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This episode contains mature content and descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners. Please take care in listening November 7, 1990 Bogota, Colombia at 7:05pm, Maruja Pachon de Villamisar and Beatriz Villamisar de Guerrero slide into the backseat of their Renault 21 after work at Faucine, the state run enterprise for the promotion of the film industry. Maruja was an award winning journalist and she attended to all press matters since drug traffickers had started Randomly kidnapping journalists in August, she developed a habit of looking over her shoulder wherever she went. As Moruja's sister in law and personal assistant, Beatrice had even less reason to be suspicious as their new chauffeur navigated through rush hour traffic to bring them home for the day. But her intuition was right. Eight men were following them. Twenty minutes later and less than 200 meters from Maruja's family home, a stolen yellow cab cut off Maruja's car and hemmed it into the left hand curb. Their driver slammed the brakes to avoid a wreck. At the same time, a Mercedes pulled up behind the car, trapping them all. Three armed men approached the car, then five more. Beatrice assumed it was a holdup. She pulled two rings off her right hand and threw them out the window. But money was not what they were after. Two men opened the back doors on each side and the fifth shot their driver in the head with an Uzi through a silencer. The men separated the women. Beatrice went into a third car, where they made her lie on the floor with a filthy smelling jacket over her head. Maruja went into the Mercedes in the middle of the back seat with a man on either side. They forced her head down against her knees so that it was hard to breathe. We only want you to deliver a message, one of them said. You'll be home in a couple of hours. As the car wove through traffic, Maruha the journalist asked, who are you people? Welcome to the greatest true crime stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode we're calling Pablo Escobar's Hostages not just bargaining chips. It's the story of Pablo Escobar's eventual surrender, but not how you've heard it before. To negotiate his terms, Escobar kidnapped and held hostage 10 journalists and their teams. In this episode, we're following two women's stories, Maruha Bachon and Diana Torbay. Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my favorite authors. If you know his name, you probably know him from his magical realist fiction titles like 100 Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, or my personal favorite of Love and other Demons. Until I got to visit Cartagena de Indias in Colombia, I actually didn't know that he was a journalist. First, Gabriel or Gabo is the name most associated with magical realism, but at the same time, starting around 1948, when he left Bogota for Cartagena because of political unrest, he cut his teeth on journalism. More importantly, or at least more relevantly, I had never heard of his book News of a Kidnapping. This is one of his significant works of creative nonfiction, and it's the one from which this episode takes the bulk of its research. I don't think News of a Kidnapping is super ubiquitous in English translation, at least I've never seen it before, so it's unlikely that you'll happen upon it on a shelf next to the General in his Labyrinth, or the Autumn of the Patriarch, or even his posthumous novel released just this year until August. But don't worry, we will link to it in the show notes. And if you're translator loyal like me, then you can rest easy, because this book is also translated by the inimitable Edith Grossman. I also want to thank you in advance for affording me grace when I'm pronouncing these names. I'm doing my best and I have practiced, but I'm not fluent in Spanish, so thank you for understanding. Frankly, it's just like me to pick up a serious work of true crime to read on vacation, most people on a rooftop slurping the Monada con Cocos chit, chat with other expats, or dance to the throbbing music that you'd have to shout over regard regardless. But you know who you can find in the far corner of the pool, behind black sunglasses and under a sun hat and a bikini too small for this advanced stage of pregnancy? Me. And probably, since you're listening to this, you let me start by Saying Colombia in 1991 is very different politically from Colombia in 2024. In 1991, well, that's the stereotypical Colombia you think of when you free associate. I'm going to give a very truncated, extremely generalized political landscape of 1991. If you're listening and you're super familiar with the details of this time and place, please have mercy. And when you write in to correct me, do be nice about it. So when Maruha asked her kidnappers in that Mercedes who are you people? They said, we're from M19. I didn't know what that was. Quick and dirty. M19 in 1991 was the former guerrilla group. In 1991 they were legal. They were campaigning for seats in the Constituent assembly and had been pardoned in the late 1980s. Very, very generally, here's how I understand the trajectory of M19. They were a guerrilla group who rebelled against dictatorship