including union organizers, old ladies, young children, horses, pigs, and chickens.  At the university, guerrilla sympathizers were abducted and tortured. On February 17, 1982, Marta Nieves Ochoa was released unharmed.  Not a dime had changed hands.^[35]

This stunning victory over a well established guerrilla army impressed the whole country, military and civilians alike, but the people most impressed were the traffickers themselves. All of a sudden Pablo Escobar grasped the potential here. It was time to set old rivalries aside. Early in 1982 he joined with the powerful Ochoa family of Medellin, and Gonzalo Rodriguez Gacha of Bogota, to form Medellin & Compania.^[36]  Since Gacha knew his way around the jungles of Peru, he took charge of raw material, and the Ochoas took over transportation, distribution and money laundering. Escobar’s job was to reorganize manufacturing.  He outdid himself.  When Tranquilandia, one of his laboratories on the Rio Yari, was raided by the army a couple of years later, they found an industrial complex in the heart of the jungle with air-conditioned executive offices, dormitories, recreational facilites, a pilots lounge, six runways with hangars, maintenance facilities, and 14 processing laboratories capable of turning out 20 tons of cocaine a month.  The raid also revealed something of Escobar’s ability to penetrate the government.  Only half-a-dozen top officials knew about the assault in advance, but the place was nearly deserted when the cops arrived.^[37]

It soon became obvious that there was no way Escobar could be brought to justice on his home turf, and the U.S. was leaning heavily on the Colombian government to extradite him on charges in Miami and Los Angeles. Escobar, of course, hated this idea because he took the U.S. criminal justice system seriously. In Bogota, you might be able to buy a supreme court justice for as little as $50,000, but judges in the U.S. were said to be much more expensive. And there were no “Get out of Jail Free” cards from the Federal Penetentiary in Marion,