Incorruptible Colonel Rejoins Escobar Pursuit

Col. Hugo Martinez was delighted when he got the news, in Madrid, that Pablo Escobar had walked out of jail. No one knew better than the colonel what a charade that imprisonment had been. Martinez had spent nearly three years hunting Escobar before his infamous 1991 "surrender" to a luxury prison cell guarded by his cronies, which Martinez viewed as the evasive drug lord's most ingenious escape to date.

Martinez had never met Escobar, but his life was inextricably entwined with the fugitive's. From 1989 to 1991, the colonel had been in charge of the first police campaign to capture Escobar. His efforts, though ultimately futile, were rewarded in 1991 with a comfortable post in Madrid, as military liaison to Spain.

There was another, more urgent reason for his transfer: Escobar had tried several times to murder the colonel and his family in Colombia. On the very plane that took Martinez and his family from Bogota to Madrid, a bomb had been set to explode at a certain altitude. It was discovered, in flight, after the airline received a last-minute phone tip. The pilots held a very low altitude to the nearest airfield, where the bomb was found and removed.

Now, in the summer of 1992, the Colombian and American governments had decided that with Escobar once again a fugitive, the man to lead the new, expanded hunt for him was Police Col. Hugo Martinez.

It was a good time to leave Spain. Just a few months earlier, a car bomb had been discovered on the street outside the Colombian Embassy in Madrid, right where Martinez passed each day to work. The colonel avoided the street that day only because he had heard a radio report of police activity blocking the road. The police activity, of course, was the Madrid police bomb squad. The device was so complicated that they detonated it on the spot.

Everyone knew who the target was. Martinez was asked to stay away from the embassy for a while. He took his wife and family on an extended camping trip, feeling impotent, isolated, pursued and angry. So long as Escobar remained in jail, there was nothing he could do. The drug boss' escape was a godsend, an opportunity to fight back again.

Martinez was six years older than Escobar at 48, a point in life where a man feels it is now or never for his life's goals. He was quiet and bookish, with an aloof manner that seemed ill-suited to leading men in the field.