and fraudulent elections. When they agreed to demobilize and instead effect change through legal politics, the remaining members were formally pardoned and they created a legitimate political party. All that to say when these kidnappers told Maruha a journalist, that they were part of M19. She immediately knew they were bullshitting her. And Maruha, again a journalist. Pressed for the truth. She said seriously, are you dealers or guerrillas? They said they were guerrillas. They were lying dealers, capos or captains. Pretty much everyone really who worked for Pablo Escobar was at this time part of a group called the Extraditables. So what is an Extraditable bottom line? At the time, in 1991, not anymore. The government was still so full of corruption that the drug dealers wanted to be tried in their home country. What they didn't want was to be extradited specifically to the United States for crimes committed here because the US was having no mercy. In fact, sentences were extraordinarily harsh. One Colombian drug dealer who was extradited in 1987 received life imprisonment plus 130 years. The so called Extraditables hid behind the peril that their families would face once the actual criminals were behind bars. Naturally, the Colombian government was reluctant to grant the huge acquiescence of guaranteeing non extradition. They thought Pablo Escobar essentially wanted to continue carrying out business as usual, but this time with physical protection from the government. The new 1991 Colombian government was knocked down with being complicit in grand crimes against humanity. So Pablo started taking hostages to get what he wanted. I should mention here that extradition to the US was possible at all because of a treaty signed under President Julio Cesar Torbay. He was in office from 1978 to 1982. Two subsequent presidents continued that treaty. The presidential candidate of the New Liberalism party had Torbay's full support. Luis Carlos Galan was leading with 60% approval in the polls. And then Pablo Escobar tried to take power of the New Liberalism Party. Galan denounced him in a rally and declared a staunch position against drug cartels. The cartels assassinated Galan before the end of the presidential race. Okay, technically his murder is still unsolved, but I mean, they all but confessed to his killing. In 1989, Golan's campaign director, Cesar Gaviria, came into office. Gaviria defended extradition as an indispensable tool for strengthening the penal system and announced an unprecedented strategy against the drug traffickers who surrendered and confessed. And they could obtain non extradition in return. Sounds fair, right? Generous even to me. Yeah, it wasn't good enough for the Extraditables. Gavidia is the president during our story. But I thought it was relevant to give you more background history on the presidential office. Because when Pablo Escobar didn't get his way with the extradition clause, he started taking hostages. The first hostage was seized on August 30, 1990. Diana Torbay was also an award winning journalist, director of the television news program Krypton and of the Bogota magazine Oy por oy. Diana was also the daughter of former president and leader of the Liberal Party, Julio Cesar Torbay. They got Diana on a bait and switch. Deanna was supposed to interview the former Spanish priest and guerrilla fighter. Yes, priest turned guerrilla fighter, Manuel Perez. Her team had their suspicions. But nothing could have stopped Deanna from trying to engage in a dialogue about peace with the leader of the Colombian National Liberation army, or the eln. He was the leader of the second largest guerrilla group at the time. She and her team of five all drove from Bogota to Onda. There they got in two vehicles and rode with the stated guerrillas overnight. Then they waited for a landslide to be cleared. The next four hours, Diana and the lone woman on the crew rode on horses while the men walked through forests. People knew Diana's face even in the coffee groves and peaceful valleys. They called out to her as she passed. That evening, they dismounted near a city that had to be Medellin. It was not ELN territory. The crew continued to Copacabana and entered a little house. A masked man told her that the priest was waiting, but the women should go first for safety. Her cameraman was wary. This supposed guerrilla fighter was wearing a Rolex, and these guys weapons were not guerrilla weapons. He warned Deanna against it. And we all know the first rule of horror movies is you never split up the group. But she couldn't prevent it. After a two hour forced march during a storm, she, Asusena Liavano, who was editor in chief and director, and Juan Vita, who was an editor, arrived at the first house where they would be held hostage. By the end of 1990, Escobar and the Extraditables had abducted 10 people to use as bargaining chips. What the hell was he thinking? We'll get into that and much more when we come back. To recap, the three people we're following most closely have all been kidnapped. First, Diana Torbay, the news show and magazine reporter. Also the daughter of the former president. Both a powerful woman in her own right and powerful by