country’s Supreme Court judges, and killed a prominent newspaper editor who dared denounce the power of the cartel. Escobar and his brutal sicarios – most of them teenage assassins plucked from the shantytowns that surround the city of Medellín – were killing anyone who stood in their way. Bruce’s priority was capturing Pablo Escobar, the billionaire Medellín Cartel chief who was responsible for the myriad car bombs that were going off around Colombia, not to mention smuggling tons of cocaine to North America and Europe. He had to be he was heading up one of the most dangerous missions in the history of the DEA. He was a big man, about six foot four, and just about one of the nicest people I had ever met – a gentle giant. I recognized the voice of my group supervisor, Bruce Stock, on the other end, but there was a slight tremor, a hint of uncertainty in the way he pronounced my name.īruce was in his early fifties and had worked as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent around the world for most of his career. I knew something was very wrong when I picked up the phone at my new apartment in Bogotá. “Manhunters” presents Steve and Javier’s history in law enforcement from their rigorous physical training and their early DEA assignments in Miami and Austin to the Escobar mission in Medellin, Colombia ― living far from home and serving as frontline soldiers in the never-ending war on drugs that continues to devastate America. Peña tell the true story ― which also inspired the hit Netflix series, Narcos ― of how they helped put an end to one of the world’s most infamous narco-terrorists. In “Manhunters: How We Took Down Pablo Escobar” legendary DEA operatives Steve Murphy and Javier F.
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