When the elite force that had been hunting Colombia's most notorious drug trafficker for more than 16 months stormed a two-story house last Thursday afternoon in Medellin and shot Pablo Escobar Gaviria dead, the wave of jubilation that swept much of the country began with the raiders themselves. "We won!" they shouted, as they raised their guns over the drug lord's body. Amid all the commotion, few remarked that at the moment he was killed, the man who had spent a year and a half running from the world's largest manhunt wasn't wearing any shoes. In dying barefoot, Pablo Escobar exited his life in a fashion antithetical to the spirit in which he lived: desperate and vulnerable.
His death represents an important victory against a man who did more than anyone else to set the tone for the drug-related violence that in the past 10 years has cost Colombia the lives of an Attorney General, a Justice Minister, three presidential candidates, more than 200 judges, 30 kidnap victims, dozens of journalists and some 1,000 police officers. Yet it has not concluded the war against the $15 billion-a-year cocaine industry. At most, Escobar's end simply ushers in a new battle against those who have taken over the turf. "While the police hunted him down," says a Drug Enforcement Administration official, "other criminal groups had a heyday. The bottom line is that the cocaine business is bigger than ever."
Still, Escobar has haunted Colombia ever since he escaped in July 1992 from his farcical incarceration near his hometown of Envigado, in a custom-built prison complete with king-size bed, private bath and Jacuzzi. Over the next year, he succeeded dozens of times in eluding the 1,500-man Search Block unit that pursued him by moving clandestinely among his supporters in Medellin and the surrounding countryside. His hiding places included secret rooms carved out between walls, under stairs and underground. Often he cloaked himself in artful guises, dressing as a woman or riding in coffins as a corpse. At least four times, moments before the trap sprang shut, the wily farmer's son with the double chin and potbelly slipped away and mysteriously vanished. "He was like a deer," says a DEA agent involved in the chase. "He could disappear into the hills."
On Oct. 11, eight members of the Search Block broke into a remote farmhouse two hours outside Medellin. "We were sure we had him surrounded," a police official told the press. But the kingpin melted away at the last minute. His trackers were so close that Escobar was forced to leave behind two briefcases filled with soap, T shirts, blue jeans and dark glasses. There were also letters from his nine-year-old daughter Manuela -- "Dear Papa, I miss you a lot and wish I could see you" -- and his son Juan Pablo, 16. And there was a letter in Escobar's handwriting to his mother Hermilda, 70: he was tired and willing to turn himself in, he wrote, but he didn't see much hope of the government's accepting his surrender.
But neither his slipperiness nor his offers to pay $27,000 for each Search ; Block officer killed could prevent the systematic liquidation of 26 of Escobar's closest collaborators. By last Wednesday, Escobar's 44th birthday, he had been a fugitive for 499 days and was growing weary; ulcer medicine found in the house where he was killed indicates he was also unwell.