proxy. Second, Maruja, kidnapped three months later. Journalist and director of press. She was married to Alberto Villamisara, campaigning for the Constituent assembly and writing at the newspaper El Tiempo. Alberto was a famously tenacious, if not aggressive, politician and diplomat. He was a chief ally to President Luis Carlos Galan in seeking to limit the power of Pablo Escobar. So Maruja, too was both powerful in her own right, and by proxy, Beatrice Villamusar was Maruja's assistant. They'd actually kidnapped her on accident. At the same time, Maruha assumed the kidnappers had already let her go because she wasn't involved in any press. Not really. But when they reunited within hours of being abducted, they embraced like they had not seen each other in years. They arrived to a squalid room with one mattress on the floor and two masked guards. And then the main guard, the one who was in charge, said he was letting Beatrice go. He said, we took you along by mistake. Beatrice said immediately, oh, no, I'm staying with Maruja. The guards were genuinely impressed with her loyalty. When she asked to use the bathroom, they took her down a hallway with a torn, nasty cloth over her head. The lavatory was tiny and disgusting. When she returned, her circumstances had changed. The guards had heard on the radio that Beatrice was the sister of Maruja's husband, Alberto Villamizar. So she too had become a powerful hostage to them. We know who you are now, the guard said, and we can use you. The radio had also revealed that the police knew their escape route, which made the current house dangerous for all of them. The kidnappers relocated Maruja and Beatrice in the trunk of a third car. They led the women into another small, dimly lit room with a mattress on the floor, two guards, and a bed in the corner. On the bed was Marina Montoya. Maruja and Beatrice knew Marina, and they knew she had been kidnapped three months earlier, just after Diana. She was thought to be dead, since, by all deduction, her abduction was a form of vengeance. The unconfirmed story was that Marina's brother, the Secretary General, had agreed to negotiate terms that the government had not fulfilled. In other words, Marina was not a bargaining chip. The common theory was that she had been kidnapped only to execute. Marina was in a bad condition. She was a skeleton, and her white hair hung limp where she lay on the bed. She was alive, but she did not move. Marina was 64 years old, and she was renowned for her beauty, especially her beautifully groomed hands and fingernails. This person was not how they remembered her. It didn't take long for Maruja and Beatrice to understand what sent Marina into decline. The rules of the captivity were harsher than those of a prison. They could only speak if urgent, and even then, only in a whisper. They could not get off the mattress they had to share. The room was hardly lit at all. And it had no ventilation, so it was hard to breathe in the heat and stench. In the night, the room turned freezing and the walls dripped water. Their clothes were confiscated and replaced with two sweatsuits. They had to ask permission from the two guards for everything they needed, from sitting up to speaking to smoking. Maruja even got death threats for snoring in her sleep. They did, however, have a television, and it was always set to one news station or another. Alberto Villamisar was on news shows eight times in the first two days, hoping Maruja and Beatriz would hear him. Plus, nearly all of Maruja's six children worked in the media, and they used their resources to communicate to her. It was unquestionably awful for all the hostages, but I was surprised to learn that after weeks of captivity, the hostages realized that their guards were also kind of hostages. The guards were the worst part of the captivity. They were boys, young, uneducated, brutal and volatile. They worked in pairs for 12 hour shifts with their submachine guns ready. Marquez says in news of a kidnapping, the boy's common condition was absolute fatalism. They knew they were going to die young. They accepted and cared only about living for the moment. They made excuses to themselves for their reprehensible work. It meant helping the family, buying nice clothes, having motorcycles, and ensuring the happiness of their mothers, whom they adored above all else in the world, and for whose sakes they were willing to die. Never mind that a mother would never, ever make that decision for her child. It didn't seem much like any of them had choices, though. The guards had names that suited their personalities. Monk Spots or the scariest one, the one who flirted with Marina and hated Maruha Barabas. One was afraid the Extraditables would kill him when they no longer needed him, just as a precaution, in case he wanted to tell some of their secrets. Between late November and December 17, the government worked hard and in secret to revise the extradition treaty and get the hostages freed. During that time, I think as a gesture of good faith, the Extraditables released four hostages. That meant they still held six. Three were together. Maruja, Beatriz, and Marina. Maruja thought the Extraditables were burning all the low cards. Only the bargaining chips were still being held. And Marina. And then, in a different location, there was Diana Torbay and Richard Becerra. The last detained alone, was Pacho Santos. Christmas came and went. Their spirits sank when the captors of Maruja, Beatriz and Marina, including the family whose house they were held in, insisted on a big New Year's Eve celebration. The hostages didn't really know what to do with that. Then, sometime in January, one of the guards burst into Pacho Santos room and said, it's all fucked up. They're going to kill the hostages. He explained that first they would kill Marina Montoya every three days. Another in this Richard Becerra, Beatrice, Maruja, and then Diana. The guard told Pacho he would be last. He said, but don't worry. This government can't stomach more than two dead bodies. In reality, Pacho was the first on the list. For some reason, though, his sentence was not carried out. January 23rd, Marina's favorite guard, Monk, came into the room. We came to take Granny to another house, he said. Maruha asked outright, are you going to kill her? Monk was so upset by the question that he disconnected the TV and radio and confiscated them. Marina said, who knows? Maybe they're going to release me. Maruja and Beatrice decided the kindest thing to do was to agree. But they knew better. After they took Marina away, they realized the TV and radio had been taken to keep them from knowing how the night ended. This part of the story is the saddest part of the story. Marina's body was found the next morning in an empty lot north of Bogota. The corpse wore a hood that obscured her vision, and there were six entrance and exit wounds in her skull, which she never saw coming because of the crazy number of unidentified bodies in Bogota at the time. The Jane Doe was dumped in a common grave after the autopsy. But one of the pathologists who had performed the autopsy believed, quote, the corpse of the lady with the fine clothes and the impeccable nails was in fact Marina Montoya. He was correct. As soon as her identity was established, however, someone claiming to be from the Justice Ministry called the Institute of Forensic Medicine, urging them not to reveal that the body was in a mass grave. It was bad pr. Officials had a hard time locating the body when Marina's son came to identify her. When they did, she was difficult to recognize because the wounds had so disfigured her face. Several days had passed between Marina's death and the public awareness of her death. On January 25, two days after Marina's death, but before its discovery, a guard burst into the house where Diana Torbay and Richard Barrera were held hostage. He shouted, the law is all over us. Deanna and Richard started getting ready to leave. The kidnappers gave them white hats so that from the helicopters above, they would look like innocent campesinos or local farmers. They further disguised the hostages by throwing a black shawl over Deanna and putting Richard in a leather jacket. Then the guards literally told them to run for the hills. This is the shootout, remember? Current President Gaviria promised that no armed rescue mission would take place, and definitely not without permission from the families. Deanna and Richard tried to sprint up the hill, but after months in captivity, they both gave out fast. Nearly as soon as the helicopters were in sight, Richard threw himself to the ground at the first sound of gunfire. And then Deonna fell face down beside him. They killed me. She screamed. I can't move my legs. She asked Richard to look at her back, because she had felt something like an electric shock before she fell. He saw just above her left hip bone, a clean, tiny hole with no blood. The Elite Corps was approaching, though they didn't know that at the time, they were the frontline troops in the battle against drug trafficking two years earlier. Two members of the Elite Corps approached Richard and Diana, lying on the hillside, guns raised. Where's Pablo? They asked. Richard explained who they were, showed his id, and with the help of some actual campesinos, the local farmers who had taken cover in the under rush, they got Diana to a helicopter. A military source called former President Torbay and told him that Diana had been rescued in Medellin. He was overjoyed, and he tried to contact Diana's mother, Nydia, to inform her as well. Nydia, by the way, was also a hotshot reporter with her own television show, who was also extremely connected. President Torbay dispatched his chief bodyguard to drive to Nydia to tell her the good news, but she was having none of it. The latest report said that Diana was in intensive care, but she believed her own instincts over the news, and she called the President straight away. They killed Deanna, she told him, and it's your doing. It's your fault. And it's what comes of having a soul of stone. He corrected her that Diana was alive. She rejected his news. He asked, how do you know that? She said, because I'm her mother, and my heart tells me so. An hour later, news arrived that Diana had bled to death. Despite hours of medical intervention, it was a hopeless case. A high velocity, medium caliber explosive bullet had shattered her spinal column at the waist. As I mentioned before, her mother, Nydia, was also a formidable woman. She went to see Deanna at the hospital, and even in her grief and despair, she held a press conference right outside the operating room. She told the press a detailed account of the appeals, that she and the Torbays had made to the president about not attempting a rescue. When the criminals panicked from being under attack, they might do anything, even on accident. Many of Escobar's recruits were kids, after all, and she blamed both the stupidity and criminality of the Extraditables. She also said that the government and the president were equally culpable for ignoring their requests for the safety of the hostages. The media quoted her verbatim. Public opinion solidified in her support, and the public became indignant with the government. President Gaviria wanted to issue a denial of Lydia's statement, but then he thought better of it. You cannot argue with the mother's grief, he said. Instead, that they would go to the funeral. The president and the entire government. They did. And after the mourning, Nydia went to his office and got straight to the point. She said that she was wrong for accusing him, because now she knew he had not been aware of it. In case you missed it, this woman, this journalist grieving her murdered daughter, both apologized to the president for accusing him of her daughter's death, and then said she wasn't mad at him anymore because he, the president, didn't know what his own military was doing. Just incredible. Nydia had learned that the mission's purpose had been to liberate the hostages, not to find Pablo Escobar, which is what the president had been told. The military had tortured a captive guard until he revealed the hostage's location. Nivea told President Gaviria. All of this in addition to the fact that the guard had been killed in the operation. I'm not sure how she knew this, honestly, but sometimes journalists are able to procure a fuller picture of an objective truth, at least more able than a powerful political figure, if only for the reason that journalists can get straight answers from more people without them fearing blowback. It's also unsurprising that the official version of events was directly contradicted by the Extraditables. Although Gavidia launched a full investigation into the mission that ended in Diana Torbay's death, there was no undoing it. The official statement given by police almost immediately after, which seems to be consistent with Richard Barrera's testimony, is that Diana was shot by one of the kidnappers as they were fleeing. Escobar spun that story. He actually agreed with the points that Nydia made to the president. Escobar said that police had carried out the raid knowing that the hostages were there. And they knew that because they had arrested and tortured two of his men, one of whom had guided the officers to the location from a helicopter. He said that Diana was killed when she had already been released and that she'd been shot by police. He also said that three bystanding campesinos had been killed while police identified the dead as criminals. It makes perfect sense that each side would pin the culpability on the other. But there are a couple other things to consider. Richard Becerra was there for all of it. His statement said that Deanna's death was accidental. Accidental, of course, with the full, full knowledge that a bunch of dudes armed with submachine guns running up a hill had clear intention of firing them at someone. What's not clear is who shot Deanna or whether they meant to shoot her. At least there was no conclusive evidence to prove that it was intentional. Most people supported this sole eyewitness testimony. But listener, you and I know that he was also under extreme stress at the time. I would never say that he was outright lying. But is it possible that he misremembered some details? Sure. Could he have been paying more attention to his critically injured colleagues than trying to identify where the shots originated? I think so. He also said that the members of the Elite Corps who came upon him and Diana asked him, where's Pablo? They did not ask, are you Richard Becerra? So the intent of the mission. That's unclear too. Not long after Marina Montoya's body was identified, it surprised everyone. The public thought she had been executed long ago. And not long after that, on January 29, Decree 303 was issued. It cleared all the obstacles that had interfered with the drug traffickers surrender. Extradition was not granted for political crimes, not for any native born Colombians. The government was never able to shake the public belief that the issuance was, quote, an act of contrition of Diana's death. I tend to agree. Since extradition was re established in a constitutional amendment in 1997 for the tourbill family, Diana's parents, her siblings, her husband and her children, that decree was too little and too late. But it made a huge difference for the remaining hostages. The Extraditables immediately released a statement announcing that they canceled the remaining executions. Maruja and Beatrice knew nothing about any of those news breaks. They hadn't had access to any form of news. They had no idea that some hostages had been released. And they had no idea that some of them, including their friend Marina, had been killed. Once they even had an opportunity to escape. One of the guards had a heart attack and dropped his weapon. Both Maruja and Beatrice had military training. Beatrice had even taken special artillery courses. But they had everything to lose. On February 2, the woman who kept the house where they were captive told them that two hostages would be released. Maruja and Beatrice were wary. They had heard this before, but the woman was so sure she'd already bought them new makeup and razors in preparation for their release. It happened on February 7, but only Beatrice was released. The guards told Maruja she would have to wait another week, and Maruja was pissed. Happy for her sister in law, of course, but angry at her husband. Why had he not negotiated for her release, too? She knew he would have to be a part of the hostage negotiation, not only because of his professional position as political diplomat with the Medellin cartel even before they were kidnapped, but also because he was very closely related to both of them. They discussed the story Beatrice would need to tell Alberto, specifically how to navigate the details around Alberto's impulsive nature, so that they protected everyone's safety. The bosses gave Beatrice 10 minutes to get ready. Maruja helped her. It had been three months since either of them had seen their own reflections, and they were appalled. They were ashen, underweight, with limp, untended hair. Beatrice tried to make herself up, and Maruja stopped her, saying, as pale as you are, you'll look awful if you put that on. That is a real friend notifying you about a wardrobe malfunction before you get out of the house. The bosses blindfolded Beatrice and had her lie down on the floor of a jeep. They dropped her off in Normandia with a bill in her hand for the first cab she saw. If you tell the press you are with Dona Marina Montoya, we'll kill Maruja, they said. A cab pulled up immediately, and she realized later that this driver was also a plant. He asked where she was going, and she had to repeat her address for him three times. That's when she realized she was whispering. It would be a symptom of her captivity that took her a long time to shake. When they arrived at her house, Beatrice had to go inside to get change for the cabbie. The old porter shouted when he recognized her, gave her a big hug, and took her up to the flat. After reuniting with her husband and children, she called her brother Alberto. He was at her house in 10 minutes. Meanwhile, Maruja became convinced that they had murdered Beatrice. Despite the repeated refrain, a dead hostage has no value. They finally allowed her to watch the midday news on tv, where Beatrice was surrounded by her family. And that's when Maruja discovered that her husband had redecorated their apartment. He had done it to keep her spirits up. He'd tried to follow the design plan she'd mentioned to him before her kidnapping, but the colors were wrong and her favorite antique was improperly curated. Maruha was irate. She yelled at the tv. It's just the opposite of what I said. I loved this moment of reading their story, just like I loved the moment of Beatriz making up her face. I guess because it feels so human. It feels so much like what I would do. I mean, how relieving for just a moment to concentrate on how that orange toned lipstick makes my teeth look yellow, or how they put the library in the wrong room of my apartment, rather than whether or not I will be executed by submachine gun that afternoon. But it wasn't long before Maruha grew depressed. The bosses had a changing of the guard. These new guards were nicer, more educated, talked to her like a person, and her spirits lifted a bit. And then the old guard came back and so did her depression. One of the bosses called the newly freed Beatrice more than once, screaming medicine because he couldn't remember the heart medication Maruja required. In the end, Francisco Santos, the other journalist, held in a different house near Bogota, and Maruja Pachon were not released until Monday, May 20. That's almost seven months of living as a hostage. In line with Pablo Escobar's need for publicity. Maruja would be released in time for the 7:00 news, and Francisco would be released in time for the news. At 9:30, the woman who kept the house offered to buy Maruja anything she needed. Maruha just asked for the essentials. Mascara, lipstick, an eyebrow pencil, and, because this was 1991, a pair of stockings to replace the ones the kidnappers tore during her abduction. She also asked them to return the emerald ring they had taken at her initial abduction, but they couldn't find it. Her drive to freedom was fast and uneventful. They put a hood over her head and had her lie on the floor of the car, just as Beatrice had, and after 40 or so minutes they pushed her out of the car. She did as they had instructed, both take the first cab. The first driver she saw recognized her immediately. He took her to the nearest house to call her family using their phone, and everyone there recognized her and embraced her as well. Alberto and their son were in their cars on the way to her as soon as they could take down the address. The reporters were waiting outside her home. She knew them. She said, take it easy, guys. It'll be easier to talk in the apartment. I don't want to detract from our focus here. Telling the story of the journalists who were held hostage is the point of this episode. Pablo saw them as bargaining chips. That's how he used people in this instance, as bargaining chips. But the psychopathy runs so deep that nowadays it's pretty clear that he saw most people as expendable. It's important to this show that we illustrate they were not expendable. Pablo's hostages were people. Mothers of journalists, wives to ambassadors, sisters to politicians, daughters of presidents. Yes, they were powerful people, both by their associations to decision makers who could be manipulated to a criminal's needs. But they were also powerful in themselves. They were journalists and television news crews, survivors, women who talked back to their child guards and demanded basic accommodations, even at gunpoint, who traveled for days and hours at the promise of talking peace with a violent radical. But they were people first. People who had very distinct visions of how their living room should be decorated. People who ran the neighborhood cafe, the ones who might remember your order and your name as soon as you walked in the door. But I don't want to leave you hanging either. Because they were abducted for essentially, one Pablo Escobar didn't want to be tried for his crimes in the United States. Their time spent as hostages was not in vain. Within a week, President Gaviria had negotiated surrender terms with Escobar. They actually negotiated through a televangelist priest, Father Garcia Herreros, which is just wild to me. The actual surrender was done via helicopter in the soccer field on the estate of Pablo's mansion, surrounded by beautiful tropical flowers and heavily armed guards. Pablo hugged each one of them and then climbed into the helicopter, which took them from Pablo's soccer field to the soccer field at the local prison. In the helicopter, Alberto Villamusar, Maruja's husband and Beatrice's brother, asked Pablo why he had abducted them. Pablo's response is going to repulse you. It sounds like something a spoiled child would say. He said. I was kidnapping people to get something, and I didn't get it. Nobody was talking to me. Nobody was paying attention. So I went after Dona Maruja to see if that would work. I didn't know anything of Pablo's ultimate fate. I probably should have. But in case you're like me, here's the real quick and dirty end of Pablo Escobar. So remember how the government thought he'd basically use them as a shield and continue running his drug cartel from prison? Well, they weren't far off. He bribed the guards, and he smuggled in enough shit to make his personal private prison a high end hacienda. The government realized what he was doing and they planned to move him to another prison without warning. When Pablo got wind of the change through his numerous bribes, as paranoid people tend to do, he broke out. This was 299 days, so less than a year after his initial surrender, he bounced from safe house to safe house, leaving a huge body count of bodyguards, innocents and his own thugs in his wake. Eighteen months later, plainclothes police barricaded his hideout and Pablo was killed during the gunfire. Soon after her release, Maruha's emerald ring was returned to her in a package tied with a ribbon. There was a diamond chip missing, but it was her ring and she was regaining her health so fast that it almost fit. It definitely fit again by the time two years later, when she was elected Colombia's Minister of Education. Join me next week on the Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told for our episode on Linda Taylor, or at least we think that was her name. We're talking about the first ever welfare queen and the ultimate scam artist. Maybe I'd like to shout out a few key sources that made it possible for me to tell this week's story, especially Gabriel Garcia Marquez's nonfiction work entitled News of a Kidnapping. We will link to it in our show notes. For more information about this case and others we cover on the show, visit diversionaudio.com One more thing before I go. If you haven't already, I'll love you forever. If you pre order my forthcoming true crime book Madame Queen the Life and Crimes of Harlem's Underground Racketeer Stephanie Sinclair. There's a link to do it at your favorite retailer in our show's notes. The Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer and I hosted this episode. I also wrote this episode and if you like my writing, you should check out my book, America's First Female Serial Killer, Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster. Our show is edited by Antonio Enriquez Theme music by Tyler Cash Produced by Emma DeMuth Executive produced by Scott Waxman Stop hitting snooze on new tech Upgrade the whole team@lenovo.com Unlock AI experiences with the ThinkPad X1 Carbon powered by Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create and boost productivity all on one device. When the tech search for business PCs@lenovo.com.